One of my favorite things about linguistics

Well, I may not have figured out what I'm going to do with a degree in linguistics, but at least I still know why I like it! In my thesis (on the phonology of fantasy neologisms) (by the way, how cool that it's online! hee hee hee!), I discussed the role of language in literature. Great literature uses language to its fullest advantage. To steal an example from myself: in Huck Finn, Twain uses Huck's uneducated hick dialect to create a verisimilitude (that's a word I had to use a lot in my thesis) that draws the reader into the story. In "Soldier's Home", Hemingway uses his spare language and indirect descriptions (e.g., the bacon fat hardening on Krebs' plate) to pass the characters' feelings on to the reader. Dr. Seuss used rhymes and fun made-up words to make his stories engaging (and really, don't we all believe, deep down, that there are such creatures as Whos and somewhere there's an elephant named Horton?). And sometimes, literature passes its special language on to the lexicon.

There's not really a branch of linguistics that studies this, but I love examining the interplay of language and literature. I could spend all day at it. Oh wait--I have spent all day on it occasionally.

Anyone out there have any other examples of literary language? (Oooh, that could be a book title. Or a rock band. Okay, not a rock band. But I think I'm obligated to write a book called "literary language" now.)

Babel

This is another neat website I've found in looking for linguistics-related stuff. I would like to point out that while Ruhlen does seem to have his head on straight (and know his stuff!), he overlooked the fact that Old English is the "parent" language of Modern English much the way that Latin is the parent language of Spanish, French, and Italian.

Oh, I know it's not entirely the same. Latin is the (dead) forebear of a whole family of languages (the Romance Languages), while Old English is the (dead) ancestor of just one Germanic Language, but I think it's a shame that he doesn't point out the fact that the Germanic (and Slavic, etc.) Languages do have ancestor languages, and we do have written documentation of some them, it's just that they don't all stem from the one parent language like the Romances do. I think that, since Old English was contemporary to at least some of the time period when Latin was spoken, he should point that out. I agree, though, that there must be some proto-Germanic and proto-Slavic tongues that gave rise to the various Germanic & Slavic languages we speak today. And more to the point, that there is likely some proto-everything language from which all of our tongues come.

Maybe it's proto-Babel.