Well, there you go:

What American accent do you have? Your Result: North Central "North Central" is what professional linguists call the Minnesota accent. If you saw "Fargo" you probably didn't think the characters sounded very out of the ordinary. Outsiders probably mistake you for a Canadian a lot.
Boston
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The Inland North
Philadelphia
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What American accent do you have? Take More Quizzes

Finally, my German lessons have paid off, in laughter.

Neil writes:

It's a verb and it's strange because the past participle starts with a different letter to the present participle. This is very common in other Teutonic languages such as German but I had no idea there were any such words in English.

Read about participles here and here.

Update: Ah, I figured out the answer as I went for a little walk. Check the comments.

Eugene (do they call you Gene?) Volokh writes:

While we're at it, why are there gender-generic terms "parents," "siblings," and "children" -- and, in English, only a gender-generic "cousin" -- but not "auncles" or "niecews"? (No, I'm not serious about those two particular suggestions; I'm noting the absence of any such word.)

After doing a minor amount of research about why there isn't a different word for M/F cousins, I suspect the answer is because when the word came over from Latin (via old French), we lost the endings that differentiated M from F and end up with the same word for different genders.

The Latin root words are consobrina (F)/consobrinus (M), meaning cousin on the mother's side. Note that there's a different set of words for cousin on Dad's side (sobrina/sobrinus) and another set of words for cousins that are from your Dad's sister or your Mom's brother (amitina/amitinus).

Disclaimer: I don't pretend to speak Latin, but I am pretty handy with Bartleby's.

Neil Bartlett writes:

This is the first in a series of posts that I wrote approx. 2 years ago when I spent some time in Vienna -- with occassional shuttles to and from Toronto. At the time, I had a blog and intended to put the posts on the blog but never did. In re-reading them recently, I realized they cover topics I still want to write about. Topics such as learning German and the Germanic culture; Topics I knew little about before going to Vienna.

For the record, I enjoyed and still enjoy learning German immensely. After about a year of elapsed time (not all spent in Vienna) I had reached the point of reading novels in the language so I feel I reached a reasonable level of proficiency. This series of posts is about things both mainstream and arcane that occured as I went through the process of absorbing another language.

[...] After a while, I noticed that using only about 15-20 phrases -- say 30-40 words -- got you by in a large number of daily social interactions. Most curiously, these words were often not in the beginners books. At least not until book 2 or 3. In the meantime in book 1 you learn desparately useful stuff such as parts of the body and how to talk to your grandma in German (despite the fact that my Grandma is dead and spoke, to my recollection, only English.)

Via Digital Annealing, here's something I didn't even know existed: a sonic illusion (a/k/a the "McGurk-effect").

This is an old e-mail discussion I had with Amritas about the translation of the title of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix into German. The following is a letter I sent to a German friend living in Austria.

There's some dispute with some people I'm talking to about the German Genitive form of the English word "Phoenix".

LEO/Canoo lists it as having a "-es or -s" ending which is fair enough, except the German translation of "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" into German is Harry Potter und der Orden des Phönix (no ending on the genitive-declined "Phönix").

He responds:

To answer your tricky question: I would say

1. ".. des Phönix" sounds much better than ".. des Phönixes" or even ".. des Phönixs". I claim the latter is wrong, phonetically. The language reference, der Duden, is saying "des Phönixes"
2. You could also argue that the full sentence would look like ".. des Vogels Phönix" where 'Vogel' has been dismissed
3. As always there are some variations you can choose from as the internet proves:-)

Neil (an English speaker who knows German) adds:

Definitely some web ponderings on this from [here]:

Allgemein gilt es ja jetzt als beschlossen, dass der Titel des 5. Bandes : Harry Potter and the Order of the Phönix heißen soll. Der deutsche Titel würde dann ungefähr so lauten: Harry Potter und der Orden des Phönixes.

[Also] this one is interesting as they don't mention the title being wrong but they do correctly use the genitive for the phrase "Eines Nachts wird Harry von den Mitgliedern des Ordens des Phönixes abgeholt".

