Tag: linguistics
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How far back in time can you understand English?
Colin Gorrie wrote an excellent blog post last month, in the style of a travel blog but where every couple of paragraphs the blogger jumped back a hundred years in time, switching to an earlier dialect of English as they do so, until they become gradually unintelligible to most readers. Fascinating.
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Heterophonic Homonyms
On a car journey on which they'd otherwise have been fighting, the kids helped me start a collection of heterophonic homonyms - words that are spelled the same but have different pronunciations and meanings. I've got nine of them now in English, and maybe two in other languages... can you help me find some more?
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Goose-Related Etymologies
Geese seem to work their way all over our language. Let's take a look at the etymology of some goosey terminology.
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The Ballad of John Crawford
Dan and his friends play a second game of Dialect, this time as a criminal gang on Portsmouth docks.
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Entles (Gender-Neutral Aunts, Uncles, etc.)
With thanks to Enfys' latest blog post, Dan learns a new word and he loves it.
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We Are The Martians
Alec, Matt R, Penny, and Dan play The Outpost scenario in Dialect: A Game About Language and How It Dies.
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The British-Irish Dialect Quiz
What is your name for the playground game in which one child chases the rest and anyone who is touched becomes the pursuer?
New York Times
Pretty accurate for me, although my answers to some of the questions - representing the diversity of places around Great Britain that I've lived and some of the … -
What If English Were Phonetically Consistent?
YouTube (youtube.com)
Aaron Alon (YouTube)
I'm reminded of an old joke (best read aloud), which I'll repeat for your amusement:
The European Union commissioners have announced that agreement has been reached to adopt English as the preferred language for European communications, rather than German, which was the other possibility. As part of the negotiations, …