Archive for Historical linguistics

In my last post I touched on the fact that whose as a relative possessive adjective referring to inanimate objects feels a little strange to some people. In a submission for the topic suggestion contest, Jake asked about the use of that with animate referents (“The woman that was in the car”) and then said, [...]

Historical linguistics is a field that many people don’t know a whole lot about. We all speak a language, and we all know that our words came from somewhere else, but we don’t always have the clearest idea as to where or why. So people speculate and come up with plausible explanations of word origins—what [...]