Glottal Spot

  I've heard of Universal Grammar, but I have to say, I've never thought it sounded probable. Or, maybe it sounded too probable; something we wanted to be true. "Hey, look! There are reasons we speak this way. It's right ." And I'm not a prescriptivist, so I bristled a bit at the thought of One True Way to speak. Most people who love language love the variety of it. But then I read the research and yeah, it doesn't look entirely like BS. There are four basic principles. Monsieur Jordain's Principle: Like things should be together. The thing that does the action should be somewhere near the action. The words describing a thing should probably be in the same clause as the thing. There are languages that don't follow this as strictly, but they're the exception. Caesar's Principle: The action usually follows our perception of time. The famous example is Caesar's "Veni, Vidi, Vici" - I came, I saw, I conquered. It would make a com...

  You know, usually it takes most people more than a few posts to have a dramatic follow-up. But I guess when you don't know much, it's easy to have to correct yourself. So remember when I was ostensibly marveling at language change but also kind of mocking the French for dropping their word that means "not" and replacing it with something else. And then being all French about it for hundreds of years? Well... we did the same thing. Pretty much exactly. You know what the English word negative signifier used to be? Ne. Just like French. Because they both came from Latin. Duh. And then we started to add this little affectation on the end of our negatives, ne-a-wiht, which like it looks, meant not a whit, not a bit, not even a thing. So you might have said, over a thousand years ago, "I ne like avocado on my toast, ne-a-wiht." Or, you'd say that, but with all the proper old-timey words, but you get the gist, right? You don't want a bit of avocado on y...

  Oh, it's been 18 months? Huh. Picking up where I left off as though it weren't 18 months later, I'm back to studying linguistics, and back to wanting to record my thoughts and share the love. I'm currently working my way through Guy Deutscher's The Unfolding of Language . It's not too technical, and probably just right for an amateur like me. I'm in Chapter 2: Perpetual Motion, which is, as you might guess, about language change - one of my favorite topics. One example of language change is in the smallest of words, and possibly one of the first concepts ever verbalized: I. You'd think that such a small but important English word would stay pretty static in pronunciation over the years, but even in the last millennium, it's undergone quite a bit of change. In the 10th century A.D., the first person pronoun was spelled Ic , and pronounced almost like 'itch.' English showing its Germanic roots, I think. But I guess I'd have to know G...

  An investigation into how three snacks became associated with madness. BY DAN NOSOWITZ APRIL 13, 2018

  TIL that phoneme change doesn't happen gradually like I always thought. I assumed Grimm's Law was a slow burn. When those P's became F's, I thought there was a point in time when people said... something in between a P and an F. Which now that I think about it, makes little sense. What in heck would be between a P and an F?? But no, instead, it happens quickly. A group of people start to pronounce something in a new way. That group increases in size. The previous group dwindles or maybe dies out. Think about how a portion of the English speaking population says the word "think" as "fink?" There was no point in time where people said something in between those two sounds. Will fink ever replace think? Who knows? But it just might...

  As mentioned before, I'm working my way through the very accessible The Unfolding of Language by Guy Deutscher. I've been reading about a topic I'm fairly familiar with - how consonant changes in English caused us to have two (and occasionally three) different words for the same thing and you probably wouldn't recognize them as having the same root word. To put it as simply as possible - because people are inherently verbally lazy, we eventually took a lot of voiced consonants and made them unvoiced (like b became p) and stops became fricatives (p's became f's.) This chart will help: It's called Grimm's Law. Yes, that Grimm. Now all that is fine and dandy, and the book goes on to give some examples - like how we have the words tooth and dental, and you wouldn't think they were related but, yup, they're from the same root word. Only tooth went through a pronunciation change in England, and dental came along from Latin afterwords and missed the ...