[Lexicog] social change in lexicon

[Fritz Goerling]

Bill,

Do you know what the definition of a linguist is?:

Someone who dies of hunger in a delicatessen shop.  :-)

Fritz

  When I first went to Germany I had the odd experience of being
  able to understand most of the signs and so forth but discovering
  that I lacked very basic conservational vocabulary. On the plane
  on the way over I had read a 200 page computer-science document
  in preparation for the meeting we were going to, but as we were
  jostled in the crowded airport I had to ask my companion, whose
  German is excellant, how to say "Excuse me", an expression which
  seems not to be frequent in the linguistic or mathematical
  literature, or even in German poetry. And in spite of my ability
  to say such things as "sound law", "juxtaposition", and "Hilbert space",
  I knew the names of very few of the items on the breakfast table.


  Bill

  --
  Bill Poser, Linguistics, University of Pennsylvania
  http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~wjposer/ billposer at alum.mit.edu




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