May I present this poem on language typography by Taylor Mali performed by Ronny Bruce.

Typography from Ronnie Bruce on Vimeo.

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ht you know you’re british when…

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I love Mila Kunis. An immigrant from Ukrane at age 7, her American English is as impeccable as her native Russian.

In this video, she has it out with a reporter who was questioning Justin Timberlake as to why he is doing more movies than music lately. Due to a delay in translation, the lovely Mila jumps to Timberlake’s defense in flawless Russian. боом! роустед.

ht the daily what.

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Matt Soniak has put up a piece at mental_floss, a great blog by the way, on the first letter of the alphabet.

Being the gateway to the other letters and to literacy, “A” has rich symbolic value. Grouped with “B” and “C,” or even standing all alone, it can represent the whole alphabet and the learning of it. When that trio is written on a blackboard, there’s no having to guess what the kids are learning. The “A” and its Greek cousin alpha are also shorthand for excellence and achievement. You get an “A” or “A+” for good work in school, an A-1 vessel is an well built boat of the highest class and many social animals, from dogs to humans, follow the lead of the alpha male.

Even the word “alphabet” is taken from the first two letters of the Greek alphabet and A and B’s equivalents alpha beta.

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Laura Gibbs, online classics instructor at the University of Oklahoma, has compiled a list of texting abbreviations in Latin at her great blog Bestiaria Latina. You can also see Laura’s post on Google+. She’s also worth putting into your circles if you get into this kid of nerdery.

Here are some. Go over to Bestiaria to see the full list.

AFP: Amici fidelissimi perpetuo. = BFF
AMSV: Apud me sis volo. = WYWH
BT: Brevi tempore. = BRB
ENS: Ego non scio. = IDK
FIS: Fac ipse sibi. = DIY
FMC: Fac me certiorem. = LMK
GF: Gratias futuras. = TIA
HPC: Humi provolutus cachinnans = ROFLOL
HPR: Humi provolutus ridens = ROFL
IATG: Immortales ago tibi gratias. = TYVM
LT: Ludo tantum. = JK
MVR: Magna voce ridens. = LOL
NCOQL: Ne credas omnibus quae legis. = DBEYR
NMD: Nimis mihi dicis. = TMI
NS: Nescio. = DK
OME: Opus mihi est. = ISO
PDI: Proh di immortales. = OMG
QC: Quam citissime. = ASAP
QLV: Quantilibet valeat = FWIW
QNI: Quidnam Inferorum. = WTF
RA: Redibo actutum. = BRB
ROR: Rotundo ore ridens. = LOL
SC: Sine cura. = NP
SHM: Sententia humili mea. = IMHO
TCPM: Tecum colloquar postmodo. = TTYL
UEQO: Ut ego quidem opinor. = IMHO
VDO = OIC
VR: Valde ridens. = LOL
VVTM: Vae, vae tibi maledicto. = STBY

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  Though English has tons of  etymologically Greek/Latin compounds... ht unreasonable faith...

Barbara Billingsley, best known for playing the iconic role of Beaver’s mom June Cleaver on “Leave It to Beaver,” a show that seemed to epitomize post-war middle-class white suburban America, passed away this morning at age 94.

We also can’t forget her role as the Jive-talkin’ passenger in the 1980′s movie Airplane!

Here is a compilation of the Jive scenes from Airplane! with Billingsley’s part at the end.

Here is an interview on her role in Airplane!

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This is simply fascinating.  The Ottowa Citizen reports on work by linguists which has resulted in the first evidence of a linguistic link between the Old World and New World.

The landmark discovery, initially proposed two years ago by U.S. researcher Edward Vajda, represents the only known link between any Old World language and the hundreds of speech systems among First Nations in the Western Hemisphere.

The collection of articles by Vajda and other experts details a multitude of clear connections — nouns, verbs and key grammatical structures — between the language spoken by the Ket people of Russia’s Yenisei River region and dozens of languages used by North American aboriginal groups.

…

He found that the few remaining Ket speakers in Russia and the Dene, Gwich’in and other Athapaskan speakers in North America used almost identical words for canoe and such component parts as the prow and cross-piece.

“Finally, here was the beginning of a system that struck me as beyond the realm of chance,” Vajda wrote at the time. “At that moment, I think I realized how an archeologist must feel who peers inside a freshly opened Egyptian tomb and witnesses what no one has seen for thousands of years.”

Currently, only the Eskimo-Aleut family of aboriginal languages spoken by the Inuit of Canada, Alaska, Greenland and Russia straddle the hemispheric divide between Asia and the Americas. Those connections aren’t surprising, given the relatively recent arrival of the Inuit to North America.

But linguists had never definitively linked any ancient, Old World language to those spoken by the Indian nations of North and South America. Their ancestors are believed to have migrated from Asia to the New World — across what was then a dried-up Bering Strait — at least 13,000 years ago.

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French has the Académie française, Spanish has the Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española, but English has never had a central authority on the language. The anarchy of our English language is one of her charms, in my opinion. Although English doesn’t have any recognized central authority, we do have standards established by convention, recognized style guides, etc.

English is a mutt, so to speak. She has her origins in the Germanic language of the Anglo-Saxons who were later conquered by the French Normans which had a revolutionary effect on the language making English a hybrid Germanic and Romance language. Thus we plenty of synonyms and near-synonyms like kingly and royal, rise and mount, ask and question, the former being Germanic and the latter being Latinate.

English orthography, particularly our spelling, is very inconsistent.  We have plenty of words with archaic spellings, such as knight, which  now has a silent “k” but originally did not.  However we still cling to the old spelling.

