A final language (and Christmas!) related posting for 2006:

The Telegraph newspaper is reporting on an acoustic analysis of the Queen’s Christmas broadcasts to the Commonwealth since 1952 which shows that over the years, the Queen’s English has become less posh. The article begins: “As the common tongue continues its inexorable slide towards a new dark age of glottal stops and “innits”, news comes that even the Queen is drifting slowly down river towards Estuary English.”

Between 1952 and 2006, the royal vowel sounds have slowly shifted from the upper class Upper Received Pronunciation towards the more democratic Standard Received Pronunciation.

“In 1952 she would have been heard referring to ‘thet men in the bleck het’. Now it would be ‘that man in the black hat’. Similarly, she would have spoken of the citay and dutay, rather than citee and dutee, and hame rather than home In the 1950s she would have been lorst, but by the 1970s lost.”

The original research paper by Jonathan Harrington, published in the Journal of Phonetics Vol. 34, Issue 4, Oct. 2006, is called An acoustic analysis of ‘happy-tensing’ in the Queen’s Christmas broadcasts.

UBC Library subscribes to the Journal of Phonetics online – read the full article here. You can also listen for yourself by viewing the Queen’s Christmas broadcasts in these short video clips from 1958, 1975, and 2006.

According to an online survey by dictionary publisher Merriam-Webster, the word that best summed up 2006 is: truthiness – “truth that comes from the gut, not books.

Truthiness made its debut on Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report in October 2005.

This is not the first award for the word – it was also awarded the 16th annual Word of the Year (2005) by the American Dialect Society, who defined it as “the quality of preferring concepts or facts one wishes to be true, rather than concepts or facts known to be true.”

UBC Library is currently trialling the database Lexicons of Early Modern English.

Lexicons of Early Modern English (LEME) is a historical database of monolingual, bilingual, and polyglot dictionaries, lexical encyclopedias, hard-word glossaries, spelling lists, and lexically-valuable treatises surviving in print or manuscript from the Tudor, Stuart, Caroline, Commonwealth, and Restoration periods (1480-1702).

A sample of titles from the over 150 lexicons:

The trial ends January 10, 2007.

Need a place to study for exams, with research materials and computers at hand?

Koerner Library is open for extended hours during the exam period. The library will be open every night until 1 am from December 4-18.

Good luck on your exams!