Linguistic Discussion Of European Languages of Obscure origin

I'm not sure I'd want to say there is any current vowel shift happening in English on par with the Great Vowel Shift. That took about two hundred years and involved a major reshuffling of vowels. Due to widespread literacy and a huge corpus of English texts, modern English speakers have a much stronger concept of our language as being something that exists by itself independent of what people actually speak. This acts as a check against the natural tendency of our language to undergo changes. The 15th and 16th centuries were much less literate. Language has been around a lot longer than writing so the effect of writing on language change isn't something I'd call natural but it's there.

For the past several decades, we have had standarising (or de-standarising as the case may be) accents beamed directly into our homes by the media. This *is* going to change our accents.

Be careful here... the research I've seen about the effect of TV, radio and film on dialects finds it has almost zero impact. Counterintuitive yes but language quite often is.

What books are you reading, Kate?

(the krza)I thought it'd be fun, Kate, but I don't think linguists these days are so hot on historical linguistics (at least my school's department wasn't), which to me is the most fascinating.

I think it depends on where you're studying. At the University of Texas there wasn't a huge emphasis on syntax and semantics. I loved historical, and a big thing in linguistics today is documenting the world's languages before a lot of them go away, and to do that properly you need a pretty good handle on phonology, phonetics, and how languages change.

What the fuck?

The Basque people fished in north Atlantic waters for many, many centuries and may have been the first group to systematically fish for cod and herring off the Newfoundland coast, but they didn't share this information with other groups because of its commercial value. Iceland was probably a good place to do ship repairs and to resupply while out on fishing expeditions.

The phrases all sound like trading phrases, which makes sense.

In many parts of rural northern England, a system of counting sheep based on ancient Brittonic persisted until relatively recently. In the Dales, 1-10 was yain, tain, edderoa, peddero, pitts, tayter, leter, overro, coverro, dix (or variants thereof). https://t.co/F0ZjxB9pXG

— History of Leeds | James Rhodes (@rh0desy) July 9, 2019

See also: Jake Thackray - Molly Metcalfe

https://youtu.be/TiXINuf5nbI

Yeah, that's pretty well known - and not confined to Yorkshire by any means.

My immediate thought was Jake Thackray, that's how I knew about this. I really like the song, too.

... or the North... or England...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yan_Tan_Tethera

a Thackray wormhole on you tube is a very good hour spent.

Jake was The Man.

Beautiful song. I never knew there were so many variants of Yan Tan Tether Mether (the version I knew, which according to the wiki, turns out to be the Swaledale variant!).