Language Bridge Across the Bering Strait

15 July 2010

An article in the Ottawa Citizen tells of linguistic researchers who have discovered connections between Ket, a language spoken by a few hundred people in Siberia, and Dene, a language of Canada’s native Americans. The work isn’t new, evidently it’s been around for a few years, but I was unaware of it and the article is a good account (a relatively rare occurrence in reporting on linguistics).

The Yup’ik language has long been known to straddle the hemispheric dividing line, but the Yup’iks are relative newcomers to North America. The Ket-Dene connection points to an older migration of people, perhaps part of the original migration of humans to the Western Hemisphere at the end of the Ice Age. (The Ottawa Citizen article conflates the Yup’ik and Inuit languages. They are part of the same language family, but are not the same language. Unlike Yup’ik, Inuit is spoken exclusively in North America and Greenland.)

(Hat tip to The Lousy Linguist)

The Problem With Prescriptivism

1 July 2010

In this Language Log article, Geoff Pullum gives what is perhaps the most succinct explanation of what is wrong with most prescriptivist diktats. It’s not only sums up the problem nicely, but it offers an alternative for how to teach writing and usage:

The way to avoid needless bad choices in the grammatical structure of your writing is not to learn a short list of things you must always avoid; it’s to be sensitive to what’s a good idea and what’s a bad idea, on a basis of knowing the difference. There’s a reason why Sandy should have avoided singular they in what she wrote: she had some cases of plural they fighting with the singular ones in the same sentence. Don’t set up two competing sets of identical pronouns fighting with each other in the same sentence if you can avoid it. That’s a good recommendation, not a silly one. Whereas “Don’t ever use singular they” is a silly one. [emphasis original]