Glottochronology

Planning on traveling into the past?  Have you just discovered a time machine that will bring you back to the days of the caveman?  What will you say to the people you find there or will you be able to communicate at all?  In almost every movie where someone travels to the past, they encounter people and after only minutes, are able to communicate freely with them.  Is this really possible?  Some scientists think it is…to a point.

The study of glottochronology is based on the idea that language changes at a constant average rate which should allow us to be able to trace the changes in language through history, thus making it possible for us to figure out how to “speak” the English language during any part of history.  Does this really work?  It assumes that there are words that essentially do not change, such as “I”, “who”, “two”, “five” and “thou”, and words that will disappear from the language after a short period of time (words in our vocabulary such as “stick”, “dirty”, “guts” and “squeeze”.) So if you do pop back in time, try to avoid those words if you want to fit in with the locals.

Here is an example of a language being traced. (Courtesy of Alexander Bainbridge at his blog TransCaucasus.)

You can read more about the idea right here.

Could you pronounce that?

What is the most frequently mispronounced word in the English language?

I’d like to add a few more to the list.

#1. Library  (Not “lie-berry”)

#2. Frustrated (Not “Fuss-trated”)

#3.  Ask (Not “axe”)

You can find the full article about words here:

http://www.russiatoday.com/features/news/30685

Anglitaliano

In Canada, we often hear people speaking French, and along with it comes a few scattered English words.  Maybe there is just no English translation for a word and so the English word is just inserted in regular speech. Is it Frenglish? Call it what you may, but it is just part of our world.  However, Italy is getting tired of its people using a combination of English and Italian, calling it Anglitaliano.

The Dante Alighieri Society asked people for examples of over-used foreign words and “il weekend” emerged as the worst offender.  Other commonly used words are “cool” and “lo stress”.  The society has asked that people stop abusing the beautiful Italian language by inserting English words, and many Italians seem to agree.  They feel that using English words is sometimes faster and often thought to be very chic, but many want to keep the language clean.

You can read more about this controversy here.

Do you think the English language is “clean”?