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If you’ve been using heavily patched, older versions of the English language, you’ll be pleased to know that a completely updated and revised edition just entered beta testing. One reviewer at The Register thinks that it’s great:
Just downloaded the beta version of English V3.31, and I have to say I am very excited about it. This is definitely going to be a feather in the cap of Anglophones everywhere, and way better than the notorious V2.99 release of French (or the ‘deux point neufty-neuf’ as it has become known). There’s a ton of new features to talk about, so let me dive in right away with some toothsome details.[...]
By the way, an alternative spelling proposal, which aimed to differentiate better between so-called ‘British’ English and its assorted inferior knock-offs, has been resoundingly rejected to the disappointment of many. The idea, backed by the Tourist Board among others, was to boost the general kookynicity of British spellings in general and word endings in particular. In short, to take the ball introduced by such pairings as analogue/analog, colour/color and programme/program and run it out of the gridiron and over the try line.
For example, the noun ‘dog’ was to be respelled ‘dogue’, giving it a 66% boost in angliosity, and the days of the weeke were to be reworked with an ‘arts and crafts’ feel with carefully-designed, synthetically yet sympathetically retro-blended syllables: Thursnobdaye.
Link -via Ace of Spades HQ | Photo by Flickr user crdotx used under Creative Commons license
The Frisian language is spoken by about half a million people in the Netherlands and Germany. It is the closet surviving relative of Old English, the tongue of Anglo-Saxon England. How mutually intelligible are the two languages? In this clip from the documentary series Mongel Nation, Eddie Izzard, speaking only Old English, tries to buy a cow from a Frisian-speaking farmer. -via Ace of Spades HQ
What new words have been officially* added to the English language? Oxford University Press now lists them on its website. Now, whenever you write “meep” or “nekkid”, you can feel confident that you’re using real words and spelling them correctly. Insist that your English professor change the grade on your term paper.
Link via Geekosystem
*As much as such a label can be attributed to something as nebulous as a language.
A study by the British Library revealed that despite concerns to the contrary, Britons have not begun adopting the American pronunciation for English words. In fact, British English is changing at a faster rate than American English. Jonnie Robinson, one of the researchers, said:
‘In fact, in some cases it is the other way around. British English, for whatever reason, is innovating and changing while American English remains very conservative and traditional in its speech patterns.’
Here’s how Robinson and his colleagues conducted the study of 10,000 English speakers:
The volunteers were asked to read extracts from Mr Tickle, one of the series of Mr Men books by Roger Hargreaves.
They were also asked to pronounce a set of six different words which included ‘controversy’, ‘garage’, ‘scone’, ‘neither’, ‘attitude’ and ‘schedule’.
Linguists then examined the recordings made by 60 of the British and Irish participants and 60 of their counterparts from the U.S. and Canada.
Link via Ace of Spades HQ | Image: Daily Mail
Tired of your old dictionary? Do you find the OED to be just a little bit staid and conventional? If that’s the case, then you might want to consider looking up your word in the OEDILF – the Omnificent English Dictionary in Limerick Form. This is a crowdsourced project, seeking at least one limerick for every meaning of every word in the English language. Definitions are presented only in the five-line AABBA rhyme sequence. For aleuromancy, you would find three limericks, including these two by Seth Brown and S.A. McBurnie:
My occult divinations ain’t fancy —
I read flour; that’s aleuromancy.
You toss knuckles and bones,
I’ll just stick with my scones;
Stealing dead people’s fingers is chancy.
Want an augury, easy to swallow?
Aleuromancy—go ask Apollo:
Balls of flour, words inside.
Mix ‘em up, then divide.
(Later on, fortune cookies would follow.)
Like the original OED, this is a very-long-term work-in-progress. They are currently accepting submissions “based on words beginning with the letters Aa- through Dr- inclusive ONLY.” The estimated date for completion of the dictionary is 17 Oct 2035.
Link.
