My posts generally fall under one of three categories:

  • COMMENT: Discussion of either work that I have found interesting or recent pop-science claims (in the fields of Cognitive Science and Linguistics).

  • SUMMARY: Discussion of my own recent work.

  • MUSING: Anything else.

 

Read my posts below:

 

MUSING - Chance Similarities

September 28, 2019

One kind of linguistic coincidence that I’ve been recently interested in is a phenomenon sometimes referred to as ‘chance similarity’ (e.g. Campbell and Mixco 2007) or ‘false cognates’ (Wikipedia). This is when words from different languages with similar meanings also sound similar, which might sometimes lead to the false assumption that the words are etymologically related.

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