Couple of Articles on Prescriptivism

16 July 2010

John McIntyre, copy editor for the Baltimore Sun, has a post on his You Don’t Say blog outlining a very sensible approach to prescriptivism. McIntyre “gets it.” Very few people who dispense writing advice realize or acknowledge that different registers and voices are appropriate for different audiences, and the “rules” of style need to be adjusted accordingly.

And the Johnson language blog over at the Economist has a post about how prescriptive criticism of language is often used to mask ad hominem attacks.

I Write Like

16 July 2010

This is a fun, but ultimately pointless, site. I purports to tell you which famous writer you write like.

I evidently write like H.P. Lovecraft. Although one of my posts from 2001 is like Shakespeare.

I write like
H. P. Lovecraft

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Oddly enough, Shakespeare’s Sonnet #116 is written in the style of Dickens.

(Hat tip to Michael Bigley)

Language Bridge Across the Bering Strait

15 July 2010

An article in the Ottawa Citizen tells of linguistic researchers who have discovered connections between Ket, a language spoken by a few hundred people in Siberia, and Dene, a language of Canada’s native Americans. The work isn’t new, evidently it’s been around for a few years, but I was unaware of it and the article is a good account (a relatively rare occurrence in reporting on linguistics).

The Yup’ik language has long been known to straddle the hemispheric dividing line, but the Yup’iks are relative newcomers to North America. The Ket-Dene connection points to an older migration of people, perhaps part of the original migration of humans to the Western Hemisphere at the end of the Ice Age. (The Ottawa Citizen article conflates the Yup’ik and Inuit languages. They are part of the same language family, but are not the same language. Unlike Yup’ik, Inuit is spoken exclusively in North America and Greenland.)

(Hat tip to The Lousy Linguist)