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I keep clawing at the bars of the cage I built for myself. But first a digression. Walter W. Skeat wrote numerous notes on English etymology, some of which he eventually put together and published in book form. Much to my regret, not too many kl-words attracted his attention. But I was amused to discover that the verb clop means not only the sound made by shoes or hoofs but also “to cling, adhere to.”

The post Sartor resartus, or some thoughts on the origin of the word “cloth” and the history of clothes appeared first on OUPblog.

In 2004, Shakespeare's Globe in London began a daring experiment. They decided to mount a production of a Shakespeare play in 'original pronunciation' (OP) - a reconstruction of the accents that would have been used on the London stage around the year 1600, part of a period known as Early Modern English. They chose Romeo and Juliet as their first production, but - uncertain about how the unfamiliar accent would be received by the audience - performances in OP took place for only one weekend.

The post Original pronunciation: the state of the art in 2016 appeared first on OUPblog.

Our mother tongues seem to us like the natural way to communicate, but it is perhaps a universal human experience to be confronted and confused by a very different language. We can't help but wonder how and why other languages sound so strange to us, and can be so difficult to learn as adults. This is an even bigger surprise when we consider that all languages come from a common source.

The post New frontiers in evolutionary linguistics appeared first on OUPblog.

From what was said last week it follows that pagans did not need a highly charged word for “god,” let alone “God.” They recognized a hierarchy of supernatural beings and the division of labor in that “heavenly” crowd. Some disturbed our dreams, some bereaved us of reason, and still others inflicted diseases and in general worked evil and mischief.

The post Playing God, Chapter 2 appeared first on OUPblog.

What This Story Needs Is a Pig in a Wig

Written & Illustrated by Emma J. Virján
HarperCollins Children’s Books
05/12/2015
978-0-06-232724-6
32 pages      Age 1—3

“What this story needs is a pig in a wig on a boat with some friends having fun in the sun–So come on board! Join Pig on an exciting boat ride where she discovers that life is a lot more fun with more friends.”[back cover]

Review
NOTE: This review is a tad unusual. It mixes my traditional review format with interview questions asked of the pig in a wig.
What This Story Needs Is a Pig in a Wig will instantly remind you of dear ole Dr. Seuss. The author employs fast-paced writing combined with simple, but effective, rhymes young children will love to hear and repeat. The narrator sends Pig, wearing a stunning pink wig—what is with that wig—sailing the moat in a boat. Why would a pig wear a wig? Well, I asked Pig and she said (rather emphatically),

“Wigs are fun and I’m a pig that loves to have fun!”

If you venture to Pig’s website—and I do suggest you do—you will find Pig is not simply a pink wig gal.

Back to the story: One by one, the narrator adds a menagerie of interesting, kid-friendly animals to the boat in the moat. A frog, a dog, and a goat on a log join Pig in her wig. But there are more. A rat, wearing a cool hat, sits on a trunk—belonging to an elephant—with a skunk, who is with a mouse in a house. I was beginning to wonder what other animal could possibly be added to the small boat in the moat, when Pig yelled at the narrator. I asked Pig why she stopped all of the narrator’s fun. I thought it was very exciting having rhyming animals set sail. Pig had a different point of view:

“It was getting crowded, too crowded — a frog, a dog, a goat on a log,
a rat in a hat on a trunk, with a skunk, in a house, with a mouse AND
a panda in a blouse? It was more than my little, pink boat could handle.”

Pig is right, the small boat is crowded. So, beginning with the Panda—she performs a cannonball—the narrator reverses course, sending the animals out of the boat and into the moat. Once they leave, the narrator changes the story:

“What this story needs
is a pig in a wig,
on a boat,
in a moat,
having fun,
in the sun,
on her own . . .”

Now, all alone in her boat, Pig is sailing the moat. I think Pig is lonely and realizes she enjoyed her new animal friends. So the pig in a pink wig called for her new friends to return. Taking charge of the narration, Pig decides what the story needs . . .

Pig in a Wig, is a fun story young children will love to hear. The rhyming is simple, yet smart and witty. Kids will be reciting Pig in a Wig and, hopefully, figuring out their own rhyming group of friends. The illustrations are clean and engaging. Many pages hold surprises, such as a pig snout rug, Frog doing a hand-stand, and Dog and Goat holding hands. Dr. Seuss would love Pig in a Wig, which happens to be the same size as an iconic Dr. Seuss book. The simple story will charm young children during story time at school or a library. What This Story Needs Is a Pig in a Wig is so much fun to read I hope to see Pig in new stories.

I asked one last question, wondering, with all those charismatic animals on board, who is Pig’s favorite passenger. She said,

“Well . . . none were my favorite at the beginning, as they were all getting
in my way of having fun in the sun! At the end though, ALL of them were
my favorite, with Goat on his log being my extra, extra favorite.”

WHAT THIS STORY NEEDS IS A PIG IN A WIG. Text and illustrations copyright (C) 2015 by . Reproduced by permission of the publisher, HarperCollins Children’s Books, New York, NY.

Purchase What This Story Needs is a Pig in a Wig at Amazon—Book Depository—Apple iBooks—HarperCollins Children’s Books.

Learn more about What This Story Needs is a Pig in a Wig HERE.
There are Coloring Sheet HERE, 
An Activity Guide HERE, 
And a Teacher’s Guide HERE. 

