Jabal al-Lughat

Some time ago, I found a copy of perhaps the only five-language phrasebook for the Andaman Islands. The Andaman Islands are a remote islan...

Some time ago, I came across a web page characterizing a dictionary of Kenzi Nubian dating from 1635 as "the oldest dictionary of an A...

Yehudah ibn Quraysh was a rabbi of the late ninth/early tenth century from Tahert (modern Tiaret, in Algeria.) Shocked to hear that the Jew...

As David Boxenhorn noted in his comment to the previous post, the definite articles of Hebrew and Arabic display two odd-seeming properties:...

Rishon Rishon just posted a table comparing the words in my previous post to Hebrew. Most of them are correct; mo`ed and g'vul are not...

Eid Mubarak عيد مبارك, or, as they say in Algeria, Sahha Eidek صحّا عيدك to everybody! Today is Eid al-Fitr, the day on which the Ramadan fa...

A tantalizingly brief note of 1931 in the Gold Coast Review describes an ethnic group called the Mpre, found only in the village of Butie i...

Today I attended my first lecture as an MA student here at SOAS - on phonology. Nothing much to report yet; the highlight had to be our lec...

Grammars come in many flavors nowadays - Chomskyan, functionalist, structuralist... However, grammars in verse are something you don't ...

In case I have any regular readers, I thought I should explain that I'm currently enjoying a holiday in Algeria and nearly incommunicado...

or, anyway, that was my reaction to the reconstructed pronunciation of a Shakespearean accent provided by the BBC . Apparently, the Globe i...

I've been reading Mencken's The American Language (Supplement I, 1945), and find it tremendously entertaining in small doses: Since...

Language Log has recently posted twice on the bizarre name of the organization claiming to have carried out the attack. An apparently acc...

Among the many shared characteristics that make the Maghreb proper (Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco north of the Atlas Mountains) a linguistic...

Interesting story on Tasmanian today... The last speaker of a Tasmanian language died in 1905 ( Wikipedia ), and little material survives, ...

And as long as I'm comparing pronouns, it seems only fair to note that not all languages have nice stable uncomplicated pronouns like Be...

Some interesting news this week from the Beja, an ethnic group of the Red Sea coast of Sudan and Egypt. It's unclear whether this rebe...

With apologies for the long hiatus in my postings, I would like to present another topic in West African writing: the surprisingly formalize...

Most English speakers are familiar with the phenomenon of r-dropping; it divides the English-speaking world into Ireland, Scotland, and most...

Leafing through a book on the early days of Rastafarianism, I came across the word "blin'ty" in an interview with someone spea...