yil707
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Emily Huel GIF: GIPHY. Introduction: From the Old English form nan þinc, the word nothing, as defined by the Oxford English Dictionary, is “no part, share, or quantity of a thing; no aspect, evidence, or quality of a thing or person” (OED s.v. nothing, n. sense 2a). The first written evidence of the word was […]
Yin Liu Fallacy: Dictionaries regulate language. Because I am the U of S English Department’s default ‘language’ person, questions by the general public about dictionaries usually get passed on to me. Once I was interviewed by a reporter about the latest edition of some dictionary — I think it was Merriam-Webster’s — and the words […]
Yin Liu Fallacy: Some very commonly used English words or structures are ungrammatical. What a linguist considers ungrammatical English and what a lot of other people consider ungrammatical English are often very different. Here, for example, is a sentence (from the opening of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn) that a lot of English speakers […]
Yin Liu Fallacy: Technology is the latest electronic gadgetry. I’m going to save myself some extra work here and simply direct you to a blog post on my research project website: http://www.medievalcodes.ca/2015/08/using-technology.html . Here’s an excerpt: So this is a plea to hold on to that broader definition of technology and that broader view of […]
Yin Liu Fallacy: Some languages are more complex than others, or harder to learn. One of the basic ideas of modern linguistics is that all natural human languages are equally complex, or at least that you can’t measure complexity in a way that would allow you to rank languages from most to least complex. By […]
Yin Liu Myth: English is written using the English alphabet. There is no English alphabet. English is a language, not a writing system. It can be represented in writing in many different ways: by using an alphabet, by using Morse Code, by Braille, whatever you wish. Most commonly today, it is written using the Roman […]
Yin Liu Myth: It is possible to speak English without an accent. No, it isn’t. What we call an ‘accent’ is a way of pronouncing a language — in technical terms, the phonetics of a dialect. If you speak a language, you have an accent. And, unless your language is spoken by a very, very […]
This is a blog for a History of the English Language course at the University of Saskatchewan. There will be two main types of posts: (1) student posts on various topics related to the course; and (2) short posts by Yin Liu, the instructor of the course, in a series that you might like to […]