Geek time...
I suppose its only fitting in light of recent geeky topic discussions in the LJ... Last night I snuggled up to watch a special program on PBS (Public Broadcasting, for the foreigners)--a program which i had pencilled into my schedule roughly a week ago, thanks to my geekyness...*sigh*
rebness may remember me mentioning a particular favorite text of mine titled The Story of English, which was based on the PBS educational series, in which the development of the English language is traced in all its incarnations through various cultures throughout the world. Great stuff involving Pidgins, creoles, slangs, patois, etc.
Well the same producers of that series created another series called Do You Speak American? A Linguistic Tour of the US. Oh boy, I was in heaven for about 3 hours. It traced dialects and speech patterns throughout the various major regions of the US, and also discussed cultural trends and popular trends, etc. The way some dialects are dying out with the integration of persons from other areas into others. Also a dying out of alot of oral traditions and such.
One interesting point brought up was the idea of the Descriptive Linguist vs the Prescriptive Linguist. So the idea is, that the Descriptive Linguist goes and examines and describes language as it is created, and views it as constantly being created and recreated by the world around it. While the prescriptive linguist believes that language should function on pre-set rules and ideas and thus preserve integrity of the lexicon.
thoughts? becky? mwahahaha