Fretty frefosterous

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 linguistic party and now we have two cousin words who don't look anything alike. This is all fairly interesting, and then the author decided to give some more examples. And lo, I present you with textbook gold:

What's going on with those asterisks?? Was it a printing error? Did Old English have letters that were little stars? No, no. They're exactly what you'd think. Just take the other word in the borrowed pair, partridge, remove the ridge as we're told, and make the linguistic change from p to f. Either the author or the editor (I'm going to guess editor) didn't want to print the word fart. In 2006. And now the last sentence of the paragraph makes a bit of sense.

Learning is fun, friends! I'm calling partridges "fartbirds" from now on.

Comments

Here goes...

I've literally put my money (and my time and sanity) where my mouth is and have started a Masters in Applied Linguistics through OU . (OK, technically, it's an MA in Education with a concentration in AL, but whatevs.) It's a bananas amount of work, considering I'm doing this for fun. I'm going to try posting here regularly in hopes that when I need to write papers I'll have something to draw on. We'll see.

Universal Grammar Basics

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...

Here, here!

OK, it hurt just writing that. But really, I do agree with this article , and will be buying this book.

Glottal Spot

Search This Blog