Johnson

THERE are a lot of good questions to consider about the internet and language. There are equally many good questions to be asked about the future of English now that a majority of its speakers are non-natives.  But last week's BBC Magazine piece on the future of English online is a dog's breakfast of confused concepts, true but misleading facts, and otherwise misguided attempts to make sense of many related, but distinct, trends in English.

Fortunately, Jane O'Brien avoided the tsk-tsking, declinist tone of so many articles like this. She talked to some relevant experts. But to take just one core example, she seems to have misunderstood what they told her:

Continue reading "Im in ur internets, creolizin ur english" »

LAST WEEK we looked at Jan Terje Faarlund's idea that "English is a Scandinavian language." He thinks that West Germanic Old English died out in Britain, and was replaced by a language based on the Viking invaders' Old Norse. Before we turn to the grammatical bits of his case, take note: Prof Faarlund hasn't published his work yet. What follows is preliminary speculation on my part, based on his interview with the University of Oslo research magazine about his paper. The paper itself is still under review.

Continue reading "Do you make Scandinavian mistakes?" »

UNTIL six years ago, idiots couldn't vote in New Jersey. (Given my home state's politics, this may come as a surprise.) "Idiot", a term inserted into New Jersey's constitution in 1844, referred to mental illness or incapacity. "Idiots" were denied suffrage. The word was replaced with more politic language in 2007. That section of the constitution now reads: "No person who has been adjudicated by a court of competent jurisdiction to lack the capacity to understand the act of voting shall enjoy the right of suffrage." Similar effect, different words.

Continue reading "The meaning of "idiot" in New Jersey" »

JOHNSON reads Reddit from time to time. Reddit, as the web's most prominent meme hatchery, is an incubator of new trends in written language. The Internet has changed so much of our lives, but few things have changed as much as the way we communicate. For the last twenty years, we’ve been interacting in writing in real time, for the first time in our species’s history. It’s fascinating, then, to look at how we’ve attempted to substitute all the nuance of spoken language and gestures with written conventions.

Reddit, of course, ain’t your daddy’s chatroom.

Continue reading "The Erkernermerst" »

THE weekend's election seems to have cleared up little about the prospects for Catalonian independence. The governing party, which campaigned for Catalonia's right to self-determination but not (yet) outright immediate independence, lost seats. An outright secessionist party gained seats, but so did a party vociferously opposed to independence. Overall, parties affiliated with the self-determination movement will now have a majority. 

What are the linguistic factors at play? Catalan is an ancient language, recorded at least since the 11th century in a form clearly distinct from vulgar Latin. This age puts it roughly on par with the much bigger neighbouring French and Castillian Spanish. Unlike neighbouring Occitan/Provençal (also found in writing a thousand years ago), Catalan is the vibrant majority language of its territory still today. A 2001 census of Catalonia found that 4.6m of the 6.2m in the Catalan autonomous region spoke Catalan (and 3.1m could write it).  Unfortunately, this doesn't distinguish levels of competency, though we can probably assume that people comfortable writing Catalan speak it well. Just 340,000 (5%) say they do not understand Catalan.  Compare that to the Basque autonomous region, where 52% say they speak Basque "not at all".  Basque separatism may be better known, but Catalan is healthier in Catalonia than Basque is in the Basque region.* 

Though the newspapers this week are talking mainly about Catalonia's frustration over its subsidy to the Spanish budget, linguistic factors have been part of Catalan nationalism for a long time.

Continue reading "Catalonian confusion" »

REMEMBER address books? Those physical items you once carried around (and maybe still do) with friends' phone numbers and addresses?  They can be a pain. Say a friend gives you a slip of paper with his new number. You have to remember not to lose the slip, find your address book, cross out the old number and add the new one. For friends who move frequently, the listings become a mess of cross-out marks and erasures.  Space limitations mean that one letter of the alphabet might fill up. Some contacts drift out of your life, and yet there their entries sit in your book, taking up space.  Eventually, you get a shiny new book, and carefully transfer the whole lot of addresses from one to the other. It's perfect—except it immediately starts going out of date, as sure as the milk in your refrigerator starts to sour, as friends move, change names or drift away. 

Imagine that every few years, someone would do the work for you: transfer all your friends, their latest addresses and phone numbers and e-mail addresses (and Twitter handles and blog URLs and so on), and print the whole thing in a handsome hardback edition for you. They'd have to charge you $40 or so, but you'd have a nice-looking volume on your shelf or in your bag to consult. Yet you'd still be nagged by the old problem: almost as soon as you get it, it's out of date.

Readers who have stuck through this analogy might have guessed where I'm going. Macmillan, a publishing company, has announced that it will no longer print dictionaries.

Continue reading "Finding their ideal format?" »