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Do You Speak American?

Libbey — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 07:27:36 +0000

Looking at the pages that are linked from this blog, I noticed that this page was absent, which is a shame because this is such a fun site.Â A few years ago PBS produced a documentary called “Do You Speak American?” focusing on the various dialects of English spoken in the United States.Â Since both our books are coming from a British perspective, I have a hard time conceptualizing some of the dialects discussed since I’ve never heard them.Â I thought it might be useful to have a page to look at that only focuses on the dialects that we all might be more familiar with.

There are several different sections of the site, but the section called “From Sea to Shining Sea” might be a good place to start since it talks at length about more than a dozen different American English dialects.Â There are also sections that talk about language change and the infamous question of whether English is getting better or worse.Â If anyone is planning to study a dialect of American English for their project, there are also several “further reading” links that might be helpful too (and probably screened for the sites that are actually legitimate).

All right, I hope everyone has a great weekend!

Â http://www.pbs.org/speak/

I can has Internets? Thoughts on Paper Topics

Stephanie — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 05:53:47 +0000

Anyone familiar with LOLcats should know what I’m about to say… So here goes.

I’m tossing around an essay topic that has to do with the (non-)English of LOLcats, of “I can has cheezburger?” and “Im in ur fridge, eatin ur foodz” fame. For the unfamiliar, Wikipedia has a good general introduction, or you can check out the be-all and end-all of LOLcats, www.icanhascheezburger.com. LOLcat-speak, like leet/l33t/1337 (Ã la “w00t”, etc.), is an Internet phenomenon that has developed rules and trademark characteristics of its own. So I’m thinking about writing my paper on the rules, development, and humorous syntax of LOLcat English. I’m wondering if anyone has thoughts on this, has an idea about how I could narrow the topic, has an idea of what kind of question I could ask regarding it, thinks it’s a fabulous idea, or thinks I’m crazy (or all of the above).

On a more mundane note, I’m also toying with the idea of examining dialectical differences in household American and British English–”trunk” versus “boot,” etc. If the LOLcat topic seems impossible, I’ll probably end up with this one.

So, any votes?

Short History of the “yogh”

jes — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 05:21:11 +0000

While looking for sources on my topic, the BBC English, I can across this article (copied below). Beyond just an interesting history of the letter “yogh,” it is an example of the effects of standardization from the printing press. While the printing press was helpful to spread the written language, it seems to have also hindered it a bit as well. The set letters in a typeset forced changes of non-standard letters into cognates, which while simplifying the number of letters, also complicated the pronunciation.

It’s Mingis with a yogh, not Menzies with a zee

By George Jones

Last Updated: 1:18am GMT 12/01/2006

Sir Menzies Campbell, front runner in the Liberal Democrat leadership campaign, is universally known as “Ming”.

His soubriquet derives from the Scottish pronunciation of his first name, Mingis not Menzies.

The apparent discrepancy between the spelling of Menzies and the pronunciation is based on the historical pronunciation of the letter “z”.

It dates back to a letter in old English and Scots that has no exact equivalent today. The yogh, pronounced “yog”, used to be written a bit like the old copperplate-style “z” with a tail.

The rise of printing in the 16th century coincided with the decline of the yogh, and so it tended to be rendered in print as a “z”, and pronounced as such. “Sir Mingis” has reverted to the traditional.

According to the BBC Pronunciation Unit, the name can be phonetically transcribed as “Ming-iss”. “It rhymes with ’sing’ but without the hard ‘g’,” said Catherine Sangster, BBC pronunciation linguist.

The yogh owes its origin to the Irish scribes who arrived in Saxon Britain in the 8th century. It fell out of favour with the Normans, but the Scottish retained the yogh in personal and place names, albeit mutating into a “z” to please typesetters of the day.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/01/12/nlib212.xml