In these posts I want to give an overview of the four aspects of philology: historical linguistics, the editing of texts, the interpretation of meaning in context, and literary criticism with a particular attention to language. I haven't posted on the editing of texts yet, but that will come in a week or two. This … Continue reading English as a Germanic Language, #1

In my previous post I presented a catalogue of rhetorical figures in Ellen Glasgow’s The Romantic Comedians, with an example of each. A more detailed catalogue would show that Glasgow uses most of these figures just once or twice or three times, but she uses antithesis frequently. In this post I want to look at … Continue reading Antitheses in Ellen Glasgow’s The Romantic Comedians

This week I want to look at some aspects of style in a novel by Ellen Glasgow, The Romantic Comedians. Glasgow was born in 1873 and died in 1945; she lived in Virginia, and she was a good friend of James Branch Cabell. She wrote a lot and she won a Pulitzer Prize, so she … Continue reading Rhetorical Figures in Ellen Glasgow’s The Romantic Comedians

This week I happened to reread Malcolm Lowrey’s Under the Volcano, which I last read probably forty years ago or more. It’s not one of my favourite books, but many people like it a lot, and I’m not writing this blog to give my opinions. Whether I like it or not, I grant that it’s … Continue reading Plangent, Ostiole, and Winze

Etymological Entertainments #3 Today I want to talk a little more about phonotactics, that is, the rules of sound combination in various languages. In an earlier post (“Etymological Entertainments #2”) I noted that when we say the English word “pterodactyl” we don’t pronounce the initial “p”—we say “teradactyl”. The initial cluster “pt” is not allowed … Continue reading Pneumonia, Amnesia, and Knee