"doth" is like "do" or "does"?
I'm rereading Bill Bryson's The Mother Tongue right now (or I would be, if I wasn't at work), and I just got finished with the part of "The First Thousand Years" chapter that deals with the evolution of tenses, cases, etc., from the highly inflected (meaning, lots of different endings to words depending on if they're plural or singular, or gendered male, female, or neuter, or are signifying different parts of speech, which was how Old English was) to the uninflected (mostly present-day English, in which words are distinguished by word order and other signifying words like prepositions).
Bryson points out that the "th" ending to words was a London-dialect thing that somehow evolved to the "s/es" ending that was originally Scandinavian thing from the northern English dialects (picked up there when the Vikings settled in the 9th century). Shakespeare's time (late 16th/early 17th centuries) was at the tail end of a huge change in the English language starting in the 15th century (compare Chaucer to the printer Caxton's work 100 years later, and aside from spelling variations, Caxton is much more readible).\
And I will get off of my History-of-English geek high horse now...
I love History-of-English geekiness. More, more!
A nap would be lovely, but food would be even better. Too bad I have water and honey mustard dressing in my fridge.
"We Real Cool"
This is one of my favorites!
Kat, check out the "Favorite Poem" project. They have lots of people (just regular people) explaining why their favroite poem is THEIR favorite poem.
"We Real Cool" is one of them.
Loving the poetry talk!
Unfortunately, I have to grade nine more essays and write 62 narratives today, so I can't participate.
t sulk
Jesus, Kristin, make me feel like a slacker! Damn.
I'd be whimpering, and looking for heroin and cheap gutter sex. Ugh.
I love History-of-English geekiness. More, more!
Well, one thing more. I learned the official term for one of my favorite word things: metanalysis. It's the term for when the initial letter for a noun transfers back or forth to the article preceeding it. Thus, a napron (which I'm guessing, but have nothing to cite to prove it, was probably related to a napkin) became an apron. Also, a nickname was originally an ekename ("eke" being the Old and Middle English word for "also"). I find that process to be just too damn cool!
"A norange" is another one; that's why the Spanish call them "naranjas" and we call them "oranges".
Mmmm. Spicy brains.
I love the Favorite Poems site. Now I have Gerard Manly Hopkins on the brain. "I caught this morning morning's minion." Love!
Isn't it a great site?! I'm going to link my classroom TV to my computer and show a bunch of them next week.
Hopefully. If I get the splitter-thingie I need.
