The evolution of English as a language - past, present, and future.

[pjsnyc]

Stumbled across this interesting essay in Wired. Thought some of you may find it a fun read. Enjoy!

http://www.wired.com/culture/culture...16-07/st_essay

[Palouse]

Interesting read, but I don't expect to be speaking Chinglish in my lifetime. However, language always evolves. Read a bit of Beowulf or Shakespeare. Anyone know where the famous bits of English poetry below are from?

Whan that April with his showres soote
The droughte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veine in swich licour,
Of which vertu engendred is the flowr;

[pjsnyc]

I've always found linguistics and etymology to be interesting subject matter. As for Beowulf - yeah - it's crazy how different Old English is to Modern English (Shakespeare is considered modern BTW).

[Palouse]

  pjsnyc said:

I've always found linguistics and etymology to be interesting subject matter. As for Beowulf - yeah - it's crazy how different Old English is to Modern English (Shakespeare is considered modern BTW).

I enjoy it a lot myself. English is one of my undergrad degrees (my other degree pays the bills), and my wife has her PhD in linguistics.

Chaucer is considered modern English, too, but people still have a hard time with both Chaucer and Shakespeare because the language has evolved so much. I had a helluva time in my Chaucer class for the first half of the semester...if I remember correctly. That was a long time ago. I have a hard enough time remembering what I ate for breakfast, but I can still rattle off the prologue to the Canterbury Tales.

[Harry Longshanks]

  pjsnyc said:

The evolution of English as a language - past, present, and future.

Ahhhhhhhh! Don't do that! I just had a horrific flashback to college and running around trying to find an open class for my mandatory English lit credits!

[Palouse]

  Harry Longshanks said:

I recall stuff like that, too. I work on a university campus, and registering for classes is so much easier for the students than we had it. They can do it all online now. I recall standing in line for hours only to find out I didn't have my advisor's signature on the right signature line...which required standing in another line. Those were the days.

[pjsnyc]

  Palouse said:

...and my wife has her PhD in linguistics...

Friggin awesome! I've actually been considering going back to school to pursue a higher degree in linguistics. Any good pointers your wife might have for me as a starting point?

[Harry Longshanks]

  pjsnyc said:

Friggin awesome! I've actually been considering going back to school to pursue a higher degree in linguistics. Any good pointers your wife might have for me as a starting point?

What would you do with that type of degree.

(^^^ genuinely curious. Not trying to be an ass.)

[Craig Mac]

  Palouse said:

Interesting read, but I don't expect to be speaking Chinglish in my lifetime. However, language always evolves. Read a bit of Beowulf or Shakespeare. Anyone know where the famous bits of English poetry below are from?

I guess this is the origin of the "april showers bring may flowers" phrase then right? Next time I hear that I'll say "Chaucer", and I'm sure they'll look at me and say, "What?"

[pjsnyc]

  Harry Longshanks said:

What would you do with that type of degree.

I feel linguistics can play a large role in making voice recognition technology really work. Seems to be the one thing we can't get close to right...yet

I guess I'm just a big Knight Rider fan...jk...not really... Anyway, I was a philosphy major/engineering minor as an undergrad - so the two can compliment each other. Right now I'm in IT, so combining it all would be a dream for me Other than getting to scratch

[Surefire]

Not sure if you've considered it but text mining is also becoming a big thing.

I work for a software company that develops text mining software and we employ computational linguists to produce dictionaries of language patterns that may be of interest when extracting text that may be interesting from large corporas of text.

I hope that made sense! I tried to explain it in normal English and discovered its pretty hard to describe without using the industry jargon!

It is a combination of IT and linguistics so might be ideal for you?

[pjsnyc]

  Surefire said:

Not sure if you've considered it but text mining is also becoming a big thing.

Hmmmm...perhaps - but I've gotten my fair share of data mining here at work, so I'm kinda sick of the whole 'mining' thing - very tedious (stuff that you'd put on the bottom of your to-do list) type stuff...unless its not what I think? I'll def consider it - thanks.

[pjsnyc]

Looks like M$ is hiring!

http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/busin...-powerset.html

[Surefire]

  pjsnyc said:

Looks like M$ is hiring!

What powersoft do is text mining. Its pretty much what we do here too, although I guess the NY Times explained it a little better than me!

[Palouse]

  pjsnyc said:

Friggin awesome! I've actually been considering going back to school to pursue a higher degree in linguistics. Any good pointers your wife might have for me as a starting point?

Academics are tough, particularly in the liberal arts, but the good ones succeed and make tenure. It's competitive. I work in administration at a state university, and unless you really love a particular field, it's really difficult to fake. I'm not saying that's you, but I see it quite a bit here. Students get into the PhD program and leave only with an MS in an effort to scoot them out the door to be able to provide the funding for more worthy students.

My wife specializes in second language acquisition as it relates to the grammar and writing classrooms, so her specialty isn't the kind of linguistics in the Noam Chomsky sense, which is what I think you're interested in. She likes pedagogy a lot, and that's her focus. Her first master's degree is in Germanics, and she got accepted into the German pedagogy PhD program at UT Austin, but when she realized her job prospects were so limited, she changed routes. Her current job field is still pretty limited. Looking at the salaries here on campus, my suggestion is to become an accounting or finance professor. You don't have the grants pressure (although there's still the pressure to publish) like those in the sciences and engineering have, and you make six figures right out of graduate school. In the end, though, you still have to love it or the pain and suffering isn't worth it in my opinion.

  Harry Longshanks said:

What would you do with that type of degree.

Teach, mostly. If you end up with a PhD in the liberal arts, chances are you went into it expecting to become a professor.

  Craig Mac said:

I guess this is the origin of the "april showers bring may flowers" phrase then right? Next time I hear that I'll say "Chaucer", and I'm sure they'll look at me and say, "What?"

You know, I don't know. Sad to say I never made that connection. I'll check the OED on that when I get home tonight and see if I come up with anything.