One of the more interesting observations I realized from the Chasing the Sun excerpts was that Green heavily emphasized the idea that lexicographers see themselves as bringers of the true meaning of words, like Moses who brought down from Mount Sinai the Ten Commandments. ” Green cites Ephraim Chamber’s belief that lexicography has its origins in ancient Egypt, where the empire’s priests had presumably wanted to keep forever and securely remembered the complex meanings of their sacred hieroglyphics, and notes that his theory “‘turns the lexicographer’s guardianship of the cultural tradition into a sacred trust and thus sanctions the privileged position of those who control the flow of information to the unitiated.’”

So strong is this metaphor of the dictionary as the gate to the true meaning of words, and lexicographers as the “priests” bringing the masses to these true meanings, that I couldn’t help but think of the logos, the Original Word, the word of Truth itself, especially as it was interpreted by Derrida. I wouldn’t even be surprised if Green mentioned Derrida, and that I just missed the allusion. Green’s comments on lexicography reminded me much of Derrida’s criticism of Western civilization as being “logocentric.” I don’t know whether many of the students in this class are acquainted with Derrida (I had to read him in my Intro to Lit Theory class last semester, and did a paper on him for that class as well,) but if anybody is, I would like to know whether he or she has noticed the same connections.

Here’s the link to the bible translation project I mentioned in class.  Stephanie, this might be helpful to your project, since there’s a section about how to translate into lolcat.  Even if it’s not helpful to your project, it will probably be pretty funny anyway.  Check it out!

http://www.lolcatbible.com/index.php?title=Main_Page

I just found an interesting article by Ronald Butters.  Here’s the introduction to his article:

“The vast literature on reasons why human languages inevitably change through time focuses on two types of causation, “functional,” and “social.”  My purpose here is to explore a third category of explanation, one that has largely been ignored or dismissed as seemingly inconsequential: I argue that a change/chaos model of linguistic change is a necessary and important supplement to functional and social explanations.”

I would like to use specific examples of changes in English such as the Great Vowel Shift, loss of inflections, and whatever else I have pages left for in order to either support this theory or challenge it.  This is the first time I’ve been introduced to this model, and is a nice change from other explanations I have heard for linguistic change so far.  Any comments of suggestions are welcome!

Okay, so I’m pretty sure that I want to write about the impact of “political correctness” and maybe compare its status to other forms of prescriptivism.  I also wanted to talk about its impact on lexicography and resulting neologisms, such as “African American” and “disabled” as well as discussing the evolution of “culturally sensitive” vocabulary.  For instance, “crippled” has shifted to “handicapped” (which is now considered offensive as well) which has changed to “disabled” which might evolve into “differently abled” depending on how much insult people associate with “disabled.”  I was also curious as to the process by which people derive offense from some words and not others; in some cases, they attribute insult to words which actually have no racial or sexist etymologies, such as the word “niggard” which was used to mean “miser.” 

Lastly, i was interested by the extent to which over-prescriptivism can actually produce the opposite of cultural sensitivity by becoming a joke.  For example, “mentally challenged” introduced “challenged” as a more sensitive word, but has now been used humorously as “vertically challenged” (”short”) and “metabolically challenged” (”dead”).

 Ack…so, I have a lot of random ideas and really don’t know which direction to take this.  Does anyone have any suggestions as to which sound the most promising or are best suited to a research paper?  I would really appreciate any opinions/feedback.  Thanks!

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 (à 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?

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

So, I’ve been thinking about my topic for the essay- came across this notion of “Jewish English.”  I think I might narrow my topic down to certain expressions that have been borrowed from Yiddish, how / why, but I’m still checking out this Jewish English for fun- if you get the chance and feel like laughing and cringing at the same time, google “hebonics” (might have to be Jewish to appreciate it more).

http://www.britishcouncil.org/ba/learning-elt-future.pdf    

As  I was browsing around looking for ideas for my paper, I stumbled across this article forecasting the popularity and future of the English language in the 21st century. It’s relatively old, published maybe 11 years ago by the British Council but it brings up interesting points that are still relevant today. One of the points that really intrigued me was the idea of a bilingual future. Because English is associated with countries in positions of power and with “leading-edge” developments, it is possible that the world will eventually become a multilingual place with English being one of the primary languages spoken. As of now, the world of international business is definitely a bilingual playing field but one can only wonder if it will get to the point where even citizens of third world countries will be fluent in English.  Any responses?    

  On a different note, I’d like to follow the example and also throw my idea out there for my paper. After reading in Crystal about Shakespeare’s contributions to the English language,  I began thinking about whether there were more recent authors who have come close to doing the same. Not able think of one off the top of my head, I broadened the idea to genres, and I came up with the topic of the contributions of novel lexemes from science fiction literature to the English language (going back to my presentation topic). I realize this is still pretty broad but I’d love to hear from others whether or not they think this is an viable topic.   

So I did some follow-up research regarding my question in class Thursday about Latin pronouns. Nowhere on the Web, from university websites all the way to Wikipedia, did I find any mention of a formal/informal distinction between the Latin second-person pronouns.

On a closer look, I found this: Crystal mentions on 307 that the development of said formal distinction “had already taken place in French,” and that influence from French, then viewed as a more courtly or prestigious language by English nobles, likely caused the change in English. So it seems, indeed, that Latin never had the tu/vos informal/formal division, but that it developed in French and other Latin-derived languages after Latin was no longer popularly spoken.

I did some digging and found a couple of interesting links. We mentioned the Lord’s Prayer in class, which uses “thy” and such: the version here (http://www.sacred-texts.com/chr/lordpray.htm) in Latin uses the “tu” form as well. Perhaps people, then, were accustomed to using a singular form when addressing God even before the formality question came into being.

Also, this discussion of thou and you from U. of Toronto (http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~cpercy/courses/6361Malton.htm) mentions the influence French had on the formal/informal development. All in all, a bit of a tangential issue, but I thought these were interesting and I should share them with all of you.

I decided I’d take Professor’s advice and throw my intended topic up on the blog. I had originally thought I wanted to do something on leveling and the possibility of a pidgin in the Danelaw, but that seems like it would be too difficult given that modern, cutting edge scholars of Old English still don’t really know that much about the subject. So, I decided I’d like to look at a modern pidgin, and since I’m already somewhat familiar with chinese grammar Singaporean English seemed like it might be a good option. That along with the fact that a few of my friends are familiar with it seems like good reason to choose this topic. I’m wondering if I ought to focus on a specific part of the pidgin (or actually it’s probably more of a creole now that I think about it) or if it would be ok to focus on it as a whole?

Also, I’m writing this so that no one has a chance to take my topic out from under me : P

Happy César Chávez weekend!