To illustrate the absurdity of English spelling, George Bernard Shaw devised an alternate spelling for the word fish spelled ghoti. That’s right, ghoti is pronounced  ”fish” /ˈfɪʃ/.  Take the gh from tough for the /f/ sound, the o from women for the /ɪ/ “i” sound and the ti from nation for the /ʃ/ “sh” sound and you get ghoti, “fish.” Shaw also came up with this very clever spelling for “potato” /poʊˈteɪtoʊ/, ghoughpteighbteau. Try and figure that one out. Perhaps the only truly successful attempt at spelling reform came about by Noah Webster who standardized the American English language. Thus we have uniquely American spellings such as color not colour or center not centre. The inconsistency is not limited to spelling, but also to grammar and sytax.

Currently there is an attempt by the Queen’s English Society to create an Academy of English modeled on the Académie Française. Gerald Warner opining at The Telegraph supports this effort.

Globalisation has meant that the predominance of English in computerised societies is making it more vulnerable to abuse than any other tongue. The advent of texting has had a disastrous effect on literacy and the mass media are complicit in bastardisation of language. Then there is the omnipresent, nightmarish gibberish of management jargon. The worst problem, however, is the collapse of literacy within our education system – the forum that should have been the sturdiest bastion of correct practice.

Instead, laissez-faire attitudes towards spelling, grammar and syntax, encouraged by trendy educationalists, have created a situation in which illiterate pupils have now been joined by a generation of largely illiterate teachers. The “inclusive” mania to embrace the lowest common denominator has left the language of Shakespeare fighting for survival. The universal misuse of apostrophes recently provoked the writing of a best-selling book; its success suggests there is still a desire among the bulk of the population to understand and employ correct usage, but abuses are proliferating.

The inarticulacy of young people’s speech is not something that will necessarily correct itself with maturity, as optimists rashly assume: where there is no understanding of the basic structures of our language, self-improvement can only be a hit-or-miss effort.

Every literate individual has his own pet aversion. I would single out, in particular, the current pandemic misuse of the subjunctive, rampant in media reports. “Gordon Brown may have won the general election if he had had more convincing policies” suggests that there remains some doubt on the subject, that it could yet transpire that Brown had won the election: “Gordon Brown might have won the general election…” is obviously the correct version, which should come automatically to any educated person.

Aggravating the current crisis is state-sponsored illiteracy, with central and local government promoting politically correct Newspeak, such as “chair” for chairman, and innumerable hideous neologisms such as “spokesperson”, which are additionally offensive in patronisingly attributing infantile insecurity to women. We live in an age of aggressive Philistinism. Modern “art” is a sick joke, imposed on the public in the absence of courageous opponents denouncing the Emperor’s new clothes; it is no coincidence that its iconic artefact was a urinal exhibited in 1917, as the old world that had produced so many glories of true art was dissolving.

In this climate of anti-aestheticism it is unsurprising that even an attempt to preserve the beauty and coherence of the English language should meet with opposition by those who claim that it needs to “evolve” unimpeded. There is nothing wrong with a language evolving – English has always done so; but what is happening now is not evolution but nihilism. It must be resisted and the Queen’s English Society is to be congratulated on its initiative. All champions of literacy will wish the society success in establishing a much-needed Academy of English.

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  This via Guanabee. During a testimony at a Texas senate committee hearing on a bill meant to crack down on so-called "sanctuary cities", Texas senator Chris Harris (R-Arlington), interrupted a man testifying in Spanish, saying he should "be speaking in English" because it was "insulting" to "them" to hear him speak Spanish. Antolin Aguirre speaks Spanish and is functional in English which linguistically places him far ahead of this redneck piece of shit. I speak five languages. How many do yo...

Though English has tons of  etymologically Greek/Latin compounds…

ht unreasonable faith

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• July 26, 2011 -- Texting abbreviations… in Latin
  Laura Gibbs, online classics instructor at the University of Oklahoma, has compiled a list of texting abbreviations in Latin at her great blog Bestiaria Latina. You can also see Laura's post on Google+. She's also worth putting into your circles if you get into this kid of nerdery. Here are some. Go over to Bestiaria to see the full list. AFP: Amici fidelissimi perpetuo. = BFF AMSV: Apud me sis volo. = WYWH BT: Brevi tempore. = BRB ENS: Ego non scio. = IDK FIS: Fac ipse sibi. = DIY FMC:...

Minnesotta Daily reports on the story of linguist d’Armond Speers who spoke to his son only in Klingon, the language of the eponymous alien race in Star Trek, for the first three years of his life.  Speers wanted to learn if language acquisition would process using a constructed language in the same manner as natural language.  The control was the child’s mother, who spoke to him in English.  Speers said, “I was interested in the question of whether my son, going through his first language acquisition process, would acquire it like any human language. He was definitely starting to learn it.”

As for Speers, who still gets nostalgic when he recalls singing the Klingon lullaby “May the Empire Endure” with his son at bedtime, the experiment was a dud. His son is now in high school and doesn’t speak a word of Klingon.

Although some of the things he’s done lead people to believe he’s a “Star Trek” fanatic, Speers said it’s actually a passion for language that attracts him to Klingon.

“I don’t go to ‘Star Trek’ conventions, I don’t wear the fake forehead,” he said. “I’m a linguist.”

Constructed language does suffer shortcomings when it comes to language acquisition.  Natural languages have the benefit of generations of use and seem far better suited for easier acquisition, but the jury is still out.  It’s difficult to dismiss constructed language all together.  There are plenty of stories of children acquiring Esperanto, another constructed language, and maintaining fluency into adulthood.  It isn’t so much constructed versus natural language, but the content of the language.  Compare studies of language acquisition across different natural languages.

It would have been interesting to see the results if Speers had continued to speak to his son in Klingon after three years.

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