Author Archives: brinton

Because of changes in pronunciation, many of Shakespeare’s puns (including his ribald ones) are lost for modern audiences: http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/03/loves-labours-found-saving-shakespeares-puns/471786/

Does speaking with a foreign accent have important consequences socially and economically? This article addresses this important question: http://qz.com/624335/the-reason-you-discriminate-against-foreign-accents-starts-with-what-they-do-to-your-brain/

Dr. Emma Moore speaks about l-vocalization and other features of Estuary English in British English: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ttWYFU6QK88

The Los Angeles County Library is celebrating the Oxford English Dictionary during the month of March. Explore this rich and exciting website: LFLA.ORG/OED

A lot of vocabulary has been eliminated from the current version of the SAT tests. An amusing article in The Economist incorporates the lost vocabulary into a story: http://www.theworldin.com/article/10654/elegy-lost-verbiage What do you think about the elimination of this vocabulary?

The modal auxiliaries carry a lot of weight, as became evident in the Paris conference on climate change: http://chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/2015/12/15/shall-should-and-the-fate-of-the-earth/

Attempts to reform French spelling by removing the circumflex or eliminating some hyphens (changes approved, by the way, by the august Académie Française) have met strenuous disapproval by traditionalists: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/06/world/europe/french-spelling-changes-26-years-in-the-making-cause-a-fracas.html?smprod=nytcore-ipad&smid=nytcore-ipad-share

Akira Okrent and illustrator Sean O’Neill have produced another great whiteboard video on the history of English spelling: http://mentalfloss.com/article/62995/why-english-spelling-so-weird

http://mentalfloss.com/article/69007/how-did-language-begin