As I mentioned earlier, the Global Language Monitor previewed the introduction of the one millionth word to the English language. Great publicity followed. They have returned two months later to declare that the one million word barrier has been surpassed. Fanfare abounds to celebrate this glorious day. And the GLM brand is once again associated [...]
Posts Tagged ‘English Words’
The Million Word Followup
Thursday, June 11th, 2009Is 1,000,000 words possible?
Friday, April 3rd, 2009The Global Language Monitor, which was born from the ashes of yourdictionary.com, focuses on trends in the use of language, primarily through automatic algorithmic readings of texts on the web. The latest news from the site (and you’ll notice, should you visit the site, that most of the “news” on the homepage is articles where [...]
History of English Lesson
Friday, March 13th, 2009How I love the history and development of languages! It is a never-ending labyrinth of discovery and surprises, all reflecting the wonderful creative nature of human beings.
Recently I found the BBC article on the oldest words in English, which used the study performed by researchers at Reading University as its basis. While I enjoyed learning [...]
Language Preservation Policies
Friday, December 19th, 2008Public policies aiming to preserve a national language are most commonly associated with small nations, whether they be small nation-states (i.e., Iceland, Ireland, and Estonia) or minority nations within a larger nation-state (i.e., Quebecois French, Basque, Catalan, and countless indigenous languages). Nevertheless, now many larger countries are taking action to preserve their majority languages.
The most [...]
Language Change and Politics:
Friday, December 5th, 2008While language change may occur at varying speeds and due to diverse and numerous causes, many changes have political roots or explanations. Much of language change, obviously, has come about from human migration and the use of a language by non-native speakers, with the influences of the phonetic, syntactic and morphological rules of the migrants [...]
The Past Tense – Then and Now
Tuesday, December 2nd, 2008English is evolving in numerous ways on a daily basis, be it through new words put in use (as cited here last week), new expressions, or a change in the way we use words already in use. The past tense is an excellent point of reference for this phenomenon. I was reminded of this when [...]
New Words in English 2008
Tuesday, November 25th, 2008The Oxford English Dictionary, whose corpus of texts now contains over 2 billion words, recently released its list of new words for inclusion in the Eleventh edition in the Revised Edition of its Concise Oxford English Dictionary.
http://www.askoxford.com/worldofwords/newwords/?view=uk
Some of my thoughts:
“Best”, as used in phrases such as “best of breed” is [...]
