Status Updates From An Introduction to Language

Reading the text out of order.

... No [h] was pronounced in honest, hour, habit, hotel, hospital, and herb . Common words like honest and hour continued h -less, despite the spelling. The other less frequently used words were given a "spelling pronunciation," and the h is sounded today.

"What often happened was a process that early experimenters with machine translation called 'language in, garbage out.'"

We use the term “grammar” with a systematic ambiguity. On the one hand, the term refers to the explicit theory constructed by the linguist and proposed as a description of the speaker’s competence. On the other hand, it refers to this competence itself. NOAM CHOMSKY AND MORRIS HALLE, The Sound Pattern of English, 1968

Perhaps language changes for the same reason all things change: it is the nature of things to change. As Heraclitus pointed out centuries ago, "All is flux, nothing stays still. Nothing endures but change."

In general, the written language is more conservative, that is, slower to change, than the spoken language.

"Recent studies of the social and linguistic properties of codeswitching indicate that it is a marker of bilingual identity."

Advertising, where being noticed is more important than being correct