Excerpt
When one gets in touch with a new language, the first thing that catches his attention is probably the alphabet. The German alphabet consists of all the 26 letters from the English alphabet, together with 4 additional letters, namely die Umlaute ä, ö, ü and das scharfes s ß, which only exists in lowercase. Here [...]

Introduction
In the realm of linguistic study, it is commonly accepted that individual sounds do not represent any particular meanings. It is, for instance, meaningless to ask what [p] or [a] mean. The sound for the word of a particular meaning is arbitrary; therefore there is generally no connection between sound and meaning. This, however, is [...]

Introduction
Proper names have a number of intriguing properties that are not shared by common nouns such as book, apple or man. Syntactically, in many of the world’s languages, such as English, German and Hebrew, proper names typically do not and cannot take an article (cf. *a/the Thomas). They can neither be modified by a numeral [...]

Introduction
German and English are both Germanic languages; consequently, they share a lot of similarities in terms of the vocabularies. However, due to various historical reasons, the grammar of English has undergone a lot of changes since its divorce from High German. The accumulated result is the often subtle differences in the languages’ grammars, and these [...]