Language Enthusiast

If you have been reading my blogs for an length of time, you’d know that I’m a bit of a programming language wonk. If you enjoy learning about different kinds of programming languages, you’d be pleased to know there is another kind of language geekery known as “linguistic typology”.

For example, why is it that “spoon” and “fork” are feminine in Russian, but “fork” is masculine and “spoon” is feminine in Portugese? Native speakers can tell you because “it is just so”, but cannot tell you why. Linguistic typologists can.

It’s amazing what one can learn from public radio. More on it over here.

Even more amazing is language constructs like this:

In a number of languages, every statement must contain some marker of the kind of evidence on which it is based, such as whether the speaker saw it, heard it, inferred it from indirect evidence or learned about it from someone else. This grammatical category, indicating the information source, is called ‘evidentiality’.

Having a language like this is absolutely going to make pollies squirm. +1 from me.

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