Linguistics professor Sarah Thomason will give a talk on "Deliberate Change vs. Language Families." The question she'll be asking is this: Can linguistic changes made intentionally cause problems for efforts to establish genetic relationships among languages? (The answer is yes, but rarely.)

HistLing is devoted to discussions of language change. Group members include interested faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates from a wide variety of U-M departments -- Linguistics, Anthropology, Asian Languages and Cultures, Classics, Germanic Languages, Near Eastern Studies, Romance Languages, Slavic Languages - and from two nearby universities, Eastern Michigan (Ypsilanti) and Wayne State (Detroit).