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DailyDirt: You Say Tomato, I Say Tomahto
from the urls-we-dig-up dept
Dead languages don't change and evolve. It's the languages that people speak the most that develop new words and new dialects. In the past, it's been difficult to track the evolution of language, but with more and more wiretapped phonecalls digital voice recordings available for analysis, linguists are in a better position to study how languages are changing. Here are just a few interesting links on language dialects.
- Joshua Katz used linguistic data from Bert Vaux's dialect survey to generate interactive maps of how people speak across the continental US. What is your generic term for a sweetened carbonated beverage? [url]
- Phonemica is a project to record the thousands of different Chinese dialects in order to preserve the richness of the language for future generations. It's run by volunteers who want to collect spoken stories, and it was started with an Indiegogo fundraising campaign. [url]
- There are several barriers that prevent various English dialects from becoming their own languages. Modern literacy and the increasing global mobility of people make it harder and harder for new languages to split off and develop. [url]
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Re: [screaming internally]
(must... resist... urge... to correct... with 'era'...)
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I did check a few dictionaries for you. Alas, they were different than they were 35 years ago; I have no evidence for my case. When we researched this in school, as instructed, generally "yeah" was not listed, or was listed as slang. Moreover, "Yea" had the secondary pronunciation which we are speaking about.
Offhand, I don't know how to prove the past to you, unless I find a suitable 1970 dictionary, and you happen to have a sister. You can either believe me or not. Hence, why I gave no reason that doesn't change anything.
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Nice.
"How to you say aunt?"
option: "I have the same vowel in "ah", "caught", and "aunt".
The Electric Company - still paying off decades later. Awesome.
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barriers that prevent various English dialects from becoming their own languages
But he leaves off two other factors:
1) USAian entertainment syndicated at prices below those that local producers can compete with. Whether you call this cultural pollution (bay watch) or cultural enrichment (some example I can't think of right now)you can't deny that US TV and cinema are globally pervasive.
2) The two most globally dominate countries of the last few centuries were Britain and (at least for the time being) the US. Which means that English is The lingua franca.
Who knows? in 100 years the international lingua franca might be Chinese and condescending arseholes will be using English instead of Latin to say things like lingua franca.
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Navajo
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