RULES GRAMMAR CHANGE!

Onion Radio News. No more will English rules follow! Wordorigins via.

Comments

  1. Times repeated before got it right he wonder I?

  2. Sounded familiar thought I this did. Adapted from this article, published in 1997 which was, this Radio News item was. Changed thesauruses in original were, highway signs in adaptation were replaced with. Thesauruses no more used are?

  3. Indeed familiar sound this does. Master Yoda perhaps author reform this of?

  4. Crown, A. says

    I think there’s little point in continuing to discuss this.
    I’ll propose something related, that I recently suggested at Language Log. How about we all learn the extinct Mashantucket Pequod language, and then make it the official language of the United States? Everyone has to start from scratch, even the Mashantucket Pequot Tribe, so it is fair to every language-speaking group — although there must be one or two who can still speak it. Anyway that’s a detail. But then the USA would have its own official language, like France or Iran, but without imposing boring old English on everyone. If it doesn’t catch on, it wouldn’t matter: the official language doesn’t have to be the most spoken language. It would be roughly analogous to the Queen of England being the Head of State but not doing anything useful: people would just stop trying to make English the official language, because we’d already have Pequot. And everyone who tried a little bit would have an extra language to speak. And then we could try and make everyone else speak it.

  5. Sounds fair enough to me. When do we start?

  6. Crown, A. says

    Ok. I’ll do a bit of research, and let you know.

  7. “No more will English rules follow”??? me to like syntax German sounds a bit. Also of Yoda reminds me.

  8. The thing that struck me about the piece was how consistent it was. Simple anastrophe it was, genuinely random and disordered it was not.

  9. John Emerson says

    Souians have a bitter animus against the Pequot, as well they might, and will refuse to cooperate.

  10. John Emerson says

    Souians have a bitter animus against the Pequot, as well they might, and will refuse to cooperate.

  11. As Isabel suggests, it’s recycled from the regular Onion. But the last time this piece came up on Language Log, I took the time to figure out what it would sound like if one really did alter the syntax to late OE patterns (as the piece suggests).
    My results, along with a thumbnail guide to writing your own, can be found here:
    http://www.polysyllabic.com/?q=node/209

  12. Crown, A. says

    John Emerson: I can’t find anything on google about Sioux-Mashantucket Pequot hostility. Will you tell me a bit more, please?

  13. Crown, Arthur says

    What I’ve found out about learning the Pequot language:
    There’s a linguist called jessie little doe baird, who has been employed by the Mashantucket Pequot Tribe in Connecticut to reconstruct their extinct language. She is, I think, the only authority in the language, having a PhD in Linguistics from MIT and having done this work for her own tribe, the Mashpee Wampanoag (that was a language not spoken for 150 years).
    From the Native Village News, 2005:
    She found Wampanoag to be the first American Indian language to have a writing system, “At a certain period in the 17th century there were more Wampanoag people that were literate in Wampanoag than there were English people in written English.” She added that even the first Bible set to print on this continent was written in Wampanoag.
    The Wampanoag now have a 10,000 word dictionary, and over 100 tribe members are learning the language (her own daughter is bilingual). I read somewhere that Pequod currently has about 1,000 words, not very many for an official language, but I would like to talk to her anyway. Does anyone know how I can get her email address?

  14. John Emerson says

    It’s intuitive, Krone. You have to grok it.
    I recently found that the Sauk / Sac / Meskwaki language has been written since early in the nineteenth century. The Meskwaki live in Tama Iowa and have produced a fine poet, Ray Young Bear. Link.

  15. John Emerson says

    It’s intuitive, Krone. You have to grok it.
    I recently found that the Sauk / Sac / Meskwaki language has been written since early in the nineteenth century. The Meskwaki live in Tama Iowa and have produced a fine poet, Ray Young Bear. Link.

  16. The Wampanoag revival was discussed here back in May. Look on its project page for Ms. Baird’s email address.

  17. Water, by the way, is not scarce on Mars. It’s all over the place, it was in the news this week.
    I’m working on another project, which is to be the King of Mars. Before you say something like, “Well, you’ve never been there, so”, etc., don’t forget that, thanks to Disraeli, Queen Victoria was Empress Of India, and she never went near the place.

  18. For what it’s worth, I support your candidacy.

  19. It means a lot to me, Language. I’ve also got my wife and my daughter semi on board. There’s quite a bit of money at stake, and that’s really what this is about, frankly. I do not have great leadership qualities.
    Thank you once again, MMcM. I will look that up now. How kind you are. I only used lower case for her name because she likes it that way, apparently.
    I’m unable to grok a Sioux-Pequot grudge, so I’m disregarding it as a possible problem.

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