Nerd alert! As many of you know, JRR Tolkien, author of 'The Hobbit' and 'Lord of the Rings,' was a historical linguist. I was just re-reading a bit of The Hobbit and noticed his linguistics coming out in his description of Bilbo's cold (caught riding those barrels down the river) at Laketown (near the end of the chapter 'A Warm Welcome'). He notes that for a time, Bilbo's public speeches were limited to "Thag you very buch." This happens when you're congested and have difficulty producing nasal consonants, which then revert to the homorganic non-nasal.
Or, as I tell my students, 'a cold in my nose' becomes 'a cold id by dose.'
-
OK, somebody has to say it. 17 years ago close to 3,000 people died largely because the US was unprepared for an attack of that kind, or for...
-
The internet news site Common Dreams carried an article recently about a group of students from Liberty University visiting the Smithsonia...
-
I may write more about this later, but for now just examine the differences. Later... (added on Oct 9, 2010): Essentially, in apes the l...
No comments:
Post a Comment
Comments and feedback are welcome, as long as they conform to normal standards of civility and decency. I will delete comments that do not meet these standards.