Literary theorist and columnist Stanley Fish has listed and described what he regards as the five greatest sentences ever composed in the English language. Among them is this selection from John Bunyan’s 1678 work The Pilgrim’s Progress. In my limited experience, I cannot think of any craftsman of the English language greater than Vladimir Nabokov, who wrote as though he was sculpting words from marble. And a selection from Nabokov is properly included in Fish’s follow-up post in which the professor judged from reader-submitted suggestions.
What do you think is the greatest sentence in the history of the English language?
Link (and a Follow-Up) | Screenshot: edited image from the first edition
Pictured above is the longest word in the English language. It’s a slang term for a disease incurred by inhaling silicone dioxide. Sam Kean has a story at NPR’s website describing the difficult task of defining a “word” so that one may determine which is the longest.
For example, do the names for chemical chains count? Does a word have to be published to qualify? Should words intentionally created to be the longest be considered real words? Kean lists the six words that qualify under various criteria. Which do you think is the best case for the longest word?
A recent post about a newscaster’s gaffe prompted me to seek out this classic clip. It was first posted on YouTube almost five years ago, but is worth viewing as an example of the importance of punctuation – specifically, that a period should signify a full stop.
The text as it was written for the newscaster:
“Good evening, I’m Ken Bastida; Dana is off tonight.
He was murdered and set on fire while celebrating his birthday. The body of Jimmy Frezshi was found by firefighters on Monroe Street…”
The result as it was read off the teleprompter:
“Good evening, I’m Ken Bastida. Dana is off tonight; he was murdered and set on fire while celebrating his birthday.
The body of Jimmy Frezshi was found by firefighters on Monroe Street…”
Heather Carreiro of Matador Abroad suggests twenty English language words that she thinks should return to common usage. Here are two examples from her list:
9. Brabble
Verb – “To quarrel about trifles; esp. to quarrel noisily, brawl, squabble” – Brabble basically means to argue loudly about something that doesn’t really matter, as in “Why are we still brabbling about who left the dirty spoon on the kitchen table?” You can also use it as a noun: “Stop that ridiculous brabble and do something useful!”[...]
14. Hoddypeak
Noun – “A fool, simpleton, noodle, blockhead” – This one doesn’t need any explanation as to how you could use it; you may already have someone in mind who fits the description.
Link via Brian J. Noggle | Photo by Flickr user greeblie used under Creative Commons license
One of the weaknesses of the English language is that it presents no way to refer to person without being gender-specific. The use s/he and his/her, while accomplishing this goal, gets cumbersome. Guardian columnist Lucy Mangan put it like this:
The whole pronouns-must-agree-with-antecedents thing causes me utter agony. Do you know how many paragraphs I’ve had to tear down and rebuild because you can’t say, “Somebody left their cheese in the fridge”, so you say, “Somebody left his/her cheese in the fridge”, but then you need to refer to his/her cheese several times thereafter and your writing ends up looking like an explosion in a pedants’ factory?
Awareness of this problem is not new, and English Prof. Dennis Baron of the University of Illinois has a lengthy post describing how English users have tried to resolve it over the past 150 years. He writes:
In 1890, a report in the Rocky Mountain News recommends hi, hes, hem, as a paradigm that will be “readily taken up and assimilated spontaneously,” though of course that didn’t happen, and so, after more than thirty years of proposals for hi, ir, hizer, ons, e, and ith, no word took hold, in 1894 the paper called on the state legislature to create a gender-neutral pronoun to “correct a well known imperfection of our language.” And shortly thereafter, a reader suggests a “bi-personal pronoun,” either the coordinates he or she, his or her, him or her, or the compounds hesher, hiser, himer: “It was particularly appropriate that Colorado should do so, because the ladies are on a political equality with men.”
And in 1897 a Charleston, South Carolina, newspaper reports on a Massachusetts law that forbids certain kinds of feathers to be worn in hats, a law presumably aimed at women but which employs a masculine pronoun. This presents a problem for the Boston police commissioner, who insists that the masculine pronoun does not include the feminine: “I don’t believe I could arrest a woman on that law,” he said. “The masculine pronoun does not specifically include the women. The law including both usually says ‘person’ or ‘persons,’ but this one simply says ‘his.’”
