DailyDirt: You Say Tomato, I Say Tomahto
from the urls-we-dig-up dept
Dead languages don’t change and evolve. It’s the languages that people speak the most that develop new words and new dialects. In the past, it’s been difficult to track the evolution of language, but with more and more wiretapped phonecalls digital voice recordings available for analysis, linguists are in a better position to study how languages are changing. Here are just a few interesting links on language dialects.
- Joshua Katz used linguistic data from Bert Vaux’s dialect survey to generate interactive maps of how people speak across the continental US. What is your generic term for a sweetened carbonated beverage? [url]
- Phonemica is a project to record the thousands of different Chinese dialects in order to preserve the richness of the language for future generations. It’s run by volunteers who want to collect spoken stories, and it was started with an Indiegogo fundraising campaign. [url]
- There are several barriers that prevent various English dialects from becoming their own languages. Modern literacy and the increasing global mobility of people make it harder and harder for new languages to split off and develop. [url]
If you’d like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.
Filed Under: chinese, dialects, english, language, linguists, literacy, mandarin, phonemica, speaking, voices
Companies: indiegogo
Comments on “DailyDirt: You Say Tomato, I Say Tomahto”
I disagree modern literacy is creating new dialects, put a physicist and a chemical engineer in the same room and they will not be able to communicate.
Yeah, but now that we live in the error of grammar nazis calling out every minor “error”, English is not going to evolve even in the minor ways it still could.
Re: [screaming internally]
(must… resist… urge… to correct… with ‘era’…)
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“Yea” shouldn’t have an “h”. (etc.)
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“Yea” is pronounced “yay”. “Yeah” is a different word and pronounced differently. Yea verily!
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You are incorrect
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How so? You make a statement like, “You are incorrect”, but give no details. Until you point out HOW I’m incorrect, I’m going to assume that you are a liar.
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Don’t play sillily. “Assume good faith” is the rule. You didn’t really say anything more than I was wrong, either.
I did check a few dictionaries for you. Alas, they were different than they were 35 years ago; I have no evidence for my case. When we researched this in school, as instructed, generally “yeah” was not listed, or was listed as slang. Moreover, “Yea” had the secondary pronunciation which we are speaking about.
Offhand, I don’t know how to prove the past to you, unless I find a suitable 1970 dictionary, and you happen to have a sister. You can either believe me or not. Hence, why I gave no reason that doesn’t change anything.
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Nobody takes grammar nazis seriously, so I don’t think they’d have any effect.
Nice.
On the Katz link in the Dialect Survey Map : 1st question
“How to you say aunt?”
option: “I have the same vowel in “ah”, “caught”, and “aunt”.
The Electric Company – still paying off decades later. Awesome.
barriers that prevent various English dialects from becoming their own languages
Is it lack of Geographical Isolation? or is it that teh interwebs (and ok the Plain old Telephone Service before that) have made Geographic Isolation != total isolation?
But he leaves off two other factors:
1) USAian entertainment syndicated at prices below those that local producers can compete with. Whether you call this cultural pollution (bay watch) or cultural enrichment (some example I can’t think of right now)you can’t deny that US TV and cinema are globally pervasive.
2) The two most globally dominate countries of the last few centuries were Britain and (at least for the time being) the US. Which means that English is The lingua franca.
Who knows? in 100 years the international lingua franca might be Chinese and condescending arseholes will be using English instead of Latin to say things like lingua franca.
Navajo
My friend who is a Navajo once told me that most dinner conversations in Navajo homes are usually arguments about the meanings of different words.
I’ve never heard anyone say “tomahto” in my life (unless as a joke). Seriously, who talks like that?
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I think it’s the Pacific Northwest region of the US, but I’m not sure.