(posted with tweetshots.com)
“loke”
This incident led to me and Mary’s stopgap affection-verb “loke”.
How is that pronounced?
Rhymes with “joke”/”oak”. I realize that it’s an opaque blend (love + like), since the vowel of “love” is a schwa and the /o/ comes from neither part of the blend. Obviously, I was an amateur linguist to allow a spelling pronunciation!
Knowledge Bomb
Latin dissimilates liquids (r’s and l’s), and by virtue of our partitioned lexicon of classical and Germanic roots and affixes, we English speakers also dissimilate liquids and we’ve gone our whole lives without knowing it.
Exhibit A: The normal -al affix
- radial, regional, hysterical, labial, digital, lateral, tribal
Exhibit B: The -ar words
- polar (pole), solar, angular, particular, vehicular, uvular, popular, cellular
What unites the B set is the fact that -lal is a funny way to end those words, so -lar is chosen instead. This is what is meant by dissimilated liquids: -lar is chosen over -lal. In contrast, the A set (once sufficiently extrapolated) will contain all and only the -al endings that are not -lal. There might be a couple exceptions—lunar is an analogy of the dissimilated solar—but if you encounter a random Latinish word that ends in /l/ and you need to make a quick adjective from it, you will instinctively choose -ar over -al.
Word of the day!: square + circle = squircle
Wugs were invented in 1958, by Jean Berko Gleason. Gleason described them to an unprepared world, in her paper “The Child’s Learning of English Morphology,” Word, vol. 14, 1958, pp. 150-77. Wugs are what showed that little kids are savvy about about making plurals.
Pitchfork: The Social History of the MP3 →
I give you “Music Rules,” a set of printable worksheets for teachers, who most certainly don’t need more externally-sanctioned frameworks telling them how to teach, let alone one that draws on a pedagogy built to create unthinking allegiance to an illogical law. Here’s an actual excerpt— this isn’t a joke— that draws on Cold War fear-mongering and a strategically-chosen new word (“songlifting”) for its rhetorical effect:
“Now find out if songlifting is a real problem in your community. Use this chart to interview family members and friends about where they get their music. Bring your findings back to class and combine them with those of your classmates. Use your data to figure out how much songlifting occurs among the people you know. See for yourself by completing the calculation below.”
I really do like the word “songlifting”, even if the semanticist in me has misgivings about how accurate the analogy between “shoplifting” and “songlifting” is: [insert theft/piracy distinction argument; note lack of a shop in songlifting; note the predicate rewrites the victim and context of shoplifting with an object type thus equating victim/crime and object]. Also one can shoplift anything and talk about it normally, but it’s funny saying things like “He songlifted five songs” or “What songs did you songlift?” or “the songs she songlifted…”.
What A Linguist Does
Calls up friends during the middle of the day to ask what the plural to “runner-up” is.
It’s runners-up.
Runner-up for favorite hyphenated plural: sons-of-bitches.
Holy shit! What a good example!
This is going in my next email to our morphologist.
What A Linguist Does
Calls up friends during the middle of the day to ask what the plural to “runner-up” is.
Examples of Analogical Language Change
Mechanism
Analogy: a word becomes more like another word, a set of words, or a morphological paradigm.
Examples
backformation: break a word into smaller pieces perceiving a derivation that didn’t actually happen as one that did happen, yielding new roots in the process
(1) “editor” -> “edit+or” and “edit” becomes a verb
(2) “burglar” -> “burgl+ar” and “burgle” becomes a verb (for some)
reanalysis: reinterpret adjacent sounds
(1) “an ewt” -> “a newt”
folk etymology: interpret a foreignism using the closest thing your language has to that form even there is no meaningful relation between the forms
(1) Spanish “charqui” -> English “(beef) jerky”
(2) Latin ultra (“beyond”) + age (noun suffix) -> French “outr|age” (“insult”) -> English “out|rage” (more like “outburst” than “insult”)
blending: combine salient parts from two words to yield a new one
“smoke” + “fog” -> “smog”
hypercorrection: overcompensate while avoiding a particular error
(1) While avoiding the “fella/yella” pronounciation of “fellow/yellow”, some dialects overgeneralize the correction a pronounce “umbrella” as “umbrellow”.
(2) Similarly, while avoiding the “han’/fin’/roun’” pronunciations of “hand/find/round”, some dialects pronounce “drown/drowned” as “drownd/drownded”.
