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Universal Declaration of Human Rights Article One All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood. Article Two Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set...

But these French loanwords in other Germanic languages nonetheless exist. For example, here in Sweden, a restaurant is called restaurang; the ending is the Swedish attempt at rendering the final French nasals. To see what food is available at a restaurang, you look at a meny (in Scandinavia, <y>...

They didn't. In Old English, that sound was spelled sc. The <ſ> letter is identical to s and was used before other consonants, in the Early Modern era. Try looking for old documents like the US Constitution or Declaration of Independence. It was discontinued because it looked too much like <f>...

Are you following the thread in which people argue the Malian expeditions were mythology?

Sort of. I mean, British English still has a short-long vowel difference, and I don't mind that the new long E and O sounds (as in bate and boat, not as in beet and boot) are diphthongs, where in German and Dutch they're monophthongs. What I mind is that Middle English ea and ee merged, and the...

Certain aspects of English phonology bother me from a purely aesthetic perspective, and I'm wondering whether they could have been butterflied away with a 16c POD. Namely, the Great Vowel Shift wasn't completely symmetric. In the front vowels, the Middle English vowels shifted /aɪ ɛː eː iː/ >...

Yes, and in Flanders, conservative spoken varieties still make a three-way distinction in pronouns: masculine and feminine nouns use the same inflectional endings on everything, but they use separate gendered pronouns. But the trend is away from that, and toward the standard, in which everything...

The synthetic future tense disappeared and was replaced by an analytic construction, which has since fused and turned into a new synthetic tense, which in French is already losing toward a new analytic construction: amabo -> amare habeo -> j'aimerai -> je vais aimer. In French the use of...

Any of the following can slow down language change: 1. Literacy, especially mass literacy. 2. Low population density, but some sense of shared culture over a large enough area to contain many villages. 3. Low urbanization. Basically, I'm describing Iceland. A lot also depends on how phonology...

Most Germanic languages lost their grammatical genders, or are in the process of doing so. Icelandic kept its system because it's super-conservative, and Standard German did because it's also fairly conservative. But Dutch and the mainland North Germanic languages collapsed their grammatical...

German Zionists like Arthur Ruppin believed something like that.

I don't think any sentence of your comment is correct. 1. Entire regions were abandoned after the Black Death; the remaining populated areas may not have been any more isolated. 2. Isolated villages are actually loci of linguistic conservatism. This is why Icelandic is so similar to Old Norse...

What you really want is to advance Jewish emancipation without advancing romantic nationalism. Jewish emancipation in Europe started with Napoleon, and in Germany was substantially achieved by the 1860s, which was too late. But note that by the 1920s, there was enough Jewish assimilation in...

Vancouver has a far better harbor than New West - Burrard Inlet is a fjord, whereas New West has a shallow river. You could plausibly argue for a CPR that terminated at Port Moody, which preexisted, but there's no way it would be New West.

It was the largest Spanish city. Madrid at the time amounted to nothing - if the royal court moved, there wouldn't be much of a city left to protest. But the Aragonese/Catalans in Barcelona and the mercantile class of Seville would be pissed.

Huh? There wasn't any real branching of languages immediately after the Black Death, at least none that's easy to detect. Languages changed after the demographic collapse, but they were also changing before the collapse.

I honestly don't think it's realistic. Explanations: 1. Colonialism had an economic logic: in the level of development of the 19c, the European core needed to export manufactured goods to the periphery. A handful of small states could export to other core states, like Switzerland, but the big...

Seville would take exception to that.