Visualizing Word Origins

5 August 2012

I seldom link to older blog posts, but this one is right up our alley, and I’ve only just come across it. Back in April, mkinde of the blog Ideas Illustrated created some multicolor visualizations of the origins of words in various types of writing, such as a passage from Twain’s Tom Sawyer, Dickens’s Great Expectations, medical writing, sports writing, and legal writing. He used Douglas Harper’s Online Etymology Dictionary as his source for the etymologies.

The result is striking and drives home the point of how many of our most-used words come from Old English, but it also drives home the degree to which reliance on words from Old English can vary significantly with genre; it’s much lower in legal and medical writing. We often think of writing as generic, but it isn’t. Different genres and audiences require different registers and vocabularies.

I was going to voice a quibble over possible confusion between Latin, Old Norse, and Old English, but there’s no need. Old English contains many words from Old Norse and a few, but oft-used, words from Latin (mainly ecclesiastical and religious terms), so there can be some definitional disputes over language of origin. But it appears that all the words marked as Old Norse or Latin are post-Conquest additions to the language (or at least aren’t in recorded use until after William crossed the Channel). If the word’s root was in English use before 1066, it’s marked as Old English. So kudos for getting a subtle point correct.

[Tip o’ the hat to Languagehat.]

More on Animal Language

10 July 2012

This article doesn’t provide any new information, and frustratingly doesn’t link to any actual studies, only journalistic accounts of the studies, but it is a nice summary of the state of our knowledge of animal language and whether or not it exists.

I do note the one claim about dogs being as smart as a two or three-year-old human child. The way they are measuring intelligence s remarkably anthropocentric. It’s like the old saying that the remarkable thing about a dancing bear is not how well he dances, but that he dances at all. Dogs are that smart because they demonstrate equivalent linguistic capabilities. And in fact, dogs that are trained to respond to human voices, like border collies, score higher on the “intelligence” scale. Well, duh. Rough comparisons of “intelligence” between species are meaningless. We can measure narrow aspects of intelligence, and such measurements are interesting and useful, but since we don’t have any consensus on what intelligence is in its entirety, broad comparisons like this are quite silly.

(Tip o’ the Hat to Andrew Sullivan)

The Value of Freshman Comp

19 June 2012

Lynne Murphy has a nice blog post over at Lingua Franca on whether or not a first year writing course is useful to a university student. Murphy comes down squarely on the side of yes, as do I.

Murphy observes that students in Britain don’t know how to structure an argument or, for that matter, a paragraph. From my limited, but growing, experience at a Canadian university, I agree with her assessment. The problem is not, as most grammar manuals would have it, how to write an intelligible sentence or use standard punctuation. The students have that down. (Well, maybe not punctuation, but that’s a mechanical exercise and relatively easy to correct.) My students also tend to have problems with register, tone, and the academic style. Many don’t realize that there are different registers to writing and that the style they write in an email to friends is not the one to be used in an academic paper. Those that do recognize that there is such a thing as an academic style try to imitate what they read in critical literature and the result is usually a mess. They don’t have the basics of writing a coherent essay down yet, and they couch those troubled arguments in stilted and hypercorrect language. (When I see this, I tell the student to just try to write a clear essay in plain English. Mastering the style of academic discourse will come as they continue to read critical literature.)

When I was an undergrad, I placed out of freshman comp. Due to my test scores and advanced placement credits I was permitted to jump right into the English literature courses, but I opted not to skip the class, and it was one of the best decisions of my undergrad career. I did not do so because I thought it would be an easy A, but with forethought my eighteen-year-old self had seldom exhibited, I determined that writing was an essential skill and no matter how good I was, I could always get better. Since I’d had excellent writing teachers in high school, I had mastered the basics and in the university composition class I was able step back and view my writing more objectively and to understand different purposes and approaches to good writing. For the first time I considered factors such as audience in crafting my writing. I’m sure the class was equally valuable, albeit in another way, to those students who were still having trouble with the basics.

One thing that I would disagree with Murphy on is whether North American and British universities are all that different. When I was applying to grad school, the comp requirement was something I looked at, because as a grad student I would be expected to teach composition if it were offered. I found that North American schools, or at least the ones that offered PhD programs in English, split about 50/50 as to whether or not they offered freshman comp. The University of Toronto does not, for example. There are remedial and ESL writing courses available to those that need them, but there is no general requirement for freshman comp. Perhaps there should be.