Logomacy
Between logomachy and logomancy . . .

The X-Bar: …And So Don’t I

One recent item was the use of “and so don’t I” as a positive response to a positive statement (or as a tag). My student’s informant was a Scranton, PA, native, and another student (from Central NY) said it’s native to him, as well.

I certainly heard this growing up in New England, although as a transplant (several generations short of being a native by New England reckoning) I don’t think I ever uttered it myself. I never adopted the non-rhotic accent, either.

The most interesting linguistics book I picked up last year was Trask’s Historical Linguistics, but I’ve avoided blogging about it because I planned on giving it to two of my word-nerd friends for Christmas and I didn’t want to spoil the surprise. Now that they safely have their copies (and both of them have really been digging it–just yesterday one of them emailed me to ask about when the palatalization of c from /k/ to /t?/ before front vowels in Latin occurred[1. According to Palmer’s The Latin Language, “no unequivocal examples before the 6th c. AD.“), I’m free to blog about it. I hope to have a substantive post on how it neatly illustrates an important point about science and scholarship some time this evening, but now to work.

Over at Tenser, said the Tensor an interesting post about Jack Vance’s The Languages of Pao:

Unlike some other stories I’ve written about in which the linguistics is secondary, The Language of Pao is first and foremost about a particular idea from linguistic theory–it’s a novel-length exploration of a particularly strong version of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis (hereafter SWH), the idea that our patterns of thought are affected by the features of the language we speak.