Day: July 14, 2005

Lack of “Indian” proverbs explained

A simple (and, of course, erroneous) explanation of the lack of “Indian” proverbs (Shirley L Arora > Language Hat) in Peninsular Spanish (or Catalan and Galician, for that matter) is provided by a Mexican proverb, which says that the two groups simply didn’t have time to get to know each other: “Si es indio, ya…

Bush House

Much wailing and gnashing of teeth among the faithful this lunchtime on their hearing and believing that the BBC called Bush House after George W.

In praise of monosyllabic grunts

From a review by Deborah Cameron of Guy Deutscher’s The Unfolding of Language: If the principle of least effort were all there was to language change, we would presumably end up communicating in monosyllabic grunts. The reason this doesn’t happen is that there are countervailing tendencies, among them what Deutscher calls the principle of expressiveness,…