Writer’s Craft #25 – The Love of Words

This week’s guest contributor is Amy Neftzger of Nashville, on the love of words. (Lynda) Words are my drug of choice, just as they are for most writers. In fact, most writers are avid readers and it’s our love of words that brings about our need to write. I love words alone or neatly choreographed……

Spec Tech: “Wait, who hit who?”

This week’s Spec Tech post is jointly written by the two linguists on the faculty: Ryan Denzer-King and Chris Doty. Before we dive into the topic of this week’s post, we need a bit of background. All languages have ways of indicating who is doing what to whom, a phenomenon known as person-marking. English, like……

Spec Tech: Language and Culture

What is the relation between language and culture? How does the language we speak influence the way we think? These important questions are unfortunately too often not asked. People often assume a position without looking at the actual empirical evidence. On one side there are a good number of anthropologists who aver that language and……

Spec Tech: Linguistic Quirkiness

I suppose I should start my first post as a member of the Spec Tech faculty with a brief introduction. I’m a PhD student in linguistics at the University of Oregon, and should be finishing my dissertation at some point — in the future, most likely.  I’m also a writer of various things, both speculatively……

Spec Tech: Xenolinguistics

Imagine that you’ve just encountered an alien life form. Once you’ve gotten over the initial shock/excitement/etc. of discovering that we are indeed not alone in the universe, you of course want to find out all about it: where it comes from, what its home world is like. Assuming it’s sentient, you’ll also want to know……