Treuer, in this, is the representative of the Ojibwe, but already while listening, I wondered how an Indian and his brother can have such German sounding names. And it turns out that they are the sons of a holocaust survivor from Austria. That aspect is no touched upon during the program, but can be found in the uncut version of Krista Tippett’s interview with David Treuer
Language and Meaning: An Ojibwe Story [Speaking of Faith® from American Public Media]
Tagged with english language
Possibly related…
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Evolving English - Steven Pinker
Steven Pinker discusses the interplay of language and the mind and how psychological processes have shaped the English language.
The best stuff is about using Google’s enormous database of word-from-books to track how language evolves over time, in particular the gradual erosion of irregular forms in English (keep/kept and drive/drove) in favour of their regular counterparts (beep/beeped and jive/jived).
Which you WILL want to follow up with a visit to Google Ngrams - http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/ - essentially Google Trends but with all written words in the English language for the last 1,000 years (instead of all search terms in the last ten years).
Mind-blowing.
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elllo #1075 Retail Therapy
Learn English Naturally.
http://www.elllo.org/english/1051/1075-Diego-RetailTherapy.htm
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David Crystal - The Stories of English
Evolving English shows very clearly that there is no single story of the English language. David Crystal explores aspects of its evolution. Introduced by Roger Walshe. From the Evolving English exhibition at the British Library.
From http://www.bl.uk/whatson/podcasts/type/talks/index.html
Tagged with language english david crystal british library