Words often belong to etymological families. Sometimes the family relationships are obvious, but sometimes they can be surprising. In this post I will talk about two etymological families, the ship family and the shirt family. A lot of the information here comes from a wonderful book edited by Calvert Watkins, The American Heritage Dictionary of … Continue reading Ships and Shirts

When I was in junior high school, I think it was grade eight, we had regular vocabulary drills. Our grammar book had a section on words that we should know; there was also a list of pairs and triples of words that could be easily confused. I remember just one of these pairs, which for … Continue reading Cynosure and Sinecure

Let’s say we’re having soup for dinner, and I want to make sure it’s ready. I might taste a little and say, “Yes, it’s hot.” Someone who comes in at that moment and doesn’t know what’s going on could ask, “What’s hot?”, and I could answer, “The soup”. Now let’s say that I’ve come in … Continue reading What’s Raining?

In a previous post (Deep Structure Semantic Roles, posted 17 Jan) I showed that the sentence “George weighed the potatoes” has a passive partner, “The potatoes were weighed by George”, but the sentence “George weighed two hundred pounds” doesn’t have a passive partner, “*Two hundred pounds were weighed by George”. I proposed that the phrase … Continue reading More on Semantic Roles

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

Lately I’ve been posting about the mimetic aspect of narrative and world building. There’s a lot more to say about different aspects of world building—landscapes, social structures, the time and place of the events of a story, characterization, and so on. I will definitely get back to all this, but I thought I would take … Continue reading A Little Latin, Just in Case

In my previous post, “Versions of Reality”, I suggested that there is no singular thing that we can call realistic mimesis, because people see reality differently. Realism is at best a family of styles, a family of attitudes. In this post I want to examine the edges of the realistic family in some passages of … Continue reading Miss Havisham

In a previous post I looked at a passage of world-building from Willa Cather’s The Song of the Lark. In this post I will look at that passage again from several perspectives, and then compare it to a passage from Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations. Here’s the passage from The Song of the Lark: “Dr. Howard … Continue reading Versions of Reality