Friday, October 03, 2008

Friday randomness

A few things, first two snippets overheard on campus:
  • One undergrad to another, outside the building where languages are taught/housed on campus: OK, you write up all the verb classes forms and I'll do the noun class forms. Utterly mundane if you work with language, but walking by these two kids having this earnest conversation about the morphology of who-knows-what language, well it was cool.
  • Speaking of cool: Kind of lost-looking undergrad doing cell yell on the sidewalk: No, it's not like fall fall, it's more cold fall.
On a blogal note, once I digested the excellent content of Rosina Lippi-Green's recent comments about Palin's accent (here), I'm left thinking about her problems with Blogger eating comments. I really seldom comment on blogs other than this one, but have had the same problem. I'll keep an eye on this and if it gets to be too much, maybe I'll move the blog, but I'd rather not have to do that.

A couple of the local folks have been talking to the press about Palin's accent / dialect / speech, and I hope we'll patch together a big-picture post on that in the course of the day.

3 comments:

gilbertlundstrom said...

There's a good clip from this morning on NPR with Labov analyzing Palin's accent:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=95306504

Mr. Verb said...

Yeah, thanks, that was interesting. Over on ADS-L, Arnold Zwicky described Labov as "talking (not entirely accurately)" about her accent.

We've got a big post in the works here based on discussions I've been having with the Wisconsin Englishes Project folks. Stay tuned!

Anonymous said...

The Ed Schultz Show is getting calls from women calling Palin's performance 'insulting'.

A caller right now -- a Norwegian-American farm woman from Minnesota, if I heard right -- is downright outraged about Palin's accent.