I confess to finding Early Modern English somewhat dull, for as a native speaker of English generally interested in foreign languages, it’s only with Chaucer and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight that things get sufficiently exotic for me. Nonetheless there are evidently some surprises to be found even as late as the 17th century. [...]
It occasionally happens that a word newly encountered, which I suppose to be completely defunct and perhaps even a hapax legomenon, is met again soon after somewhere very different. While reading Saint-John Perse’s work Amers, his long poem in honor of the sea, I was not sure of the definition of one of the terms [...]
The website of BBC News has a feature today titled ‘20 examples of grammar misuse’. Readers had written in about what ‘ungrammatical’ elements in contemporary speech peeved them, and 20 of them were selected for the article. What is frustrating is when people get so cranky over language change that is quite natural and doesn’t [...]
In an article in the collection Comparative-Historical Linguistics: Indo-European and Finno-Ugric ed. Bela Brogyanyi and Reiner Lipp (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1993), Denis Sinor makes the intriguing case that English hullabaloo ‘tumultuous noise, uproar, clamorous confusion’ is of Turkic origin. Common Turkic ala ‘multicoloured, dappled, spotted; piebald’ is attested in virtually all Turkic languages beginning with [...]
Last October I wrote a post about the interesting innovations in Nigerian pidgin English as heard in the songs of Fela Kuti. Evidentally I am not the only linguist interested in Fela Kuti’s music, as I’ve discovered an old paper on the topic. Back in 1998 Markus Coester of the University of Mainz wrote a [...]
Over the past month or so I’ve been listening to a lot of Fela Kuti. The great Nigerian musician, human rights activist, and would-be politician was from a squarely middle-class family and lived for some time in England and the United States, so his English was generally of the standard international variety. Nonetheless, elements of [...]
A post at LiveJournal alerted me of the existence of the Anglo-Saxon word neorxnawange, meaning ‘paradise’. The word occurs in Genesis, in the story of the Fall of Adam and Eve: Þæt wīf andwyrde: “Of ðǣra trēowa wæstme ðe synd on Paradīsum wē etað: and of ðæs trēowes wæstme þe is onmiddan neorxnawange, God bebēad [...]