"I'm lookiting"

I used to collect "Peanuts" comic books when I was very young. It sort of became a rule in me to buy a new book when the family went on a holiday trip and read it through during the trip. I think I was about 8 when I started this, and I still have the books I got then.

There is one comic strip that I remember very clearly, and it happens to be about inflecting a new verb.

Charlie Brown's friend is jumping rope, and she wants him to look at her. Here is the comic strip.

(by Charles Schulz   Feb, 18th 1963)

"I'm lookiting!"

I found it very funny.

I liked the sound very much and I remember saying it over and over, I'm lookiting, I'm lookiting!

Lookit is 'look it', meaning to look at it. 

The little kids in Peanuts must be around 7. Children around that age have fairly good command of their mother tongue, but most of their knowledge of the language is acquired verbally, from 'strings of sounds'. Unlike written language, verbally produced language does not have any markers to tell where are the starts and ends of words or sentences. Then how can a child know when hearing a sentence if the verb contained is an intransitive or a phrasal verb or a transitive verb that needs an object?

It is very plausible that the children in that linguistic stage to make a rough guess about the word (in this case, verb) using the cues they get from the pauses and breaks of sound.

For the girl and Charlie, 'lookit' was one verb. She may have heard some grown-ups around her using it like "Oh, look it!" She uses it in imperative, Charlie uses it in present continuous form, although he has never heard it before. He applied the regular rule of forming a present continuous. It seems that Linus was the only one who knew that there was no such verb as 'lookit'.

Children cleverly and productively create maximum output from the minimum grammatical knowledge they have. Whenever they have no example to refer to, they go for the regular rule. 

Phoneticians as Reformers 02

Phoneticians of 19th century

Phonetics is the study of speech sounds and how they are produced, but phoneticians in the 19th century worked in a little different way from what they do today. In those days there were phoneticians who proposed or developed new system of writing to faithfully represent how the words were pronounced.

English spelling has many irregularities. A very famous example displaying the irregularity is the clever respelling of "fish" as "ghoti" ( 'gh' as in 'enough', 'o' as in 'women', and 'ti' as in 'nation').

Why so many irregularities? Here are some of many reasons.
-Words came into English from foreign languages retaining their original spelling but the pronunciation adapted to English.
-There was the Great Vowel Shift that changed the pronunciation of Middle English long vowels but the spelling staying as is.
-There were words which the spelling were reformed to reflect Greek or Latin etymology.

Phoneticians thought 26 letters in the alphabet were just not enough to phonetically describe the English words accurately -- too many irregularities, no standardized spelling or pronunciation. This issue was one of the motivations for Bernard Shaw to write "Pygmalion" (Phoneticians as Reformers 01).

Here are what phoneticians of the 19th century did to tackle the issue of the inconsistency of spelling and pronunciation:
-Regularizing: applying existing spelling rules more consistently. Some were proposed by an American English-language spelling reformer Noah Webster, and resulted in the difference in American and British spelling.
-Standardizing: Using the English alphabet and adding new diagraph (eg. <th> →/ð/, <ng>→/ŋ/), new spelling was proposed. This was proposed by Issac Pitman, who also invented shorthand system that is widely used in Britain.
-Renewing: replacing all alphabet with newly invented symbols. Bernard Shaw invented the Shavian alphabet. It had 48 letters all looking nothing like the Latin alphabet, and were "phonemic" as possible.

Against the effort of the reformers of the 19th century, English still retains its irregularities in spelling and inconsistency of spelling and pronunciation, and diverse Englishes flourish in different parts of the world.

Power of words and Mysterious Lactobacillic Drink from Asia

There was a drink I liked from childhood. It is a concentrated lactobacillic drink you dilute with water. It is white in colour, and it tastes a little sour but also sweet. It was a product of Japan.

Our family moved to Australia when I was 7, and I was happy that I could take to school drink bottles with juice in it. My mother got hold of that concentrated drink from a Japanese import food shop, and let me take that drink to school.

