h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

http://www.bbc.co.uk/h2g2/guide/A683705

Death to all Linguists!
-MyRedDice

Hi there 'my pinko dice'

there's another one for you: names!

Now, you will have to excuse me if I seem to hide my latent incompetence behind a mask of obscure long words and graMmatical pedantry, but then, how else could i skulk around in elevated circles without the reflexive vanity of such demonic trickery? Perhaps you will not even deign to speak unto ME, for I indubitably arouse negativity and thOU (Tsk! Tsk! You really must work on your accusatives and nominatives! Stay behind after school!) shalt require a dictionary to dEvine MY true meaning.

As a far from duplicit'_'ous linguist with indupitably THE best sense of humour this side of magdelen college, oxford, I quite assure you that I don't find being accused of professional logorrhoea, prolix abstract circumlocution and using a profusion of abstruse technical terminology as a means of persuasion, pacification or obfuscation very funny at all.

Fortunately, since I regard you to be of inferiour intelligence to me because you don't appreciate the need for order in a conventional if arbitrarily conceived code of communication, I don't even feel insulted by your foolish raving! I simply find this article very silly and therefore unsuitable to perdure in a single semantic paradigm with my own periphrastical hyperbolition.

I can quite assure I didn't laugh at this nonsense one little bit. Tsk!

Dégouté
Strasbourg


Disclaimer - the only bit of the above posting which is true is that I *could* be described as a linguist.

for that little thought-for-the-day, mrd

Oh, yeah, and what about the big G getting capitalised pronouns in the good book?

Good one! I had hoped for some digressions about a certain quasi-famous linguist who has vocal opinions about Capitalism, Noam Chomsky, as well as a little bit about the Klingon language (tLingan Hol) when you started talking about artificial languages. From a capitalist viewpoint, Klingon language has been incredibly successful, not in terms of the numbers of people trying to speak it, but by the fact that it is probably the single largest money-making language created by one person. Paramount Pictures actually paid this dude for his grammatical system and vocabulary set of Klingon words. Others have created words or added to that one dude's system, but surely he has made more money from it than even his closest competitor in the field of fictional/artificial languages, JRR Tolkien. (That is, Tolkien and his redactor son have generated vast sums of money, but the languages Tolkien created did not make much money by themselves. They were simply atmosphere to his stories.)

...Off to recommend this for AGG/GAG...

Hey, stop dissing linguists!

But it's so easy!

A753833 on Gender-free pronouns is my current entry on language reform - I'm sure it could do with a linguist's eagle eyes. And that one's actually serious!

I know nothing about Naom Chomsky. A weakness I shall have to remedy, I feel.

Give me three years!

Your perception on linguists seems a bit skewed though. Linguists take a 'descriptive' approach to language nowadays, not a 'prescriptive' one, so when it comes to gender-free pronouns, the use of artificial languages and capitilisation of letters, linguists will just say 'some people do this and think this, and other people do this and think this'. They will NEVER tell you what's best or give value-judgements.

Oh don't do that - you'll wreck my entire argument if you try and convince me that linguists aren't actually the sons of Satan...

I won't tell you what degree I'm starting in September then...

To be honest, I think a lot of the problem is people who studied linguistics several years ago, so they still have the old-style approach. These things tend to persist long past the point where active researchers have abandoned them. And of course teachers and other ne'er-do-wells stick to the prescriptive approach because that's supposedly their job.

I MISS Lucinda...

This is great, though I think some of his later stuff was better.

Ben

Well, this was from her less popular "raging lunatic" phase - you can see the influence of DesCartes on her use of the letter 't'...

miss ya too, babe