Thursday, November 25, 2010
Pirate linguists: Chickens on Thanksgiving
It's an oldie-but-a-goodie I guess, but one of our contributors passed this along from a student yesterday ...
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Deal with it.
Revel in it.
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What they're saying abt Mr. V
- "omg, how did I only just learn about Mr. Verb?" — Lauren, Dec. 9, '08
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5 comments:
Could you explain the joke?
Probably not, and that may be part of what makes it funny. You get different versions of what pirates yell out, of course, including these.
An easy read from a linguist's perspective is that it's a pattern of variation to be explained, like why some people say 'pop' and others say 'soda', or why you sometimes say you're 'goin' to do' something and sometimes 'gonna do' something.
A non-linguist might have done this cartoon about some notion of correctness or something.
Does that help?
*yar ==> yar in the conservative Pirate dialect A, while leniting to har in PirateB and finally weakening to ar in PirateC. Seems the most logical progression; could be geographical distribution contributed to varying degrees of conservatism.
It also made me think of the bow-wow theory.
Oh, good point! Thanks.
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