Seminar 1 (Jim Barlow)
This report will have seminar one as a basis, but will also have some
elements from lecture one, since they more or less belong together, and have
the same topic.
600 years ago the rich and wealthy people in England spoke French, and
the common people English. This was not the English language we know as
“English” today, but an older version of it. The English language has changed a
lot in these 600 years, both in spelling and pronunciation. But what does
language change mean? Jim Barlow mentioned these aspects:
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The
perception that language has changed
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The
perception that language is changing now
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Synchronic
and diachronic change
Barlow said that people in general are not interested in the fact that
the language is changing now, but that it has changed. As people get older they
become more conservative linguistically, and they are not happy about any
changes in the language. They may think that:
-
Younger
people can’t express themselves properly or communicate well
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The
standard of written and oral language decreases
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We
don’t teach children to use their language properly
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Younger
people use a lot of swearing and slang-words
This is not true. Older people do not know more about the language than
younger people do. As people grow older they identify themselves with the
language, and they want to keep the language the way they speak it.
There are several ways a language changes. Here are some examples of
word-formation in English:
Borrowing:
When you take words from other languages it is called “borrowing”. This
is more frequent in English than other languages, because Britain has no
“Language council” that tells you what kind of words you should use. English
has been borrowing words from a lot of languages, and especially French. French
was a prestige language, and English has not only taken words, but also French
pronunciation. One example of this is the pronunciation of the French word
“restaurant”. Examples of semantic refinement in English are the French words mutton,
beef and pork, instead of the old English words sheep, cow
and pig. Usually words from other languages get an English
pronunciation. Examples of words they have borrowed from other languages:
-Old Norwegian: get, give, hit, law, skill, skin, sky, take, they,
want, window
-Hungary: coach - Latin: sex
- China/Persia: tea - Japan: tsunami, uisuki=whisky
Affixation:
Create new words by using different compositions of prefixes and
suffixes. If you have for example the word “establish” you can create a new
word called “antidisestablishmentarianism”.
Compounding:
Put together different words: blackbird, gingerbread, media-friendly
-Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English: penpal, penfriend
-Oxford Advanced Learner`s Dictionary: pen-pal. pen-friend
Back-formation
to edit, to sculpt, to burgle, to stargaze, to colour-code
Clipping:
gym(nasium), fax(facsimile), veggie (vegetarian), boxers (boxer-shorts),
fridge (refrigerator)
Blending:
smog, motel, guesstimate, advertorial, stagflation, vegeburger, The
Chunnel brunch
Acronyms:
RADAR, AIDS, BASIC, ASH
Slang is also very important as a language-changing element. At this
seminar we had some recent slang-words used in the district around York, and
the meaning of them:
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Jaffa: something bad
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Slaphead: a bald headed person. (An old
slang word, which has been retaken.)
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Bumsuck: word from 1960, a wet cigarette
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Drink
link: Going from
pub to pub you need money, and then you go to a mini bank. There you can “link
your drink” and get your money.
-
Tony: the prime minister
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Whigger: White nigger, a white man wanting
to be a nigger (a mixture of white and nigger).
In this seminar we were supposed to read a text, where the word “wonk”
was mentioned several times. How can we find the meaning of this word? First we
had to find what word class it belonged to. We found that it had to be a noun,
because of the plural forms, like “wonks”. The word is stable because we found
it in other shapes in the text, like “wonkishness” and “wonkery”. The
pronunciation of the word has a sound that we find in many negative words, and
then we know it’s not a positive word. The word is mentioned together with
politics. The definition of it is: “a negative form of political adviser”. When
Tony Blair became prime minister in 1999 he got a lot of political advisers.
Some think they have a negative influence on the prime minister.