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Lara Cowell

Revealed: Self-styled 'grammar vigilante' corrects badly punctuated shop signs in dead ... - 0 views

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    An anonymous self-styled 'grammar vigilante' has revealed that he has spent years changing offending shop signs in the dead of night. Wielding an 'apostrophiser' - a broom handle laden with two sponges and a number of stickers - the man has corrected tens of missing and misplaced apostrophes on shop banners across Bristol, England over the past 13 years.
Lara Cowell

Txtng Rules - 1 views

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    Anne Curzan, an English professor and linguist at the University of Michigan, examines texting from a descriptionist perspective. Curzan notes that that effective electronically-mediated communication (EMC) users have a shared system of rules and a detailed set of conventions that moves real-time conversation into written form.
Lara Cowell

The Académie française: custodians of the French language - Telegraph - 0 views

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    The Académie française, established in 1635, is the official authority on the French language, establishing the standards for proper French. One of the aims of the Académie, whose 40 members include writers, linguists, historians and philosophers, is to protect French from foreign, notably "Anglo-Saxon" invasions. To that end, it comes up with French equivalents to pesky Anglicisms that slip into French, for example changing email into courriel.
Lara Cowell

Resistance to changes in grammar is futile, say researchers | Science | The Guardian - 1 views

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    "Whether it is by random chance or selection, one of the things that is true about English - and indeed other languages - is that the language changes," said Joshua Plotkin, co-author of the research from the University of Pennsylvania. "The grammarians might [win the battle] for a decade, but certainly over a century they are going to be on the losing side." Writing in the journal Nature, Plotkin and colleagues describe how they tracked different types of grammatical changes across the ages. Among them, the team looked at changes in American English across more than one hundred thousand texts from 1810 onwards, focusing on the use of "ed" in the past tense of verbs compared with irregular forms - for example, "spilled" versus "spilt". The hunt threw up 36 verbs which had at least two different forms of past tense, including quit/quitted and leaped/leapt. However for the majority, including spilled v spilt, the team said that which form was waxing or waning was not clearly down to selection - meaning it is probably down to chance over which word individuals heard and copied. "Chance can play an important role even in language evolution - as we know it does in biological evolution," said Plotkin, adding that the impact of random chance on language had not been fully appreciated before.
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