Musing in My Lingua Franca

“I still believe that if your aim is to change the world, journalism is a more immediate short-term weapon.”  – Tom Stoppard In 1492, the Catholic monarchs of Spain ordered the expulsion of between 40,000 and 100,000 Iberian Jews, known as Sephardim. Four years later, Portugal followed Spain’s example.  Prohibited from practicing their faith in their homelands, many Sephardim sought refuge abroad, settling in the Ottoman Empire and North Africa. The ensuing diaspora divided the Sephardic community into four groups. The Eastern Sephardim, the most recognizable of the four, settled in the Ottoman Empire, where they preserved Judæo-Spanish customs and developed an unique language (Ladino) and literary tradition. Meanwhile, the North African Sephardim developed a  different  language,  Ḥaketía, and blended their traditions with those of the North African Maghrebi Jews.    Spanish and Portuguese Jews, those who remained in their homelands, faced constant ha...

The United States novelist Mark Twain once asserted that “Anyone who can only think of one way to spell a word lacks imagination.” If this is the case, the history of spelling in the English language certainly attests to the copious creativity of its speakers! The spelling system of the English language is infamous for its apparent anarchy. Albert Einstein once lamented about “the treacherous spelling” of the language, stating, “When I am reading, I only hear it and am unable to remember what the written word looks like.”   Anglophones may be inclined to wonder what lies beneath the chaotic surface of multigraphs, silent letters, and letters with various uses.   “The story of English spelling,” observed the British linguist David Crystal, “is the story of thousands of people – some well-known, most totally unknown – who left a permanent linguistic fingerprint on our orthography.”    The story began during the Middle Ages, around the 8 th  century, when Irish mis...

Hello! I am Antonio, a senior at Troy High School in Troy, Michigan, US. I enjoy plunging into cosy rabbit holes in which I read about random topics related to languages and history. I want to study linguistics, so I hope to attend a college that has a linguistics program. I plan to stay in Michigan for now.  I am fascinated with the ways in which the basic components of language arrange themselves into myriads of varieties that undergo perpetual evolution. I enjoy tracing language varieties back in time to see how they evolved. I like the allure of searching for tendencies, the thrill of finding exceptions, and the curious oddity of detaining myself to observe ubiquitous, innate habits that elude detection despite their prevalence in quotidian speech. I used to take pictures of small plants and animals around me, but it has been a while since I have done this. Once, I took a picture of a monarch butterfly in my backyard: I also used to play video games, and I even had a YouTube ch...