shetland terror horror shock

In a few months from now, passengers travelling on the ferry between Shetland, Orkney and Aberdeen will have to produce photo ID before embarking – as part of anti-terrorist security measures.
Islanders are justifiably concerned, and the local MP is quoted as saying, “I do not find the argument that the boat is a terrorist target [...]

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segments and segmentation

Particularly in the context of learning to become literate in an alphabetic script, people talk a lot about the principle that (spoken) words can be taken apart and decomposed into smaller pieces, which relate in some way to abstract units which you might call phonemes or segments. (Note that that relation is not that speech [...]

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erskine’s signs of a legal temper

Just a follow-up on one thought on my post ‘Both to will and to do‘ from the other day.
I said there that aiming for holiness would be legalistic, (i) if it was attempted on the strength of our own efforts, forgetting that sanctifying grace comes from the same source as justifying grace, and on the [...]

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pencil corrections

Occasionally, it is the case that misprints are annoying enough that you forgive the person who has taken the trouble to point out the correction in spite of it being fairly obvious in the first place.
Other times, that person has not only defaced the book but got it wrong. Or at least not improved it. [...]

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both to will and to do

Somewhere recently I came across a question about whether or not the resolutions that Jonathan Edwards made could have been a sign of legalism.
17. Resolved, that I will live so as I shall wish I had done when I come to die.
47. Resolved, to endeavor to my utmost to deny whatever is not most agreeable [...]

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user knows best

Turns out I should interact with non-linguists more. Maybe many linguists my peers have argued themselves silly on the principle that all language varieties can be analysed on an equal footing – me, I was unprepared and somewhat flummoxed to discover so recently that this was a live issue and that such a principle required [...]

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church service

Went home last night and listened to The World Tonight With Robin Lustig, who introduced a report about a mystery worshipper in some evangelical church somewhere in England by pointing out that the ‘mystery worshipper’ concept was borrowed from mystery shoppers in the business world.
Whether intentionally or not, that comment encapsulates an enormous set of [...]

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FPism

(Scottish) Free Presbyterians seem to be known to outsiders mostly, if often in caricature, as not much more than a bastion of staunch sabbatarianism and unwavering opposition to Roman Catholicism, among all the other things that traditional calvinistic presbyterianism is generally reviled and resented for.*
Skipping lightly over the apostles and the reformation, the immediate story [...]

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endemic and deeply frustrating

Just a quick rant.
It is extremely misguided to think that the names of letters are in any way useful in discussing phonology, or the relations between phonology and orthography.
I’ve just noticed in the methodology of an article which I don’t think I’m going to bother citing that one of a battery of tasks involved the [...]

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a linguistic being?

Just towards the end of my holiday there was an interesting series of posts on Language Log about the possible religious significance of linguistic diversity. One was this, which gives details of an argument presented by Mark Baker in the concluding pages of a 1996 book, The Polysynthesis Parameter.
The book itself consists mainly of a [...]

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