This past weekend I celebrated a milestone birthday: I’m 80. Alright, shave three decades off that number, though in some ways I feel 80. Years ago, when a department colleague turned 50, his friends – or, perhaps, sworn enemies – taped a picture on his door of him lying in a coffin, smiling. I believe …
How and Why Language Changes
This post was written by Mark Davies, HC Fellow, Linguistics Department Why do languages change? The answers that some linguists tended to give 100-150 years ago strike us as being quite absurd nowadays. For example, they sometimes looked to the physical environment as a motivation for language change, such as the fact that the Germanic …