Linguistics

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Anatoly Liberman: On Giving Thought and Giving Thanks - http://blog.oup.com/2010...

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"Engl. think and thank sound alike, and their similarity is not fortuitous. In Germanic, the story begins with the verb thankjan “to think” (not “thank”!). Thankjan is the form in which our verb occurred in Gothic, a Germanic language recorded in the fourth century (the Gothic spelling was different: if someone is interested, it was þagkjan), but, unexpectedly, the noun thank (in a variety of shapes), attested in all the Old Germanic languages, meant “thank.” Apparently, thank referred to a feeling of gratitude inspired by thought: one thought of some action and expressed one’s appreciation of it. In Modern English, the noun can be used only in the plural (thanks!), but in earlier periods the singular was common and meant “thought; kindly thought,” “favor, gratitude,” and “expression of gratitude.” In sum, the more you thought of something, the more thankful (grateful) you were for what had been done for you. Unfortunately, such is not the way it always happens, but language is capricious and events of real life leave arbitrary traces in it." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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<a href="#etymology</a>" target="_blank">http://friendfeed.com/sea... ; - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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The Greek Alphabet - http://www.foundalis.com/lan...

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"The alphabet is among the few linguistic elements that have remained essentially unchanged between the Ancient and Modern Greek languages. Before listing the letters, let us make a brief comment on the pronunciation of the language, as it evolved through the millennia." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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<a href="#Indo_European</a>" target="_blank">http://friendfeed.com/sea... ; - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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The Jargon File - http://www.catb.org/jargon...

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Fwd: Voyager - Languages - http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/spacecr... (via http://friendfeed.com/afonsox...)

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via A J Canosa Rodriguez - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

:-) - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Creole language - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki...

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"A creole language, or simply a creole, is a stable language that has originated from a pidgin language that has been nativized (that is, acquired by children). The vocabulary of a creole language consists of cognates from the parent languages, though there are often clear phonetic and semantic shifts. On the other hand, the grammar often has original features but may differ substantially from those of the parent languages. Most often, the vocabulary comes from the dominant group and the grammar from the subordinate group, where such stratification exists. For example, Jamaican Creole features largely English words superimposed on West African grammar." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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"Creoles share more grammatical similarities with each other than with the languages they phylogenetically derive from.[3] However, there is no widely accepted theory that would account for those perceived similarities.[4] Moreover, no grammatical feature has been shown to be specific to creoles." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Pidgin - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki...

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"A pidgin (pronounced /ˈpɪdʒɪn/) language is a simplified language that develops as a means of communication between two or more groups that do not have a language in common. It is most commonly employed in situations such as trade, or where both groups speak languages different from the language of the country in which they reside (but where there is no common language between the groups). Fundamentally, a pidgin is a simplified means of linguistic communication, as is constructed impromptu, or by convention, between groups of people. A pidgin is not the native language of any speech community, but is instead learned as a second language.[1][2] A pidgin may be built from words, sounds, or body language from multiple other languages and cultures. Pidgins usually have low prestige with respect to other languages.[3]" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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<a rel="nofollow" href="http://humanities.uchicag... ; title="http://humanities.uchicag... ; - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Bivio – Europe's greatest linguistic curiosity | World news | The Guardian - http://www.guardian.co.uk/world...

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"Bivio's population barely scrapes 200, not counting the handful of foreigners who live there. Yet the inhabitants speak three languages and several dialects of each. A quarter speak the official language, Italian, one fifth speak Romansch, while the majority speak some variety of German. Amazingly, they all seem to understand one another. At the grocer's, everyone speaks their mother tongue, and everyone gets the right change." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

Awesome! - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Fwd: A Brief History of Grammar – Intro http://www.wellnowwhat.net/blog... (via http://friendfeed.com/xixidu)

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thanks Alexander Kruel - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Cockney Rhyming Slang - http://www.cartoonstock.com/directo...

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Rhyming slang is a form of phrase construction in the English language, and is especially prevalent in dialectal British English from the East End of London which also gives it the name Cockney rhyming slang. The construction involves replacing the common word with a phrase of two or three words, and then in almost all cases, omitting the original rhyming word, in a process called hemiteleia,[1][2] making the origin of the phrase elusive to unfamiliar listeners.[3] <a rel="nofollow" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/w... ; title="http://en.wikipedia.org/w... ; - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

The Dialectizer takes text or other web pages and instantly creates parodies of them! Try it out by selecting a dialect, then entering a URL or English text below. If you have questions about what The Dialectizer does or how it does it, please see the "Information" section toward the bottom of this page. <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.rinkworks.com/... ; title="http://www.rinkworks.com/... ; - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Evolving English: One Language, Many Voices, British Library, review - Telegraph - http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture...

