Language stuff

[dreamer_easy]

Britishisms and the Britishisation of American English. Looks like objections to "Britishisms" are based on their higher status (and thus pretentiousness) and not their lower status, as with Americanisms.

In the absence of proper language study I continue to squee at puzzling small things out - for example, the relationship between the Korean jjang, "boss, best" and the Mandarin Dui Zhang "leader". (The Duizhang himself, Kris from Exo-M, reportedly talks in his sleep in three languages. How cool is that?!) Speaking of Exo-M, they were amongst several Kpop bands who recently performed in Jakarta. The press call was a tasty salad of languages, including Korean, English, and Bahasa - you can hear Kris speaking a little of the last two here, much to the delight of the crowd (and the commenters on YouTube :).

ETA much later: the slang 짱 jjang may come from 장, as in 사장 "boss", and 장 in turn comes from the Chinese 長 zhǎng "chief".

Moar stuff:

http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/light-is-fading-for-indigenous-languages-20120922-26dik.html
http://www.sinosplice.com/life/archives/2010/04/14/the-big-bang-theory-sheldons-chinese
http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/mobiles/braille-app-frees-keyboard-slaves-20120222-1tmnz.html
http://catb.org/jargon/html/index.html (The Jargon File)
http://www.mandarintools.com/pyconverter_old.html (Chinese Romanization Converter)

Comments

[lillibet.livejournal.com]

When I was doing telephone surveys in the US for a job, many years ago, I amused myself by trying different accents. I found that British accents got better responses from women, whereas nothing got to American men like an American Southern accent on a woman. I hypothesize that the higher-status accent challenged women to prove themselves to me, whereas the lower-status accent enticed men to help out a little lady.

[dreamer-easy.livejournal.com]

Oh, that's fascinating. I know I unconsciously change register when talking to different people, partly by changing my accent: the more formal or polite, the more "cultured" my accent becomes - the more like RP, in fact.

[acelightning.livejournal.com]