Professor Jean Aitchison delivers her first Reith Lecture from her series entitled ‘The Language Web’. She explores whether our language really is in decay and argues that we need to understand language, not try to control it.
Tagged with “english”
(4)
-
Reith Lectures Archive: 1996 1. A Web Of Worries
Tagged with bbc reith lectures language words english book:author=jean aitchison
-
A Man, A Plan And A Sharpie: ‘The Great Typo Hunt’
Incensed by a "no tresspassing" sign, Jeff Deck launched a cross-country trip to right grammatical wrongs.
He enlisted a friend, Benjamin D. Herson, and together they got to work erasing errant quotation marks, rectifying misspellings and cutting unnecessary possessive apostrophes.
The Great Typo Hunt is the story of their crusade.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129086941
-
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.
-
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