London Language

Ali G meets Noam Chomsky

Ali G talks to Noam Chomsky

Here's some useful research material ;-)

Tony Blair and the Iraq 'disaster'

You Tube - Tony Blair Tells David Frost War in Iraq is a Disaster

(The relevant bit of this clip starts after around 5 minutes in, the specific quote about the 'disaster' after around 6 minutes).

This story was relevant to several classes this week. It can be used as a starting point to discuss lots of linguistic topics. We used it this week to talk about:

how we infer what a speaker means by saying something like 'It has'

how intentions and meanings are connected or sometimes separate

how reports interpret original utterances

how contextual assumptions affect interpretations (including cultural assumptions - some papers reported Tony Blair talking to David Frost, some to Al Jazeera, some to both)

and how we manage conversational interaction.

There are lots of newspaper reports about it on the web. Here are two:

Gulf Daily news - Blair Admits Iraq 'Disaster'

Times Online - Iraq war 'pretty much a disaster', Blair concedes

B-)

the english vs the american Harry Potter

Thought this might be interesting to some of you.. someone here has made a list of examples of textual differences between the British and American editions of one of Harry Potter's books.

Mai

the development of Hinglish

BBC - it's Hinglish, innit?

This is inspired by the publication of a new dictionary called 'The Queen's Hinglish'

Billy

test your english

A recent debate on the Corpora list was discussing the differences between British and American English. It started when someone was asking if there is a tool to do automatic conversion of texts/words from British English to American English and vice versa. An important point is that the differences between the two varieties extends beyond the well known spelling differences (eg. bahaviour vs. behavior, centre vs. center). The more interesting, and perhaps less known, differences are in fact lexical, grammatical and idiomatic. I thought it would be nice to mention some of the examples and to.. well, test your English. So which of those words/constructions are British and which are American?

• "do you have" vs. "have you got"
• "lift" vs. "elevator"
• "the government is" vs. "the government are"
• "half four" vs. "4:30"
• "go to the hospital" vs. "go to      hospital"
• "commoner" vs. "more common"
• "her skin has spots on it" vs. "her skin has spots on"

 Of course if you think that the answers are straightforward, well.. think again.

Mai

arabic script

Re your study visit to the British museum (which I missed unfortunately), I hope you were all interested in Arabic script. I think Arabic is one of the most beautiful languages to write, and not just because it's my native language :)  Arabic script is both so complicated and so rich that it is a fertile ground for creativity. As a standard, there are 5 main types of Arabic script, illustrated in the photo below. In Egypt, we used to learn in school the first one, naskh, and the last one, riq'a (of course, my own handwriting is not that good, but I generally write in riq'a).

But when it comes to the art of calligraphy, the options are endless. I think you've seen some examples in the British museum. You might also be interested to have a look at these examples of contemporary Arabic calligraphy designs.

Finally, here's another photo I like. This guy, apprently in love and with good artistic skills, wrote on the car "love from first sight", with diacritics and everything (he even managed to include a cute heart shape connected to the word "love":) )

Mai

'linguistic frippery'

Guardian - new slang enough to make celebs Wallace and Gromit

It's odd that this piece about a 'new Collins guide, Shame About the Boat Race' doesn't tell us any more than that about the source. The Wrap email they sent did mention this online slang dictionary, though. 'Meryl Streep' means 'cheap', apparently. Believe it or not, for some of us back in the '80s, it meant 'gypit neep' ('foolish turnip' according to Mudcat's Scots glossary, which is at least denotatively correct).

Billy