Link via Marginal Revolution | Guardian Link | Photo of statute of Samuel Johnson by Flickr user ell brown used under Creative Commons license
Mark Peters explains that the word “dude” has evolved over time. In the 1800s, it referred to a dandy — a person obsessed with proper dress and deportment. The following century, the meaning began to change:
In the 20th century, “dude” evolved to take on a more neutral meaning. The term was adopted in the black community, then as now a prime spreader of new words and meanings. This 1967 OED example reflected the shift in meaning: “My set of Negro street types contained a revolving and sometimes disappearing (when the ‘heat’, or police pressure, was on) population… These were the local ‘dudes’, their term meaning not the fancy city slickers but simply ‘the boys’, ‘fellas’, the ‘cool people’.” In the sixties, the term attracted more coolness as it was embraced by surf culture, and by the seventies, a dude was just a guy.
Link via Ace of Spades HQ | Image: Working Title Films
The Bodleian Library is publishing a new edition of the first English language dictionary of slang, which has been out of print for 300 years.
Originally entitled A New Dictionary of Terms, Ancient and Modern, of the Canting Crew, its aim was to educate the polite London classes in ‘canting’ – the language of thieves and ruffians – should they be unlucky enough to wander into the ‘wrong’ parts of town.
With over 4,000 entries, the dictionary contains many words which are now part of everyday parlance, such as ‘Chitchat’ and ‘Eyesore’ as well as a great many which have become obsolete, such as the delightful ‘Dandyprat’ and ‘Fizzle’.
Here are some examples to whet your appetite:
Cackling-farts, c. Eggs.
Farting-crackers, c. Breeches.
Grumbletonians, Malecontents, out of Humour with the Government, for want of a Place, or having lost one.
Mutton-in-long-coats, Women. A Leg of Mutton in a Silk-Stocking, a Woman’s Leg.
You can view the definitions of Arsworm, Bumfodder, Dandyprat, Humptey-Dumptey, and many more at the Bodleian Library link.
Link, via The Centered Librarian.
Katherine Harmon writes in Scientific American that a new published study reveals substantial differences between how dyslexia impacts English and Chinese-language readers:
English speakers who have developmental dyslexia usually don’t have trouble recognizing letters visually, but rather just have a hard time connecting them to their sounds.
What about languages based on full-word characters rather than sound-carrying letters? Researchers looking at the brains of dyslexic Chinese children have discovered that the disorder in that language often stems from two separate, independent problems: sound and visual perception.
The pronunciation of detailed and complex Chinese characters must be memorized, rather than sounded out like words in alphabet-based languages. That requirement led researchers to suspect that disabilities in the visual realm might come into play in dyslexia in that language. “A fine-grained visuospatial analysis must be preformed by the visual system in order to activate the characters’ phonological and semantic information,” said lead author Wai Ting Siok of the University of Hong Kong, in a prepared statement.
Link | Image: NASA
Bank Machine, an ATM operator in Britain, now has five cash machines in London that offer users the opportunity to conduct their business in the cockney dialect. It’s a promotional gimmick designed to amuse customers:
“Readin’ your bladder of lard”, read the message on the screen. It asked for his “Huckleberry Finn”. Then more bewildering questions: did he wanted to see his balance on the Charlie Sheen? Did he wish to change his Huckleberry Finn or did he simply require sausage and mash, with or without a receipt?
Ever wonder how the rest of the world view Americans and our accent? Here’s an English girl named Joanna Grace recording a short video clip of herself talking as an American.
If you find that intriguing, Urlesque has nine more such clips of non-Americans speaking "American," including various accents like the southern drawl and valley girl.
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by naturalghost.
Update 3/3/09 by Alex: If you like that, check out Amy Walker talking in 21 accents of English.