Amritas chimes in:

My guess was that the aberrant behavior of the word is OK because it's a loanword and the phonetic sequence [kses] might sound awful (cf. what Marcel said, which confirmed that suspicion of mine).

While I was doing some research on Unicode I came across something called Proto-Sinaitic^* which lead me to this neat page "Evolution of Alphabets" that graphically demonstrates how various lettering systems evolved (such as ours).

^* suggestion — sigma: "tits".

Meanwhile, tribal leaders in Kut -- disgusted with the violence incited by radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr -- have fought with his Mehdi Army and plan to hand the southern Iraqi city over to U.S. forces, a coalition source close to the situation told CNN on Friday.

They mean against, not with.

Dr. Weevil is running daily entries from Ambrose Bierce' Write It Right. For example, today's entry is:

As—as for So—as. “He is not as good as she.” Say, not so good. In affirmative sentences the rule is different: He is as good as she.

Or to put it another way, this a catalogue of losing and lost battles against "meaning slippage" in the English language. Still, fun daily reading.

Newfoundlanders use the word "suck" as a noun, used as the description of a person who sucks up to others (e.g. "you little suck"). Of course, Newfoundlanders are not maritimers.

Web Site Shows British Accent Development

Recordings of voices from the 1950s, the 1980s and 1990s on a new Web site show that older pronunciations like "toon" for town and "coo" for cow are fading, replaced with more standard forms, officials say.

[...] The use of "toon" — which once spread as far south as Yorkshire — does survive in some of the broader Newcastle accents and in some Scottish pronunciations, he said.

Among other major changes has been the "virtual disappearance" of the Northumbrian burr, the way some residents of northeast England have of pronouncing an initial "r" sound at back of the throat, as in French, rather than the front.

The British Library "Collect Britain" website is here.

Amritas quotes:

I wonder what David would think of this essay comparing Newfinese to Ebonics:

When I first left Newfoundland at the ripe old age of nineteen, it was an occasion and prime example of culture shock. Not because of a sheltered lifestyle, but because my use of my "home language" it was difficult for many to understand unless very familiar with it ...

... I became ashamed of my accent, my heritage, and at one point believed what other Canadians had always said ... [T]he term "Stupid Newfies". A language barrier between one province and the remainder of the country had given them the impression that we were stupid. A joke they say. Don't take offense. Well, I guess you'd have to live it to understand. When it came to the levels of education, ours were excellent and in keeping with the Canadian standards, but we can't seem to shake the barrier raised because of our "dialects". Canadians, and after last night, Americans too, see us as stupid because of our language.

This would most likely be the same sentiment felt by the African American population.

There's several different things going on here which I'll address.

First, "Newfie-speak" has two issues (if you care to call them that): the accent and the dialect.

I had a friend from England who came to Newfoundland for his honeymoon (Newfoundland is an exotic place if you come from Europe!). He's pretty good with languages and he said something that strikes me as quite true: there's no accent he heard in Newfoundland that doesn't exist somewhere in England. The Newfoundland accent is (accents are) fine. It's as good as any other accent, and perhaps better than some. Chicks dig the accent. Really. If it bothers you that much, a couple of small twists and you'll be mistaken for an Irishman. More than a few Newfoundlanders, for whatever reason, have made this jump.

The dialect is a different kettle of fish altogether. English has a reasonably well defined grammar and if you're going to drop out of it, I suggest that you know when and why you are doing it if you want to be taken seriously by other English speakers. Sorry, that's just the way it. I learned as an adult that the past tense of "beat" is not "bet" and you can too.

Next, there's the whole issue of being a "stupid newfie". This has nothing to with accent or dialect and a lot to with ignorance and/or bigotry. No person ever has to stand around and take shit from a stranger. However, I follow one of my prime directives here: "a fool takes offense where none was meant". If offense was meant, act accordingly; if it wasn't, make the correction^*.

Finally, the comparison of ebonics/blacks and newfie/newfies is apt, though not in the way the author of the quote above intends. There's been a movement that's been particularly strong in the last 10-15 years to change ourselves. To call ourselves "Newfoundlanders" rather than "Newfies", to shun events such as the "screeching in^**", and so forth.

