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Pan-Germanism

(Encyclopedia)Pan-Germanism, German nationalist doctrine aiming at the union of all German-speaking peoples under German rule. Pan-Germanists considered that not only the German groups in neighboring countries, suc...

Whorf, Benjamin Lee

(Encyclopedia)Whorf, Benjamin Lee hwôrf [key], 1897–1941, American linguist and anthropologist, b. Winthrop, Mass. Although he was trained in chemical engineering and worked for an insurance company, Whorf made ...

grammar

(Encyclopedia)grammar, description of the structure of a language, consisting of the sounds (see phonology); the meaningful combinations of these sounds into words or parts of words, called morphemes; and the arran...

Shakhmatov, Aleksey Aleksandrovich

(Encyclopedia)Shakhmatov, Aleksey Aleksandrovich əlĭksyāˈ əlĭksänˈdrəvĭch shôkmətôfˈ [key], 1864–1920, Russian philologist and historian. Shakhmatov's many books on the history of the Russian langua...

Aramaic

(Encyclopedia)Aramaic ârəmāˈĭk [key], language belonging to the West Semitic subdivision of the Semitic subfamily of the Afroasiatic family of languages (see Afroasiatic languages). At some point during the se...

Grimm's law

(Encyclopedia)Grimm's law, principle of relationships in Indo-European languages, first formulated by Jakob Grimm in 1822 and a continuing subject of interest and investigation to 20th-century linguists. It shows t...

Tagalog

(Encyclopedia)Tagalog tägälˈ [key], dominant people of Luzon, the Philippines, and the second largest ethnolinguistic group in the Philippines. They number about 16 million. Most of the population is Christian. ...

Manx

(Encyclopedia)Manx măngks [key], virtually extinct language belonging to the Goidelic or Gaelic group of the Celtic subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages. The last native speaker, Ned Madrell, died in...

Krapp, George Philip

(Encyclopedia)Krapp, George Philip, 1872–1934, American scholar, b. Cincinnati. Krapp joined the faculty of Columbia Univ. in 1897, was professor of English at the Univ. of Cincinnati (1908–10) and at Columbia ...

Strawson, Peter Frederick

(Encyclopedia)Strawson, Peter Frederick, 1919–2009, British philosopher, grad. Oxford 1940. An influential advocate for so-called ordinary language philosophy, he began teaching at Oxford in 1947 and from 1968 to...