…manners, customs, and languages, like political orders, are hierarchical. Languages are in closely-related groups that can’t quite understand each other fully, like the Germanic, Slavic, and Romance groups of Europe….
…the distance. Chinese is not a language, but a group of languages; to count Chinese [all dialects] as a language would be like grouping English, Dutch, German, and Scandinavian together…
…Tocharian cultures attested in contemporary Turkestan millennia later. The Tocharian languages are a definitely archaic, unique branch of Indo-European, whose discovery altered our understanding of the development of Indo-European pronunciation….
…order. The various Chinese languages, like the Romance or Germanic languages, diverged from a common ancestor, but because the Chinese script is primarily ideographic and not phonetic, and the word…
…out free are not valued. Wycliffe Bible Translators has frequent occasion to release New Testaments in languages spoken by maybe a thousand people or less. These languages – especially if…
…[of my ‘five kingdoms’, only two—the family and manners/customs/languages—are not dominated by Organizations]. I understand that an absolute ‘Rule of Law and not of humans’ [to phrase it in a…
Most people think an umlaut is the two dots over a letter that you often see in German and some other languages. A number of Anglophone rock bands have decorated…
…God-ordained sphere of authority. I speak of customs, cultures, and manners, including languages and their rules. We do not think of these, usually, as moral absolutes, but we try to…
…and doesn’t mean anything in Ge’ez, the Ethiopian liturgical language, which is ancestral to Amharic and Tigrayan, two languages spoken in northern and central Ethiopia today. Our tour concentrated on…
…languages” because there were so many languages of different origins and relationships.] None of my ancestry, to my knowledge, traces to that region; therefore, I am not a Caucasian. The…