Historical Linguistics

Today just became my only full day off for the rest of the week, seeing as my new job started yesterday and now I have 3 more shifts this week. I'm incredibly glad they're only short. Yesterday I was at work for 9 hours! And now I'm exhausted and suddenly have no time.

But anyway, on to more interesting things. Today I also realised that I had quite a lot of reading to do for uni and that in fact I couldn't really do anything more productive than try and get some reading out of the way. So this morning I have been reading my Historical Linguistics textbook because I have to for an assignment only to find that it is actually quite interesting to read. The author seems to be fond of adding quirky (I only use the word because I can't think of another way to describe it) afterthoughts. Like for example when talking about the semantic change of car from meaning a cart pulled by animals to meaning an automobile (originally called motor car) the author adds;

"today no English speaker who hears "I've just bought a new car" is going to expect a a shiny new oxcart with antilock brakes and a built-in MP3 player" Trask's Historical Linguistics (2nd Ed.) pp 44


A hilarious image if nothing else. Linguists seem to love making jokes, but then again if anyone could create a perfect pun it would probably be a Linguist. It's just a shame that a lot of the time they're jokes are a little lame. Clever, yes but also lame.

Also I guess you may have noticed that I spelt Linguist with a capital 'L'. It's not a proper noun so I'm not using 'correct' grammar. But I'm a Linguist so I know there is no such thing as 'correct' grammar (Ok, well at least not in the traditional sense). There's actually no particular reason why I've been typing Linguist as such, it's probably just because I've been doing a bit of writing in German and they capitalise their nouns.

A note on capitalisation, since I've brought it up, my friend mentioned that Google was (supposedly) bringing out a laptop which had no caps lock key because of the trend to stop using capitals, probably brought about by the rise IM/SMS-ing general internet/technology. Anyway, studying German as I am my immediate thought was "but German capitalise nouns and personal pronouns (in letters/email), isn't that important?" For some reason I thought this was a good enough reason for capitals not to be dying out. The other day, though I found a blog written in German that uses NO CAPITALS AT ALL, once again reminding me that traditional/prescriptive grammar is only useful if you are trying to learn a 2nd language but not entirely relevant/not at all important if you're a Linguist. Or anyone in the real world at all.