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THE BOOKSHELF: OUR MAGNIFICENT BASTARD TONGUE.

Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold Story of English, by John McWhorter, is an enjoyable but odd book. It's basically a combination of two items, each of which would ideally be very slim: a primer on descriptivist views of language...

SELACHIAN.

My wife and I finished Robertson Davies's What's Bred in the Bone (starts off a little dull, but becomes quite absorbing) and decided to follow it up with another Canadian novel, this one translated from French: Nikolski, by Nicolas Dickner....

POLYGLOT EPIGRAPHS.

MMcM's Polyglot Vegetarian, which is consistently both nutritious and delicious, has a post presenting all the epigraphs to Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner's The Gilded Age, of which the authors wrote: "Our quotations are set in a vast number...

MEDIEVAL NAMES ARCHIVE.

A correspondent reminded me of a site I keep running across but for some reason have never blogged about: the Medieval Names Archive. The first line on the main page is "This collection of articles on medieval and renaissance names...

THE BOOKSHELF, III.

I've been wanting to write about a book Columbia University Press sent me a while back, but every time I pick it up I get immersed in it and forget about blogging it. I was familiar with Seth Lerer's name...

KITTO.

Probably everyone who's ever taken a course equivalent to History of Civilization has read (or at least been assigned) a book by H.D.F. Kitto, probably The Greeks. I was looking at the latter entry in LibraryThing when it suddenly struck...

THE MAN WHO LOVES ALPHABETS.

Today's NY Times has an article by Michael Erard about Michael Everson, one of the co-authors of the Unicode Standard and apparently its most enthusiastic encoder of alphabets.His mission has taken him to Kabul, Afghanistan, and Helsinki, Finland; to Beijing,...

CORNISH NAMES.

I was curious about the origin of the name Chenoweth, and a quick Googling turned up the information that it was Cornish for 'new house.' I looked it up in my copy of T.F.G. Dexter's Cornish Names and there it...

NO XHOSA, PLEASE, WE'RE WELSH.

I have absolutely no comment on this story, for which I have Maureen to thank (thanks, Maureen!):...

SAVING LANGUAGES.

Now, this and this (unlike this) show how to keep languages alive. And the Cornish are hanging tough. (Via Pat, Mister Endangered Languages.)...

CORNISH FOLLOW-UP.

Long-time readers know how I feel about the Cornish revival. But it looks like there's no stopping it. (Via Pat.)...

THIS IS AN EX-LANGUAGE!

Cornish has been made an official language of the U.K. Now, I'm as big a fan of obscure languages as you'll find; I even have a book of Cornish place names. But this is ridiculous. Irish is one thing; there...