I was looking thru my logs and I found that a paper I wrote in University was cited in the Cardoza Law Review. One word, but still. The paper is called ‘Fuck’ and it’s by Christopher M. Fairman, Associate Professor of Linguistics, Ohio State University. The (unpublished paper of mine he cited was) ‘Fuck Linguistics’ written for my SocioLinguistics class in 2003.

The word gay used to mean happy or carefree. Around the 19th century it began to lose that meaning and rapidly acquire a new one – homosexual. It then seemed to be going underground, but reemerged in the 70s as a noun, acquiring more and more pride as time went on. I mention this because I’ve been stuff words into Google’s NGrams generator and this is the most striking turnaround I’ve ever seen. If you look through the text in a shitload of books, you can watch the word gay literally change meaning.

Sri Lankan English is its own form of English which is just as valid as New York English, it just has less political clout. That said, there are some funnies. One is the misallocation of o’s, resulting in phrases like ‘She loosed her virginity‘ and ‘Gentleman’s Saloon’. The former phrasing is rather graphically incorrect and the latter is misleading. A saloon in Sri Lanka is not a place serving whiskey and sarsaparilla, it’s a barbershop. This all comes from doubling the o’s, and exasperating and seemingly constant practice.

I am part of a dwindling and slightly pathetic race called the English Speaking Elite, or the Esé. Despite filling out Sinhala Buddhist on every police report (they ask), I cannot really speak Sinhala. If I’m under arrest it somehow comes back to me, but for casual inquiries I can’t. The Esé were once the dominant group in Sri Lanka (or Ceylon) or, more properly, the head niggers in charge. We were the government, we were the cops, we were the businessmen, we were the Ministers and we were the Minister’s sons. Now we’re not. Despite being an Esé myself, I think this is most certainly a good thing.

The Business For Peace Alliance forum was somewhat tame till a few Tamil gentleman got up to speak. There is great hope and opportunity, but there is still a lot of hurt and deprivation among the Tamil community. People usually don’t talk about it, but these guys did. Above is a YouTube of one gentlemen doing a test to see what languages people in the audience understood. And discussing the language issue thereupon, in Sinhala. At some point some Sinhalese gentlement in the back got up and started yelling at him to stop politicizing things. Then Secretary Rajiva Wijesinha (Ministry of Disaster Management, fittingly) got up to calm things down. Good show I thought, true, and everyone shook hands after.

1. What is the evidence for dissociations between linguistic and general intelligence? 2.3 Dissociations between language and general intelligence Linguistic ability can be dissociated from general intelligence: (i) some patients have normal intelligence but an impaired language; while (ii) some other patients have a normal linguistic ability but an impaired intelligence. This suggests that the [...]

Linguistics, especially at McGill is resitant to becoming an Empirical Science. Chomsky hated Behaviorism (Skinner) like I hate Chomsky – but he is smart as hell. Linguistics as it dominates McGill began with Chomsky’s (1959) review of B. F. Skinner’s Verbal Behavior. (src=MIT CogSci) Chomsky’s argument that language is mostly Nature is on point. There [...]

I’ve been working on a Linguistics Paper where I chart (i think) an increase in the use of the word ‘fuck’ in popular music. I’ve been going thru music lyrics for the last 20 years, and I’m storing some of the data here. TOP POP ALBUMS OF 1982 TITLE – Artist (Label) 31-Dec-82 1. ASIA [...]

src=Dr. Charles Boberg Vowels of Irish Montreal English: Mean of 9 speakers  .jpeg  .tiff Vowels of Italian Montreal English: Mean of 15 speakers  .jpeg  .tiff Vowels of Jewish Montreal English: Mean of 11 speakers  .jpeg  .tiff Why do these differences exist? The interesting thing is that in most cities in North America they don’t. In many communities, people from different European [...]