Languages, just like cuisines, come in infinite gradations, each individual speaking or eating his own variant. So how do linguists decide when two languages really are different? One way of…
Read moreOK, now let’s begin on ten of the things that food historians might learn from historical linguistics. Linguists estimate that there are somewhere between three thousand and ten thousand living…
Read moreThe theme of the 2009 Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery was Food and Language. I gave a paper on a topic I had been mulling over for some time,…
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