In recent posts I’ve been examining case systems in a few languages; in this post I’d like to introduce the idea of deep structure semantic roles, with a digression on the passive voice in English. Next time I will continue with more discussion of semantic roles. Here’s an ordinary English sentence: “The shortstop caught the … Continue reading Deep Structure Semantic Roles

This week it is my pleasure to present a Guest Essay on Egyptian Hieroglyphics by Dr. Robert Fisher. Dr. Fisher received his PhD in Indo-European Studies (1973) from UCLA, and he has taught historical linguistics and writing systems at York University. He has written about the Indo-European language family, Indo-European mythology, and the “Altaic” group … Continue reading A Guest Essay on Egyptian Hieroglyphs

In my previous post I looked at the cases in Latin. This post continues the examination of grammatical cases by comparing the case systems of a few languages. Cases are a device for showing how the words in a sentence are related to each other. There are other devices, such as word order or prepositions; … Continue reading More Cases