George > Recent Status Updates

Je le lis trop lentement, mais ça me fascine trop.

Getting the pronunciations of foreign languages can be made difficult due to our own mother tongue's phonological rules. Eg. French thé should be /te/ but English speakers tend to diphthongise it as /tei/, which suits English phonology better.

The Martians have evolved further than us, being essentially just brains and hands.

Many stereotypical attempts at a New Yorker accent tend to have 'curl' and 'coil' as homophones, but actually they are phonemically different. The vowel is unrounded in 'curl'. Try saying coil without rounding lips, and then you'll get it.

American English has generally been more conservative than British English in areas such as pronunciation, where a 'flat a' has been preserved in words like 'fast' but have morphed into a 'broad a' in British English.

"The Ulster Scots seem to have been of a more roving disposition or a more pioneering spirit than the English, and their movement from Pennsylvania to the South...seems to indicate they were generally to be found on each advancing frontier. "

"The Ulster Scots seem to have been of a more roving disposition or a more pioneering spirit than the English, and their movement from Pennsylvania to the South...seems to indicate they were generally to be found on each advancing frontier. "

"As my brother began to realise the import of all these things, he turned hastily to his own room, put all his available money--some ten pounds altogether" I know that feel bro.

Just like in the last book I read about the making of the OED, this one also posits the English dictionary as our version of the French Académie or other related 'language academies', with the editor becoming somewhat a one man academy.

English for many centuries was a dialectal continuum with many variations. As the southern dialect (in London) gained prestige, it confuses me how we lost its '-eth' ending, such as 'giveth', to our more modern '-s' ending ('gives'), despite the '-s' being a key feature in t' North. Many books on English like this one seem to gloss over this, but I wish there was more reason as to why this happened.

English is adept at incorporating foreign words, and this flexibility is what makes it one of the major global languages. But it's interesting that in the 15th and 16th centuries there was a lot of fuss over incorporating "inkhorn" terms, instead of keeping it 'pure'.

"...even when the words are English, the pattern is French." Ultimately, the influence of French on English goes deeper than you may assume - further than just vocabulary for law or military.

It's interesting that one of the main reasons that French lost its foothold in the social stratosphere in England was that the Anglo-French dialect was not considered "good" French, especially at a time when Parisian French was gaining prestige over the other three continental dialects of the time: Norman, Picard and Burgundian.

"Vor þe more þat a mon can, þe more wurþe he is." (For the more that a man knows, the more he is worth.) --On being able to speak English and French post-Norman conquest in England.

The author really digs "self-explaining compounds" found in a lot of languages today like German, but limited in Modern English. These are words that are made up of two or more other 'component' words to form a 'self-explaining' meaning. We still have them in words like 'greenhouse', but they were far more common in Old English. I would say Chinese is also filled with this too, making it easier to learn complex words

"What is this optimism?" said Cacambo. "Alas!" said Candide, "it is the madness of maintaining that everything is right when it is wrong."