I was new to the school, and my classmates were very curious of everything I had. They looked at my pencils, rubber, pencil case, lunch box, and my drink bottle. The Japanese girl had different lunch, so they wanted to taste a little. They were also curious about what was in the drink bottle.

I could not speak English well, but I could tell that my classmates wanted to taste my lunch and drink, so I let them have some. My friends liked the drink, so they asked me what the name of the juice was. I proudly said,

"Calpis!" (It was the name of the product)

"Oooh, yuck! Cow pis!"

"???"

My friends who just had enjoyed the drink was now making a great fuss about it. I could not figure out what had gone wrong.

Later I found out that 'Calpis' sounded very similar to 'cow pis', and my friends thought that they had drank "it".

Words put ideas in your head. After this incident, my friends did not ask me for a sip of my drink although it was not 'cow pis' at all. Words are powerful.

This was years before export version of Calpis was made. Now, the export version had arranged the name of the product to "Calpico". Sales-wise, I think the re-naming was a wise choice.

http://www.calpico.com/calpico/index.html

Typhoon, tycoon, tyranny and Tyrannosaur Part 2

(The second half of me letting my imagination fly from "typhoon, tycoon, tyranny and Tyrannosaur")

And then, I went on to thinking about 'tyranny' and 'Tyrannosaur'.

I guess that when archaeologists found the full set of skeletal structure for the largest carnivorous dinosaur, they must have imagined what fear it brought to other creatures living in same age. 

"Here comes thumping and whipping its thick fat tail the hungry big-headed humongous meat-eating creature with great big munching jaws lined with lethal set of sharp teeth!!!!"

So, this predator was named 'Tyrannosaur'. One of them even has -rex on the end of its name, which means "king"! How powerful could you get!

Then, what about the word 'tyranny'?

Now, I imagine that this kind of word is born from the side of the ruled, not the ruler, and in a culture where it has seen a great domination over people. If you are in power, you have no fear, you can do whatever you want. However, if you have been suffering under brutal domination for many years and you know who's or what's to blame, you would come up with a word to describe that, wouldn't you. You would want to share your agony and distress with the people under the same condition.

"Oh! That tyrant! We will be left with nothing, no food, no future if this tyranny goes on!"

Something you still might hear in a smoking room in a big company.

And this word 'tyranny' is Greek in origin. Yes, the ancient Greeks have dominated vast regions in the Mediterranean and later was dominated by the Romans.

Maki, having fun slipping myself to Asia, prehistoric ages and the ancient Greek world with words...

Typhoon, tycoon, tyranny and Tyrannosaur Part 1

I like playing with word sounds. And when I am just playing around with them, I sometimes hit on some linguistic features that words share.

typhoon

tycoon

tyranny

Tyrannosaur

These words look similar, sound similar, and also they are all terrifying if they are around you, aren't they. Frightening as one, but imagine all four of them coming to you at once (and I am so good at letting my fantasy fly wild).

".... A typhoon which revives a Tyrannosaur in its hibernation hits your country of tyranny ruled by a tycoon...."

Socially, politically, and catastrophically you are doomed!

Now, both 'typhoon' and 'tycoon' were imported from Asian words - 'typhoon' is 台風 meaning violent wind storm, and 'tycoon' is 大君 originally meaning the Tokugawa Shogun, later changing to refer to someone rich and successful in great power.

               Asian origin words showing great power over people

It may be just a coincidence, but don't these common features excite you?! They do for me.

When in ail...

A silly spin-off from Roki's ariticle "O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms?"
(http://barefootphilolo.blogspot.jp/2016/09/o-what-can-ail-thee-knight-at-arms.html)

The knight in Keat's poem was so woe-begone over a mysterious lady that a person who happened to see him in such condition had to ask him what had happened. The poem goes on to tell the knight's story meeting his lady. 

I wonder if the person said anything to the knight after hearing his story. I started to play around with the sound of 'ail', and I thought if I were that person, I would go like this;

When in AIL, 

WAIL!!!

INHALE,

EXHALE,

Then get a GRAIL,

and gallons of ALE,

and drink it down to PREVAIL!

Ale and time heal a broken heart, maybe...