Well, it’s pretty busy in Word Blog land, which is why I haven’t been quite so diligent about posting new entries. I’m taking courses in digital publishing and scholarly publishing these days, and showing up for work, too, so there hasn’t been as much time to hang out here. When I finish these courses in early August, I’ll be the fancy holder of a certificate in publishing from Ryerson University and also have a little more free time to throw around.
In the meantime, since I’m reading Pinker’s The Stuff of Thought at the moment, I thought I’d share this intriguing TED talk with you. Enjoy!
Abley, Mark. The Prodigal Tongue: Dispatches from the Future of English. Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2008. [ISBN-13: 978-0-679-31366-3]
Take a moment to be astonished at how much English has changed in the 600-odd years since Langland wrote Peirs Plowman:
In a somer sesun, whon softe was the sonne, I schop me into a shroud, as I a scheep were; In habite as an hermite unholy of werkes Wente I wyde in this world wondres to here;
Or how about the difference 1000 years can make? Here’s a passage from Beowolf:
Him þa ellenrof andswarode, wlanc Wedera leod, word æfter spræc, heard under helme: “We synt Higelaces beodgeneatas; Beowulf is min nama. Wille ic asecgan sunu Healfdenes…”
It really is amazing how much English has changed. And if you think it’s hard to suss out Langland’s words, think about how much harder it would be for him to understand ours. While his spelling is a little unconventional to our eyes and a couple of his words rather tricky, we can figure out most of what he writes. Consider, though, if Langland tried to make sense of words like sashimi, Hawaii, email, doppelganger, genome, NATO, or pizza.
In The Prodigal TongueMark Abley gives us a peek at what the future of English might look like. He explores the ways that English is evolving in Asia, where it’s spoken by a couple of hundred million people and more are learning it every day. He considers the phenomenal rate at which new words enter English from other languages, especially in cosmopolitan cities like L.A. where, according to U.S. census information, 57.8 percent of people speak a language other than English at home. The appetite among young Japanese people for new English expressions is driving rapid and radical change in the Japanese language and gets a chapter of its own. Add to these discussions chapters on how hip-hop, technology, and science fiction are affecting English and you have one of the most interesting books about words that I’ve read in the past year. I highly recommend checking this one out.
Kenneally, Christine. The First Word. Toronto: Viking, 2007. [ISBN-13: 978-0-670-03490-1]
Who spoke the first word of human language? When was that first word uttered? What did that speaker say and why?
Linguists outlawed these questions in 1866 when the Société de Linguistique of Paris declared a moratorium on the topic of how and when language first arose. Scholars who explored these questions were roundly accused of being disreputable, of being engaged in a fruitless search that could only lead to purely speculative answers.
These scholars were shunned by the international linguistics community, their papers seldom seeing the light of publication. It was only in 1990, with the publication of Steven Pinker and Paul Bloom’s “Natural Language and Natural Selection,” that the moratorium really lifted. To be sure there had been scholars publishing on the topic before, but the debate that Pinker and Bloom’s paper occasioned opened the floodgates for studies on the origins of language. The late twentieth century was the moment when anthropology, linguistics, primatology, physiology, computer modelling, neurobiology, and genetics had together reached a critical mass of knowledge that would allow us to begin tracing our way back to the origins of language.