To me, this movement is just internalizing the loathing of ignorant idiots. Rather than saying "f*ck off, mainlander", the members of this movement are saying "maybe they have a point, maybe if I change, maybe they'll like us then". Bah. The problem is with them, not with us.

^* They're mainlanders, they can't help being kind of stunned.
^** Reasonable description of screeching in here.

Amritas points to this comparitive list of British, Canadian and American spellings. A few notes:

• This explains why I'm always fighting the spell checker: I always want to spell "harbour" with the O-U spelling.
• Spell checking is driving Canadians to the American spelling, except noting the political point below.
• Where there's a choice between single-L and double-L spellings in Canadian column, I almost always see Canadians choose the double-L spelling.
• Canadians prefer the "-ize" spelling (over "-ise"), though I've seen both in use. In general, when I see blatant British spelling choices, it's often related to the speller's politics.
• I work in a very multicultural environment, with people so smart it's scary. I'm not even at the ground floor with some of these people (though they're all very nice to me). So I see the British spellings here often, since many of them are European or South African.
• I've never seen "chilli" spelled with a single-L here, though maybe I'm not paying attention.
• "Colour" with a "ou" is drilled into us at school. Same with "Centre" with the French-"re" spelling.
• I've always heard "fulfil" pronouced as if it had an "r" in the middle (same as Chicago).
• "Among", "amongst" and "between" lead to an hour long debate with my parents at the dinner table several months ago. See this and this (it's very interesting).
• Since I've moved to Toronto, I've regularized my pluralization of "shrimp" to "shrimps". This is because I spend most of my lunch times in cheap Asian restaurants. I suspect this is the story of how the English language got to be the way it is.
• As a personal note, these are my most obviously Newfie-isms:
  • I have a very difficult time pronouncing or hearing the differences in these sets of words: "air/ear", "bear/beer/bare" (i.e. mainly the difference between the German "e" and "i" sounds). Needless to say, this makes speaking and understanding German a nightmare for me.
  • People here laugh when I say "roof" and "huge", though I'm not entirely sure why.
  • When I came to Toronto, I pronouced "H" with a "H". Now I don't.
  • I pronouce words with "TTL" in the middle — "little", "kettle" — strangely: ket'-ul, lit'-ul. I could change this but I choose not to.

Yahoo shuts its Scandinavian operation, because computer using Scandinavians prefer to use the English language (US) site.

Read this post by Amritas about the forced evolution of Chomsky's Universal Grammar to make it fit with the inconvient facts of reality. I'm not really qualified to speak much about linguist theories, but man, does it ever remind me of the Ptolemaic solar system model. As Eminem might say, "give it up, it's over".

Website is one word, both for aesthetic reasons and by popular consensus.

Update: more action at DB's link above and at Alan's weblog.

Maybe "House" is Class 4 (non-human: uncountable materials and abstracta) because it was originally "Home"?

Consider the German "das Mädchen" (girl), which one would expect to be F rather than N. I assume this happened because the pressure to convert —chen words to N was overwhelming for German speakers. Maybe not exactly the same, yet it's an example of a word clearly not fitting it's classification.

From today's Bleat:

Landed at Sky Harbor – a great romantic name for airports – and off we sped for a week at the home of my wife’s brother, his wife, and their three fine kids.

That's what it always (almost) is in German:

der Flug (flight) + der Hafen (harbor) = der Flughafen (airport)

Amritas has a post about usage of Sie and du in German, and similar patterns of formal and informal, singular and plural usage in other languages. It's interesting to note that in Newfoundland use of "ye" (as a plural "you") is quite common, especially among older people, and I find myself more than occasionally using it while I'm there. We also use it this way.

Just of the top of my head, here's a few ways that I would use it (I think — I find it a little difficult to drop into Newfie speak without another one around to talk to):

• What were ye [guys] doing last night?
• I thought he was out with ye.
• Did ye go out?