Linguistic round-up: prepositions on the bus; Cornish; Quebec; bad article title

[maeveenroute]

- Overheard on the bus just now (while on my way to see "The Interpreter," before I realized I was two hours early for the next showing): "I've been practicing in some pretty inappropriate places. Like the Widener microfiche room, of which I got kicked out of. Wait - of which I got kicked out."
As Geoff Pullum notes in his classic LanguageLog post

Comments

[verredo]

I'm going to read the rest of your thesis I sweaaaaaaaaaaaaaaar. (En fait je me le promets à moi-même, parce que je VEUX la lire et que j'y pense souvent, mais jamais quand je suis devant l'ordi. :P)

[maeveenroute]

"j'y pense souvent, mais jamais quand je suis devant l'ordi"

Tu pourrais l'imprimer, tu sais... ;cp

[bohemianvegan]

That's interesting. Hasn't Cornish been dead for many centuries? I didn't know any written Cornish has survived.

I think it's great for a country like South Africa to have many official languages. It's interesting that the USA doesn't have an official language. English is the official language in name only. It's quickly becoming bilingual in many areas with all the Hispanics around. Personally I see it as no tragedy to have the USA be an officially Spanish and English-speaking nation.

cornish

[monkeygirlxx]

... is being reborn. it's a small but concerted effort, partly powered by recent movements by the welsh and breton communities to bolster their own (not yet dead) languages, as well as the related scottish gaelic/manx/irish gaelic revivification movements.

i can recommend a few books: skeul an yeth by wells brown (isbn 0-907064-21-3) is a good one. personally i'm in the "kk" camp (kernewek kemmyn "common cornish") - there are four different takes on revival, and as you might suspect, people are pretty opinionated. i tend to write with c instead of k, though (i.e. cernewec cemmyn) and dh with dd, which might be considered archaising, but hey. i'm a linguist, i'm peculiar. what can i say?

there's even a wikipedia in Cernewec - four, actually; one in each revival form. the home page of all of them is at cernewec wikipedia

Re: cornish

[maeveenroute]

I'm curious - does your preference for dd over dh have anything to do with keeping orthography somewhat consistent across the Brythonic languages?

(And do you know Ben Bruch? I have a feeling you must. *smile*)

Incidentally, the text of the Cornish oath I quoted was the form in which the BBC ran it. Or the form the BBC ran it in... depending. ;c)

Re: cornish

[monkeygirlxx]

i dinnae know ben bruch, though i should, apparently.

i am working on an orthography that aims for consistency, yes. that's also why i tend to write iedd for "speech, language" (like welsh iaidd) rather than official yeth. i'm always rewriting the rules for language transliteration, and that's what this is, really - translating a revived language that has no set orthography into the most sensible transliteration i can find.

of course, this makes people furious, but i don't care. you should see what i do to transliterate biblical hebrew or the fact that i'm learning Urban Meccan Classical Arabic, whose orthography qur'anic arabic uses but whose speech is replaced by an ancient non-urban koine. they say banâ (y-hamza), i say banê with no hamza; all hamzas are lost, turning to y,w or h intervocalically, causing vowel lengthening 2/V_C & either simple loss or consonantal gemination in 2/C_.similarly, they write *aYa, *aWa > *â but i learn *ê, *ô

man, the places i run into people...

[monkeygirlxx]

"sir! look! there's that camper in which those kids off were whacking!" - beavis & butthead do america.

hi, roomie.

[galaxy_nebula]

Ku-Ku=))) Good idea