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"They do say that the English spoken in the Appalachian mountains of America preserves the language that Shakespeare would have spoken. In the spotlit word-hoard of the Evolving English show, you can listen in on headphones to Doug Wallin (1919-2000), the renowned ballad-singer from Madison County in North Carolina, warbling Brother Green: “Oh Brother Green, please come to me / For I am shot and bleeding...” It’s like early Dylan." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Please telll me when you get to grasp some bits of it. :-) - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Fwd: The Global Language Monitor » Blog Archive » Top Words of 2010 - http://www.languagemonitor.com/top-wor... (via http://friendfeed.com/maitani...)

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"Spillcam is the Top Word, Anger and Rage the Top Phrase and Chinese Leader Hu Jintao the Top Name" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

found via Anna Haro <a rel="nofollow" href="http://ff.im/tUtJK"&... ; :-) - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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The American heritage dictionary of Indo-European roots - http://books.google.com/books...

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by Calvert Watkins - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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<a href="#Indo_European</a>" target="_blank">http://friendfeed.com/sea... ; - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Fwd: WeSay: dictionary-building tool - http://www.wesay.org/wiki... (via http://friendfeed.com/maitani...)

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Atlas of Accents around the World | CreativeRoots - Art and design inspiration from around the world - http://creativeroots.org/...

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"Are you interested in languages from around the world and their accent’s? Then you should check out “The speech accent archive” “Everyone who speaks a language, speaks it with an accent. A particular accent essentially reflects a person’s linguistic background. When people listen to someone speak with a different accent from their own, they notice the difference, and they may even make certain biased social judgments about the speaker.” Found via neatorama" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Foreign accent syndrome: <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.youtube.com/wa... ; title="http://www.youtube.com/wa... ; - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Fwd: BBC - History - British History in depth: Ages of English Timeline - http://www.bbc.co.uk/history... (via http://friendfeed.com/maitani...)

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Online Etymology Dictionary - http://www.etymonline.com/index...

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Austere: early 14c., from L. austerus "dry, harsh, sour, tart," from Gk. austeros "bitter, harsh," especially "making the tongue dry" (originally used of fruits, wines), related to auos "dry," auein "to dry" (see aurora). Use in English is figurative: "stern, severe, very simple." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

I use this quite a lot :-) - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Etymological fallacy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki...

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The etymological fallacy holds, erroneously, that the original or historical meaning of a word or phrase is necessarily similar to its actual present-day meaning. This is a linguistic misconception, mistakenly identifying a word's current semantic field with its etymology.[1] A variant of the etymological fallacy involves looking for the "true" meaning of words by delving into their etymologies.[2] - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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from entymology to etymology, nice :-) - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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The Lyceum: Why German Sounds Funny - http://peripatus.blogspot.com/2005...

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"A few years ago, I took a German class in Germany, and there was one other Anglophone in the class, Ian. Periodically, we would burst into laughter at one of the words, leaving the French and Spanish students puzzled and the German instructor annoyed. A year or so after that, I took a German class in Toronto, and the same thing happened. Occasionally, the class would burst into guffaws (later turning into stifled guffaws as the course drew on and the instructor grew more stern). This got me wondering what it was about German vocabulary that so many English speakers found amusing." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Very interesting! - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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How Did Shakespeare Originally Sound? - http://www.readwriteweb.com/archive...

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"The first "original pronunciation" production of a Shakespeare play to ever be staged on American soil opens at the University of Kansas Theatre on November 11, "A Midsummer Night's Dream." According to Paul Meier, a dialect coach and drama professor at the University of Kansas, the fact that the pronunciation is also the first American accent reclaims a playwright the country's always loved but has always felt was irretrievably foreign." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Thanks, Spidra, for the link. :-) - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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It ain't what you say. . . - Telegraph - http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment...

