Evolving English - Steven Pinker

Huffduffed by briansuda on April 29th, 2011

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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  1. Evolving English — Steven Pinker

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    —Huffduffed by adactio on April 27th, 2011

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