Historical Linguistics
English, from Olde to new
Tweet Around the year 449, England was invaded by Germanic tribes who introduced their language to the Celts whom they conquered. Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, completed in 731, recorded the first account of this catastrophe. Bede claims that the conqueror tribes were the Jutes, Angles, and Saxons, from the Danish peninsula and […]
The History of Language
Tweet School is out in most places, so I will spend the summer posting about background subjects, with or without exercises to go with them. I’ll write for a while about where language comes from, and more specifically, where English comes from. On a recent trip to the Dordogne region of France, a group of […]
Whence English?
Tweet Perhaps you have heard of “World English.” This is not a single language, but a concatenation of versions of English, as spoken in America, England, Australia, southern Africa, the Caribbean, India, Pakistan and neighbors, Hong Kong, Belize — all over the world. Each version is different in vocabulary, accent, and sometimes in syntax. Standard […]
Heritage languages
Tweet Diversity is often just a concept. Many people live in a diverse town, yet never visit the “foreign” parts of it. Students can be members of a diverse class, yet never come into contact with the parts of their peers’ lives that reflect their different backgrounds. Students with an Italian background, for example, often […]
New online dictionary available — free
Tweet Collins has published a new dictionary which has several useful features. I believe it is still in beta form. It impressed the heck out of me. 1. Definitions, of course, and the phonetic representation of the word. 2. A comprehensive list of synonyms and of related terms and related words. For the word “beat,” for […]
Steven Pinker Interview
Tweet An interview with Steven Pinker on the nature of language, and the window it provides into the human psyche and mind, is available on The New York times website. It would be an interesting short video to show to classes.
The End of English?
Tweet Below is a comment I sent in response to a post on Professor Dennis Baron’s ever-interesting blog, The Web of Language. In this post, he suggests that English may be on its way out. It’s a bit far-fetched at this moment, at our apogee (or slightly post-apogee), but worth considering. The level of discourse, […]
Creating new languages
Tweet From time to time, new languages develop in response to local needs. For example, a deaf sign language was developed in Central America by a small community which was isolated from other deaf communities. A new kind of sign language is developing in the Occupy protests. To read about it, here is the link: […]
The World Language
Tweet We need a world language. It greases the wheels of commerce, education, science, medicine, and even Rock ‘n Roll. At the moment that language is English. Dennis Baron’s recent blog posting provides his usual interesting take on this situation: http://illinois.edu/db/view/25/59351?count=1&ACTION=DIALOG. The future may involve the development of new languages as English mingles with Japanese, […]
American pronunciation
Tweet I am teaching an ESL classes at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey this term, and am having great fun introducing American English to speakers of other languages; in this case, mostly Chinese and Malay, with two Arabic speakers and one Portuguese speaker. Our next class will be on the phonetics of […]