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"As the Untouchables of India plan to open a temple to honour the English language, Christopher Howse looks at how its shifting usage defines class and culture." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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"Untouchables in India, as we reported yesterday, are to open a temple to the Goddess English. It will contain an idol of Lord Macaulay. This has put the cat among the pigeons, for Macaulay, when he went to India in 1834, took no interest in Indian literature or antiquities except as evidence of the superiority of all things European. His "Minute on Indian Education" urged the colonial administration to establish "a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect" to be made fit for "conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population"" - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Fwd: Google Teams With Linguists to Document Endangered Languages | Fast Company - http://www.fastcompany.com/1698779... (via http://friendfeed.com/maitani...)

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"Yesterday, many of the world's endangered languages, from the remotest corners of the globe, found a new home--online. Two linguists from the Living Tongues Institute, K. David Harrison and Gregory Anderson, have joined forces with Google to, in the words of Google's blog, "allow small and endangered languages that may have never been heard outside of a remote village to reach a global audience." Clips of the languages find their new home in the National Geographic Enduring Voices channel on YouTube." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

"t's been estimated that half of the world's languages are likely to disappear in the next century. The new channel may or may not revitalize some of them, but it will at least preserve them in surprising ways. Here, for instance, you can learn how to count from 1 to 37 in the Foe language of Papua New Guinea, with the help of body parts." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Tense and Aspect http://www.ucl.ac.uk/interne...

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"TENSE refers to the absolute location of an event or action in time, either the present or the past. It is marked by an inflection of the verb: - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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With me, it is the other way round. There is no grammatical aspect in German. - I too find it really difficult to distinguish tense and aspect theoretically when both concepts are conflated. - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Wörterbuch der deutschen Lehnwörter in der polnischen Schrift- und Standardsprache http://www.bis.uni-oldenburg.de/bis-ver...

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"Die historischen Kontakte zwischen Deutschen und Polen erstrecken sich über mehr als ein Jahrtausend. Polnische und deutsche Philologen feierten im Jahre 2000 ein entsprechendes “Millennium” und hinterließen einen Band (Grucza 2001) mit einer Fülle von Aufsätzen, die diesen Kontakten bzw. ihren Niederschlägen in Sprache und Literatur gewidmet sind[1]. Das vorliegende Wörterbuch will widerspiegeln, welche Spuren dieser Kontakt im Laufe der Zeit im Wortschatz des Polnischen in der Form von deutschen Lehnwörtern hinterlassen hat." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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I think because of their pronunciation, and maybe in everyday speech they are not too frequent at all - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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The Great Vowel Shift -- brief note on language - http://www.courses.fas.harvard.edu/~chauce...

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"The main difference between Chaucer's language and our own is in the pronunciation of the "long" vowels. The consonants remain generally the same, though Chaucer rolled his r's, sometimes dropped his aitches, and pronounced both elements of consonant combinations, such as "kn," that were later simplified. And the short vowels are very similar in Middle and Modern English. But the "long" vowels are regularly and strikingly different. This is due to what is called The Great Vowel Shift." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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"Old and Middle English were written in the Latin alphabet and the vowels were represented by the letters assigned to the sounds in Latin. For example, Middle English "long e" in Chaucer's "sheep" had the value of Latin "e" (and sounded like Modern English "shape" [/e/] in the International Phonetic Alphabet [IPA]). It had much the same value as written long e has in most modern European languages. Consequently, one can read Chaucer's long vowels with the same values as in Latin or any continental European language and come pretty close to the Middle English values. " - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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Old High German - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki...

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"The term Old High German (OHG, German: Althochdeutsch, German abbr. Ahd.) refers to the earliest stage of the German language and it conventionally covers the period from around 500 to 1050. Coherent written texts do not appear until the second half of the 8th century, and some treat the period before 750 as 'prehistoric' and date the start of Old High German proper to 750 for this reason. There are, however, a number of Elder Futhark inscriptions dating to the 6th century (notably the Pforzen buckle), as well as single words and many names found in Latin texts predating the 8th century." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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"Fater unseer, thu pist in himile, uuihi namun dinan, qhueme rihhi diin, uuerde uuillo diin, so in himile sosa in erdu. prooth unseer emezzihic kip uns hiutu, oblaz uns sculdi unsero, so uuir oblazem uns skuldikem, enti ni unsih firleiti in khorunka, uzzer losi unsih fona ubile." - friendfeed from FriendFeed - -

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