- Accents, to me, are extensions of languages. When I travel, I try to pick up words and phrases of the language of the place I’m going to, and I do the same with the accent - I do it out of respect. I don’t do this because of a cultural identity crisis, I don’t do this because I don’t know who I am. I do this because I hold a multitude of cultures within me. I do this because I have had the good fortune of calling many places home. / I hope the next generation feels the right to be proud of being a cultural chameleon.
- we are only scratching the veneer of linguistic possibilities that will arise from the study of vast corpuses.
- The selective acquisition of certain components of language that occurs beyond the critical period is reminiscent of the selective impairment
- Inexorable
- there is good reason to suspect
- such classifications are, of course, no more than a convenience
- to our eyes is decidedly eccentric
- he is not alone in his dislike of this ceaseless flux
- incomprehensible
- laboriously struggle to master that quaint and archaic form of the language
- he describes this use of 'hopefully' as 'ugly, pretentious'; finally, playing his ace, he asserts that it was 'introduced by sloppy American academics'.
- writer of consummate skill
- the phrase was used mordantly
- atrocious hippy drivel
- a usage that seems so normal and unremarkable to most of the population attract such hostility from the rest?
- fairly recent innovation
- particular innovation became prominent
- inclined to view changes in English as instances of 'sloppiness' 'corruption'
- the word carries a clear sense of expectation
- in spite of the vitriol 'hopefully' has attracted, then
- perverse
- if the spectacular collection of changes English has undergone in the last thousand years or so were really mostly just 'corruptions' of an originally unsullied tongue, then modern English would surely be so debased we would hardly be able to use it at all
- English today is just as fine a vehicle of expression as it ever was, and that all those centuries of 'sloppiness' and 'corruption' have had not the slightest deleterious effect
- all those who objected to the 'illogical' form are long dead and the traditional form they defended is dead with them
- defunct older form
- At every time and in every place there is a body of conservative opinion that holds that the language reached some kind of pinnacle of perfection a generation or so ago, and is now going rapidly downhill with all these ‘ugly’, ‘sloppy’, ‘illiterate’ new usages we keep hearing nowadays.
- Nowhere is the effect of language change more apparent than in present-day French.
- at frequent intervals
- most of us who endeavoured to learn French
- almost everyone has for generation said l'haricot, in blissful defiance of the Academy's decisions
- substantial grammatical changes
- Striking differences in grammar
- permissible alternative
- scarcely likely that an academy would have had any greater success in keeping the lid on change in English
- the lesson to be drawn from such observations is that language change is ceaseless and remorseless
- merely aware
- if they draw any conclusion at all
- yearn for a world in which languages never change
- unavoidable/inevitable
- even those few who are perceptive enough to realise the language is genuinely changing often
- changes are carefully and thoughtfully introduced by suitable authorities after protracted deliberation
- fixed and carefully regulated language would be a great advantage
- with no dissent allowed
- free of the ambiguities and misunderstandings that not infrequently crop up when someone else's speech turns out to be slightly different from our own?
- but we can ask a more promising question
- causes of language change are many and various
- mere fashion - This awareness of fashion is most noticeable among teenagers, for whom using this week’s words is vital, since the alternative may be social ostracism.
- using apparently trendy words
- hearing words that were passé
- outweighed by other factors
- the word was omnipresent
- a convoluted plot was combined with considerable amounts of fairly graphic, largely consequence-free sex that could, occasionally, come near the line of soft pornography
- he obviously assumed that 'bonk' was here to stay, a perfectly understandable view at the time
- conspicuous
- undoubtedly
- take a liking to their neighbours' words
- Indeed, if you leaf through the pages of an English dictionary that provides the sources of words, you will discover that well over half the words in it are taken from other languages in one way or another
- before they encountered these things overseas
- no-frills
- got it wrong, and wound up inventing some fake French
- the case of 'nom de plume' illustrates a further motivation for borrowing words
- prestige
- why speak of a mere mishap or blunder when you can instead speak delightfully of a contretemps or a faux pas?
- any class of person might possess composure or social graces, but surely only a true gentleman would exhibit sang-froid or savoir-faire
- the upper echelons of the administration and the military spoke French.
