Thursday, July 19, 2007

Linguistical fun

This post over at Language Log is worth a look. (I also ranted about this issue in a previous post.)

3 comments:

Máire said...

Hwanon ferigeað ge fætte scyldas?

I have no idea why prescriptivists think this is a good argument. The dweebish dude in the comic is purposely putting nonsense together. Slang would never survive, let alone make its way into more general usage, if it didn't serve a communicative purpose among some group of people.

Brain said...

Yeah, I like how it's supposed to imply "Let's eliminate all the rules, and we can talk gibberish, and panicle some deefoos plate carbonized." As opposed to understanding that the rules are built in, and that they are mutable as well.

Máire said...

Dude, I can't believe the special characters survived! Awsom!!111

And [understanding] that slang-users often have the express goal of distancing themselves from fuddy-duddys by making sure utterances are unintelligible. Complain all you want -- we'll slang more!