John Knox’s Bible Discovered

This gallery contains 5 photos.

Originally posted on University of Glasgow Library Blog:
Title page of “Knox” Old Testament (Sp Coll Euing Dr-b.5) Staff at the University of Glasgow Archives and Special Collections have identified a previously unknown book once owned by Scottish religious reformer John Knox.…

Language change

See quite graphically how a particular construction (not very common by the way) is gaining the ground among users. The frequency is still to low, but the important thing is the slope of the tendency since the 80s. It is interesting that both verbs (to have and to be) are considered as expressing a state in some contexts (I’m tall) and therefore they don’t accept a progressive form (the -ing participe). However, some users of English as a second language (Asian, African) tend to applied the progressive to these verbs, as a form of expressing something that refers to the very present of the speaker. This tendency could be in expansion to other English speakers, even those that have English as a first language.

Reference:

Synchronic analysis of the progressive aspect in three varieties of Asian Englishes. Soluna Salles-Berna

 

Just beautiful!!

Enjoy this wonderful combination of sounds, like words, notes transmit messages.

 

Music too

Music and language are very much connected. Both share many common features, from sounds to syntactic rules, and many more. The influence of music on our cognitive capacity is still undervalued in most of the education systems of the “advanced” world.

Here an article to consider:
http://gu.com/p/3n3pk/sbl

Something more about language

Listen to the biologist Mark Pagel talking about how language transformed the humankind.

 

 

 

Hello world!

Language is something that we use everyday, not only to communicate things to other people, but also to think, to organise ideas, to plan the future, and so on. But we never, or at least almost never, pay attention to the concept of language as a whole. Is it a system? Is it a tool? Is it in our genes? How does it work? but more fascinating How does it change?

If we consider language as a system then it must be composed of units and rules that organise those units. Units can be morphemes and phonemes, the smallest sense-elements that can somehow combined to produce a meaningful message. These units can be combined according to different morphosyntactic, semantic and pragmatic rules. Something so simple as My dog is quite funny involves a great deal of knowledge, lexical and semantic (the actual meaning of the words), morphosyntactic (how words may be formed and combined to produce a logical sentence), pragmatical (why, where, when, to whom, with what intention I’m producing this message), and many more.

The most striking thing about language is the it is alive!!! It is as dynamic as an organism!!!   And in this sense it can be studied under the perspective of the life sciences.

More in a the next post!!