- Open any popular Italian or German or even Japanese magazine at random and you will fi nd its pages spattered with English words
- pillage their vocabularies
- only Hungarian has defied this trend
- utterly baffled by formations like the name for aspirin
- losing their purely technical status and coming to be regarded as everyday English morphemes
- possible our long tradition of constructing our technical terms may be drawing to a close
- the scientists are often well acquainted with the classical languages
- elements appear only occasionally and incidentally
- times have changed
- all languages borrow words, but it is notable that some types are borrowed more readily than others
- easier to accommodate
- more likely to be denoted by nouns
- present formidable phonological difficulties
- the first option that chiefly concerns us here
- then such words are just oddities in English.
- Recently we have repaid the generosity of the French by providing them with a new phoneme
- As a result, the phonotactics of English now permit a whole series of initial clusters that were formerly impossible
- With borrowed nouns, however, we agonize and vacillate.
- confusion arises
- the problem becomes more acute
- If the morphological mismatch between the lending and borrowing languages is greater still, the borrowing language may be obliged to indulge in some strenuous manoeuvres in order to accommodate the loans.
- without appealing to other languages
- borrowing is far from being the only way of obtaining new words
- speakers delight in coining entertaining curiosities
- conform to certain rules
- formerly unproductive and confined to a few cases
- novelties
- present in the language
- the linguists of the Prague School argued that the structure of any language is, at any given moment, a mixture of fully active and productive processes, the dead and dying remains of ancient processes now disappearing from the language, and the fi rst glimmerings of new processes just beginning to come into existence. Nowhere is the truth of this view more evident than in word-formation, and most particularly in derivation.
- various other devices are used to coin new words in English
- a rather subtle but very important one
- Technical terms and trade names often exhibit unusual types of clipping, as in the British polythene
- Such formations are beloved of advertisers and journalists, who constantly create new blends, which usually have only a momentary existence: Mockney , infomercial , metrosexual , rockumentary and the like.
- unlikely that most of them make any lasting impression on you.
- this new morpheme was used to construct that pioneering word miniskirt , and the rest is history.
- growing use of initialisms and acronyms is hardly surprising
- To the great exasperation of manufacturers,
- appalled to find their names applied generically
- transpire
- normally encourage a rather conservative usage.
- neither the force of time, nor the seasons of the sea, can be halted by anybody.
- immutable
- Even small generational divides feel like gaping chasms as each party tries to relate their experiences in a way the other will understand.
- rampant use of slang words or expressions cannot be solely ascribed to teenagers.
- in the same vein as backformation
- the newly invented version eclipsed its older cousin
- change is rapid
- he will settle for something innocuous like "will you excuse me"
- the word has acquired 2 new senses
- people occupying exalted positions
- rapacious
- Capricious
- slovenly
- reflect the presumed characteristics of these creatures
- coexist happily
- gradually trespassed upon 'doom's' semantic field
- bearing this caveat in mind
- notoriously difficult to determine
- sound unacceptably vague
- superfluous
- The great archetypal activities of human society are all permeated with play from the start. Take language, for instance-that first and supreme instrument which man shapes in order to communicate, to teach, to command. Language allows him to distinguish, to establish, to state things; in short, to name them and by naming them to raise them into the domain of the spirit. In the making of speech and language the spirit is continually ··sparking·· between matter and mind, as it were, playing with this wondrous nominative faculty. Behind every abstract expression there lie the boldest of metaphors, and every metaphor is a play upon words. Thus in giving expression to life man creates a second, poetic world alongside the world of nature.
- paves the way for policies
- foreclose
- Seldes, in fact, often showed signs of admiring the broad strokes of the popular arts – where the needs for clarity and immediate recognition from a broadly defined audience allowed “no fuzzy edges, no blurred contours” – over the nuance and complexity of Great Art. Seldes consistently values affect over intellect, immediate impact over long term consequences, the spontaneous impulse over the calculated effect.
- Seldes defined art through its affective force, its ability to provoke strong and immediate reactions. As popular artists master the basic building block of their media, they developed techniques enabling them to shape and intensify affective experience.
- Middlebrow culture, however, often seduces us with fantasies of social and cultural betterment at the expense of novelty and innovation. Seldes wanted to deploy the shock value of contemporary popular culture to shake up the settled thinking of the art world, to force it to reconsider the relationship between art and everyday life.
- lapidary
mar 3 2019 ∞
jan 10 2020 +
jan 10 2020 +