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I've been reading actual books, in paper format, the past few days. Right now I'm reading Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English, by John McWhorter. In the introduction, he talks about how, even though English is a germanic language, it has developed in weird ways that no other germanic language has. He completely hooked me with this analogy.
"English's Germanic relatives are like assorted varieties of deer -- antelopes, springboks, kudu, and so on -- antlered, fleet-footed, big-brown-eyed variations on a theme. English is some dolphin swooping around underwater, all but hairless, echolocating and holding its breath. Dolphins are mammals like deer: they give birth to live young and are warm-blooded. But clearly the dolphin has strayed from the basic mammalian game plan to an extent that no deer has."
Turn the page and come to this: "German, Dutch, Swedish, and the gang are, by and large, variations on what happened to Proto-Germanic as it morphed along over three thousand years. They are ordinary rolls of the dice. English, however, is kinky. It has a predilection for dressing up like Welsh on lonely nights."
I had a hard time putting the book down at a (slightly just past) decent hour last night. It promises to be entertaining as well as informative.
As an interesting side note, if you put quotation marks in your post, apparently livejournal automatically tags your post with 'quotes.' Who knew.
"English's Germanic relatives are like assorted varieties of deer -- antelopes, springboks, kudu, and so on -- antlered, fleet-footed, big-brown-eyed variations on a theme. English is some dolphin swooping around underwater, all but hairless, echolocating and holding its breath. Dolphins are mammals like deer: they give birth to live young and are warm-blooded. But clearly the dolphin has strayed from the basic mammalian game plan to an extent that no deer has."
Turn the page and come to this: "German, Dutch, Swedish, and the gang are, by and large, variations on what happened to Proto-Germanic as it morphed along over three thousand years. They are ordinary rolls of the dice. English, however, is kinky. It has a predilection for dressing up like Welsh on lonely nights."
I had a hard time putting the book down at a (slightly just past) decent hour last night. It promises to be entertaining as well as informative.
As an interesting side note, if you put quotation marks in your post, apparently livejournal automatically tags your post with 'quotes.' Who knew.
