Eight bucks in my bank account and all I can think is:

[uncommon_crow]

...Is it terribly odd of me to want the Michif-English dictionary I've just found at the library book sale?

(Odd by anyone else's standards, not by my own, that is. By my standards it's quite normal. I'm quite prepared to live on what I've got in the cupboards for the rest of the month if it means I can feed my linguistic cravings.)

Comments

[gruselig]

I think it's quite normal. I wanted to steal the book from my school's library on the origins of words. Now that I'm taking English linguistics at UniKöln, I regret not having made off like a bandit with it.

That said, to feed our X-Files cravings, the girl and I will most likely be scraping the cupboards for scraps while our canine feasts like a queen.

[uncommon_crow]

Good-o. I knew I couldn't be the only one. Well, there's a few other people on my f-list who would do similar things, but they're all translators, writers and English majors, so it's to be expected, I guess...

Have you read anything by Bill Bryson? I think the one I've got in mind is called English: The Mother Tongue; it's the history and development of the English language, and it's great.

[shadesogrey]

Not odd, but esoteric in its uselessness (have you ever met a speaker of mitchif?)

The endangered language I find most interesting is Scottish Gaelic - because it is endangered despite being a language of white immigrants, and was once so common as to be considered the unofficial language of the Canadian parliament.

In contrast, unsurprising given our history, the rest of the endangered languages in Canada are all of native Origin.

[uncommon_crow]

I've not met any Michif-speakers (that I know of), but I'm interested in how dialects form... particularly French- or English-influenced ones, as they're the languages I speak best.