linguistics

Okay?

 in Blog  tagged linguistics / me.me.me / random by

Interesting fact of the day, which you might know but I did not: Okay or O.K., according to the Online Etymology Dictionary, dates from 1839, "only survivor of a slang fad in Boston and New York c.1838-9 for abbreviations of common phrases with deliberate, jocular misspellings (cf. K.G. for ‘no go,’ as if spelled ‘know go’); in this case, ‘oll korrect.’" It’s too bad I’m not a student of linguistics, because I can see a thesis right here on the evolution of this kind of slangy misspelling, from O.K. up through lolcats and lolspeak. I’ve been diverging from my review-only […]

Imperfect Tense vs. Passive Voice

 in Blog  tagged linguistics / thoughts by

One of the things that irritates me most about the English language is the fact that the imperfect tense is nearly identical to the passive voice. As I first learned in my French classes, there are two main forms of the immediate past tense: the complete past and the continuous past. In French, those are the imparfait, the continuous or ongoing past (je travaillais quand il m’interrompt), and the passé composé, the repetitive or complete past (j’ai travaillé). In English, the imparfait is the imperfect (I was working when he interrupted me) and the passé composé is the simple past […]