great scott!

…a blog beginning with g. Now I’m no Richard crookback but G has some serious portent in Shakespeare. Let’s put it to use as an exclamatory, Gee-up and this post can begin anew.

I’m a reader, and a writer, and a speaker. You too i’m guessing. Early on in life i’d ponder why some words could be words and others not, convinced I was that ‘seme” and ‘sume’ were words like ‘same’ and ‘some’ .

I dipped into my dad’s french book and learned ‘qui’ and ‘oui’ and mixed them up. I remember age 8 or 9 arguing with a teenage girl on the roundabout in Whittaker park that I was right and she, receiving actual lessons in french at BRGS, was wrong.

Stubborn is part of my make-up, determined one of the meanings of William. What’s in a name? And so back to examining language. My dad learned Russian from Exiled emigres and used it to scare the bejaysus out of unsuspecting former communists trying to start a new life away from the KGB.

Through language comes culture and me da’ would oft return from his lessons ladened with rye bread and kielbassa and assorted rough delicacies. As a northern lad inedible foreign muck. Ahh, the pride of prejudice, another language driven attribute!

When in my teens we emigrated to Canada, I switched accent from broad northern to rough and ready Ontario lilts and ehs, eh? Boats and about were never the same and probably the hardest part of the Canadian twang.

Everybody loves a Newfie joke and all Canucks have their own version, which drives the Newfoundlanders into hysterics, if not apoplexy at such accentuated abuse.

When does an accent become a dialect? When does a dialect become a language? Apparently for linguists the joke is when a dialect gets an army and navy then it’s a language!

And with an army and navy you can expand the language pool forcibly by pidgins and creoles. Or make an others language subservient to your own.

My own idiolect is steeped in others languages now. I’m a code switcher, which means i can start in english and end in dutch with ease. Bilingualism is the dominant global trend so get used to it!

According to Danish linguist Otto Jespersen there are five theories for how language began:

The ‘bow-wow’ theory- ie people imitated the sounds of the environment, especially animal calls.

The ‘pooh-pooh’ theory- ie people making instinctive sounds, caused by pain, anger or other emotions.

The ‘ding-dong’ theory- ie people reacted to the stimuli in the world around them, producing sounds reflected in their environment.

The ‘yo-he-ho’ theory- ie people worked together producing communal, rhythmical grunts, chants, language.

The ‘la-la’ theory- ie people associated the romantic side of life like love, play, poetic feeling and song into language.

If you’re interested in knowing more of How Language Works try this title by David Crystal. Damn this guy’s good.