The story of English spelling is the story of thousands of people – some well-known, most totally unknown – who left a permanent linguistic fingerprint on our orthography.
Texting has added a new dimension to language use, but its long-term impact is negligible. It is not a disaster.
A feature of English that makes it different compared with all other languages is its global spread.
Academics don’t normally manage to alter people’s way of thinking through their strength of argument.
Anyone interested in language ends up writing about the sociological issues around it.
Vocabulary is a matter of word-building as well as word-using.
It took three years to put Shakespeare’s words together, there were a lot of words to be studied and a lot of words to be sorted out, and it proved to be a major project.
As I get older and I get a few more years experience I become more like Dad, you know, King Lear.
Word books traditionally focus on unusual and quirky items. They tend to ignore the words that provide the skeleton of the language, without which it would fall apart, such as ‘and’ and ‘what,’ or words that provide structure to our conversation, such as ’hello.
Text messaging is just the most recent focus of people’s anxiety; what people are really worried about is a new generation gaining control of what they see as their language.
Spellings are made by people. Dictionaries – eventually – reflect popular choices.
The only languages which do not change are dead ones.
The chief characteristic of English grammar is the way words are arranged within sentences, and the technical term for this process is syntax. It.
Imagine, I said, what could happen if English continues to grow as it has. Maybe one day it will be the only language left to learn. If that happens, I concluded, it will be the greatest intellectual disaster that the planet has ever known.
It’s often thought that the only function of pronunciation is to facilitate intelligibility; but it is also there to express personal or group identity.
Intonation is the use of pitch to convey meaning in a language. It has been described as the music or melody of speech.
People sometimes say: ‘A picture is worth a thousand words.’ That’s true. But language is never far away. To talk about the picture, you may need a thousand words.
This is a lesson everyone who studies language eventually learns. You cannot stop language change. You may not like it ; you may regret the arrival of new forms and the passing of old ones but there is not the slightest thing you can do about it. Language change is as natural as breathing. It is one of the linguistic facts of life.
The end of his great project was in sight, and then he encountered the verb take, with its remarkable number of senses. He had had to deal with complicated verbs before: come had ended up with 56 senses, go had 68 and put had 80. But take was going to require an unprecedented 124.
Mixed accents are the norm these days. Even if you don’t travel, you’re not immune from accent shift. Innumerable voices enter your home every day through radio, television, the telephone, and the internet.
Language death is like no other form of disappearance. When people die, they leave signs of their presence in the world, in the form of their dwelling places, burial mounds, and artefacts – in a word, their archaeology. But spoken language leaves no archaeology. When a language dies, which has never been recorded, it is as if it has never been.