"funny" language; was Re: No more "Christian name, sir?" in Kent, UK

[Judy Prince]

Good for Jerry Sadock, Barbara----as if *only* writings in English, French
or German (as it was insisted/imposed when I attended uni) were worthily
relevant to one's research!

We USAmericans, not *needing* others' natural resources for so many years
and being geographically sequestered from most nations, had locked ourselves
up here, only recently feeling the need to know other languages, histories
and cultures.  A wonderful irony is that those precious knowings have been
brought  to us continuously by our immigrants, a fact for which we are
reasonably famous in the world.

Jerry's marvelous assertion that English counts as a "funny
language" relates to the equally witty language-political "poster poem"
by Tom Leonard, a Glaswegian Scot, in his recent poetry book _Outside The
Narrative_:

AN

OXFORD

DICTIONARY

OF

AN

ENGLISH
LANGUAGE

-------------

Judy


On 1 April 2010 06:40, Barbara Need <bhneed at gmail.com> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
-----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Barbara Need <bhneed at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      "funny" language; was Re: No more "Christian name, sir?" in
Kent,
>              UK
>
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> The UofC linguistics department has what was known as a "funny
> language requirement" aka, the non-Indo-European requirement. Except
> that I know of one fellow who managed to get Bengali to count, and
> Coptic or Middle Egyptian (I forget which), did not.
>
> This lead Jerry Sadock to observe during a paper that for this purpose
> (in the context of his paper) and this purpose only, English counts as
> a a funny language.
>
> Barbara
>
> On 29 Mar 2010, at 10:58 PM, Judy Prince wrote:
>
>> BTW, why was Chinese a "funny language requirement"?


--
"Southern hospitality has ten years left."  --Jeff Hecker, Norfolk, VA

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