Philosophy
If you're a bibliophile and a lover of the beauty and sensuousness of the spoken and written word (like Stephen Fry in this fantastic animated essay), then you probably already know about the sophistication, the richness, and the history (animated, no less) of the English language.
But if don't have a strong background on grammar and etymology, or if you're learning our language for the first time, you may sometimes find it frustrating, confusing and arbitrary. But let's put that notion to rest. If you can understand the distinction between syntax, semantics and the evolving history of a language, a whole new and fascinating world full of connections and ways of making sense of previously apparent random things starts to emerge. Here's a little taste involving the word "one":
Just beautiful :)
- Spelling Bee And Scrabble Champions
Today is the climax of the national spelling bee. The field has been cut to fifty and the competition is heating up. But what should we think of the winner? If you win the Boston marathon or the Olympic 100 meter dash, you could rightly...
- Spanish, Ebonics, And Bushisms: English As Whose National Language?
So we've got another case of conservatives trying to crack down on that creeping menace...the Spanish language. Public libraries in suburban Atlanta will no longer acquire adult fiction in Spanish because immigrants reading John Grisham is a threat...
- History Of The English Language, Animated
Have you ever tried to make sense of the English language? If you've taken courses on linguistics, logic or philosophy of language, you've learned that grammar is supposed to give us a formal understanding of the structure underlying any particular...
- "will There Be A Single Global Language?" Poll
Will there be a single global language? No...1 Yes...4 In a way we now have a "global language"...computer language. But, what I was referring to was a spoken language. It will be many decades before it would happen. I suppose that English is the dominate...
- Interrogatives Rely On Prosody
This is nothing new...more quirky than anything else. "The sound and the query: Why do questions take the form they do?" In linguistic terms, a question is largely the re-ordering of a statement. Shuffle the words around, make a couple of other changes,...
Philosophy
Making Sense of Spelling
But if don't have a strong background on grammar and etymology, or if you're learning our language for the first time, you may sometimes find it frustrating, confusing and arbitrary. But let's put that notion to rest. If you can understand the distinction between syntax, semantics and the evolving history of a language, a whole new and fascinating world full of connections and ways of making sense of previously apparent random things starts to emerge. Here's a little taste involving the word "one":
Just beautiful :)
- Spelling Bee And Scrabble Champions
Today is the climax of the national spelling bee. The field has been cut to fifty and the competition is heating up. But what should we think of the winner? If you win the Boston marathon or the Olympic 100 meter dash, you could rightly...
- Spanish, Ebonics, And Bushisms: English As Whose National Language?
So we've got another case of conservatives trying to crack down on that creeping menace...the Spanish language. Public libraries in suburban Atlanta will no longer acquire adult fiction in Spanish because immigrants reading John Grisham is a threat...
- History Of The English Language, Animated
Have you ever tried to make sense of the English language? If you've taken courses on linguistics, logic or philosophy of language, you've learned that grammar is supposed to give us a formal understanding of the structure underlying any particular...
- "will There Be A Single Global Language?" Poll
Will there be a single global language? No...1 Yes...4 In a way we now have a "global language"...computer language. But, what I was referring to was a spoken language. It will be many decades before it would happen. I suppose that English is the dominate...
- Interrogatives Rely On Prosody
This is nothing new...more quirky than anything else. "The sound and the query: Why do questions take the form they do?" In linguistic terms, a question is largely the re-ordering of a statement. Shuffle the words around, make a couple of other changes,...