Now it can be told
The most interesting linguistics book I picked up last year was Trask’s Historical Linguistics, but I’ve avoided blogging about it because I planned on giving it to two of my word-nerd friends for Christmas and I didn’t want to spoil the surprise. Now that they safely have their copies (and both of them have really been digging it–just yesterday one of them emailed me to ask about when the palatalization of c from /k/ to /t?/ before front vowels in Latin occurred[1. According to Palmer’s The Latin Language, “no unequivocal examples before the 6th c. AD.“), I’m free to blog about it. I hope to have a substantive post on how it neatly illustrates an important point about science and scholarship some time this evening, but now to work.