Kid, I’m sure this is all very fascinating to you, but I’m not going to sit and be lectured about orthography in online spaces by somebody who thinks Andrew Hussie invented leetspeak.
I have the sudden inkling that “Andrew Hussie invented leetspeak” is going to be the new “Shakespeare invented the modern English language.”
There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that Andrew Hussie will be credited with inventing all sorts of words and phrases that were actually coined by some anonymous teenage girl half a decade earlier because Homestuck will end up being the oldest surviving attestation to them.
The difference between language students and linguistics students is that if you ask a language student how many languages they know, they’ll politely rattle off a list of languages and fluency levels, but if you ask that same question of a linguist they’ll make a noise like a cat getting stepped on and make a vague comment about the weather
First of all, I apologize for this post being a bit late. I was JUST ABOUT to upload it when the internet at my house cut out. This should not have been a surprise, given all the various technical difficulties in the US yesterday…
Anyways… today’s comic deals with one of the more interesting topics in contemporary Shakespeare studies: Original Pronunciation!
O.P. and the amazing ways in which it has been reconstructed, deserve a lot more space than six stick-figure comic panels, but hey, barbarically reducing things of great literary and scholarly merit to their bare bones is kind of my “thing”. At the very least, now you know that when Hamlet tries to rhyme “move” and “love”, it’s not actually him pretending to be mad.
The super-linguist in question is David Crystal, whose praises I repeatedly sung. In his O.P. endeavors he has been ably assisted by his son, Ben Crystal, an actor who, armed with Shakespeare’s O.P., can make the prologue of Romeo and Juliet sound sexier and more piratical than you could have ever imagined. If you don’t believe, just take a listen:
Seriously. That’s gorgeous. Here’s a longer video, featuring Papa Crystal and Ben at the Globe:
It’s easy to get snobbish about Shakespeare and to believe it works only when performed in the elegantly trained received pronunciation of an Ian McKellen or a Benedict Cumberbatch. But, as the Crystals point out, received pronunciation is even further away from Shakespeare’s original accent than American are from it.
Shakespeare can be performed in any accent. English, Welsh, Scottish, American, Canadian, Singaporean, I don’t care. His words still have immense power. However, when you hear it spoken in O.P., you really get a sense of what it must have been like for those first groundlings at the first Globe Theatre.
Dammit, people, if you’re going to write a Canadian character, you can’t just throw “eh” in wherever. It’s not a verbal tic – it has a very specific semantic role.
In brief, “eh” does one of two things:
Turn an imperative into a request. e.g., “Pass me that wrench, eh?”
Turn a statement into a question. e.g., “Cold out there, eh?”
In the latter case, there are several situations where it’s commonly used:
The speaker is not sure that the statement she’s just made is correct, and is asking the listener to confirm. e.g., “That’s about forty kilometers West of here, eh?”
The speaker is checking that the listener is still interested and wishes for her to continue, but does not expect any specific response. e.g., “So then this freakin’ moose shows up, eh?”
The speaker is being sarcastic. e.g., “You really thought that one through, eh?”
When used in this way, “eh” is roughly equivalent to appending “isn’t it?” (“doesn’t it?”, “didn’t you?”, etc.) to the end of a sentence; interestingly, it also functions very much like the Japanese “ne”, which has a nearly identical effect when appended to a statement.
the speech impediment of the 21st century (by Marc Johns)
I’ll fuck you up buddy this is not a speech impediment it’s linguistic evolution!! the existence of the phrase “Aisha was like” allows the speaker to convey whatever Aisha said without making the listener assume they’re quoting Aisha directly while still maintaining the FEELING of what Aisha said.
ie, Aisha said she didn’t want to go out with me VERSUS Aisha was like, “I’d rather kiss a Wookie”.
the addition of “XYZ was like” lets the speaker be more expressive and efficient and it is a totally valid method of communicating information!!
With the way language has evolved, this is one of the few ways I can even think of to express in casual conversation what someone said.
“So I said to Aisha,” is certainly used, but if you remove the “so,” which implies casual tone (“and” can be used in the same way), you get
“I said to Aisha,” which is really formal in most English dialects/variations. I don’t know about all, but in New England dialects, you sound like you’re reading aloud from a novel.
“I told Aisha,” is really only used when you continue to describe, not tell, what you told her. Ex: “I told Aisha that James was too punk for her” works while, “I told Aisha, ‘James is too punk for you’” crosses the line back into formalness of the “I said.”
Things like “I asked” or “I answered [with]” are similar levels of casual and efficient to the “So, I said [or say, as many conversations about the past take place in present tense anyway, as if the speaker is giving a play-by-play in the moment]” but are specific to only certain situations.
“I was like, ‘Marc Johns, what is your obsession with restoring archaic speech patterns and interfering with the natural progression of English from complex to efficient?’” envelopes all of these easily and is accessible and crisp, and allows for more variations on inflection than the others.
Of course, James is probably like, “I already fucking said that.” But eh, I tried adding on.
“The man to my right started telling me about all the ways that the internet is degrading the English language. He brought up Facebook and he said: "to defriend, I mean is that a real word?”. I wanna pause on that question: what makes a word ‘real’?”- Anne Curzan, What makes a word “real”? TEDxUofM [x]
The whole TEDx talk that this is from is very much worth the watch.
This is a game of hangman where all of the words are reconstructed Proto-Indo-European words. I can’t claim it’s easy (in fact, it’s really quite hard), but it’s definitely an interesting way of learning more about PIE.
After a few rounds, you may get a better sense of which sounds are more versus less common in PIE, and after a few more, you may start noticing repeats, as it’s only drawing on a list of 18 words. Of course, you could also cheat and look up a list of Proto-Indo-European words to help.
It’s a search of Google books, but the question still stands, what the Fuck happened in 1870
I CAN ANSWER THIS!!
In the Cornish dialect of English, Pokemon meant ‘clumsy’ (pure coincidence).
In the mid 1800s there was a surge of writing about the Cornish language and dialect in an attempt to preserve them with glossaries and dictionaries being written. I wrote about it HERE.
I just love that this post happened to find the ONE HUMAN ON THE INTERNET who had the answer to this question
Krahka's OC and Meta Garbage-Palooza 