although, as partial justification, I do intend to try my hand at a little gentle techno-wizardry, for, today, I shall attempt to hyperlink (is it a verb? Probably doesn’t matter: after all, there is evidence of neither linguistic elegance nor sophistication in compuspeak).
This post constitutes proof that Plinky works. And I believe that sentence might just be proof that I can create hyperlinks. But I digress. Proof that Plinky works – because, pondering how to respond to today’s prompt (see below (and, no, I’m not going to allow myself to see how to link within an entry – at least, not today)) led to thought about the ways different languages work, then to thinking about ergativity and so forth, on to Basque, and via that to Larry Trask.
Larry Trask’s books on linguistics are wonderful: informative yet also very entertaining. He managed to make even a dictionary readable (Dictionary of Grammatical Terms in Linguistics). I didn’t know him, but I still felt a keen sense of loss at his death (2004) – and judging from the obituaries, others reacted similarly and for the same reasons (see, for example the Independent).
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