Pig in a Wig’s website:  http://emmavirjan.com/pig-in-a-wig/
Meet the author/illustrator, Emma J. Virján, at her website: http://www.emmavirjan.com
Find more engaging picture books a the HarperCollins Children’s Books website:  http://www.harpercollins.com/

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Copyright © 2015 by Sue Morris/Kid Lit Reviews. All Rights Reserved

Review section word count = 453     

Full Disclosure: What This Story Needs is a Pig in a Wig, by Emma J. Virján, and received from HarperCollins Children’s Books, is in exchange NOT for a positive review, but for an HONEST review. The opinions expressed are my own and no one else’s. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”

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By Alexander Humez

Phone (from Greek φωνή ’sound [of the voice], voice, sound, tone’) shows up in English as a prefix (in, e.g., phonograph), a root form (in, e.g., phonetics), a free-standing word (phone), and as a suffix (in, e.g., gramophone) of which A. F. Brown lists well over a hundred in his monumental Normal and Reverse English Word List, though considering that -phone in the sense of “-speaker of” can be tacked onto the end of any combining root that designates a language (as in Francophone), the list of possibilities is considerably greater.

Urdang, Humez, and Zettler in their Suffixes and Other Word-Final Elements of English distinguish among four senses in which the suffix -phone is used (six for -phonic), an overloading that has occasionally resulted in polysemy, where a word has come to have multiple meanings, whether through semantic evolution (e.g., telephone, which has come some distance from its original meaning, now no longer in use), independent invention (e.g., hypophone, which was coined by two different people to mean two very different things), or different etymological histories (e.g., diaphone, in which the -phone of one has a different immediate derivation from that of the other). Follow THIS LINK for a short list of polysemic words ending in -phone, each of which is accompanied by three examples or definitions, two of which are correct and the other of which is bogus. See if you can identify the phonies.

Alexander Humez is the co-author of Short Cuts: A Guide to Oaths, Ring Tones, Ransom Notes, Famous Last Words, and Other Forms of Minimalist Communication with his brother, Nicholas Humez, and Rob Flynn. The Humez brothers also collaborated on Latin for People, Alpha to Omega, A B C Et Cetera, Zero to Lazy Eight (with Joseph Maguire), and On the Dot. To see Humez’s previous posts, click here.

By Anatoly Liberman

It is rather odd that laughter and daughter do not rhyme, while cough and doff do. No one is surprised (after all, have and behave do not rhyme either, while live can rhyme with five or with give; anything is possible in written English), but it is still odd. As always, our spelling reflects the pronunciation of long ago. Once upon a time (that is, in Middle English), to begin at the beginning, words like ought had the diphthong we today hear in note, whereas aught had the diphthong of Audi. The digraph gh had the value of ch in Scots loch. Then the diphthongs merged; hence the homophones ought (ought to) and aught (for aught I know) in present day English. (Vowels constantly merge or split into two, and the ever-active kaleidoscope puzzles both historical linguists and the uninitiated, but there is some logic in this merry-go-round, even though it is often hard to detect.) The most enigmatic change occurred to the consonant designated by gh. It appears to have been torn between the opposing forces: while one made the consonant weak, the other strengthened it. For example, the word enough, whose graphic shape is an accurate transcript of its medieval pronunciation, has come down to us in two forms: one (archaic) is enow (rhyming with now), the other (which everybody uses) is pronounced as enuf. Likewise, Modern English has preserved slough “the skin of a snake,” that is, sluf, and slough “bog,” as in The Slough of Despond, rhyming with enow, cited above. The family name Slough is a homophone of slough “bog.”

Some time in the 15th century, the tug of war between the weak and the strong variant (au ~ ou versus f) began, as evidenced, among others, by the spellings broft “brought” and abought “about” (abought must have been born of utter confusion: so many words with au and ou had gh in the middle that inserting gh where it had never been pronounced looked like a reasonable procedure). But a particularly interesting case is the history of the word daughter. In 17th century private letters, daughter appears in the forms dater, dafter and daufter; daufter, which also turned up in the 18th century, probably reflects a mixed pronunciation, a hybrid of competing variants. The phonetic descriptions going back to that time contain statement like: “Some say f [in daughter]” and “Most of us pronounce dafter.” The same authorities testify that bought, naught, and taught often had f before t. The merger of au and ou was in progress in the 17th and even 18th century: ought could be pronounced like aft in Modern British English or without f but with the same vowel. Sought tended to be a homophone of soft. Henry Fielding (1701-1754) and Smollett (1721-1771), the latter the favorite author of the young Dickens, wrote soft and thoft for sought and thought when they reproduced the speech of people from the countryside. The poets of the Elizabethan epoch rhymed thought and aloft, caught and shaft, manslaughter and after. Shakespeare also rhymed daughter with after (and with slaughter). As late as 1764, the great lexicographer Samuel Johnson attested to the variant druft for drought. The form dafter stayed in many British dialects, for example, in the north and in East Anglia.

The word draught had a similar history. Its etymology is transparent. “Draught” is an act of drawing or that which is drawn. The meaning “design, plan” was preceded by “picture, sketch” (from draw “to describe a line”). The game known as checkers in American English is called draughts in Britain (draught meant “move,” so that draughts can be glossed as “moves,” whereas checkers refers to the “checkered” shape of the board.). The inner form of draught is more obvious than its origin. This noun was borrowed from Scandinavian (probably in the 12th century) and later reinforced by its Middle Dutch synonym dragt. Draft existed at one time as another pronunciation of draught; the form surfaced only in the 18th century. In Standard Modern English, draught is never homophonous with drought, but different spellings have been used to differentiate meanings. While American English banished draught and replaced it by draft in all senses, British English distinguishes between them. Thus, we find a beast of draught (a phrase of the same structure as a beast of burden and a beast of prey) and a draught horse; a draught of water (as well as a draught of pain), and susceptible to draughts. But in both countries, if people are anti-draft, their resentment has nothing to do with a current of air. A banking term is also draft everywhere. When a verb was formed from this noun, naturally, the later form became its basis; hence to draft. A much longer and more precise essay could be written on the subject, but for starters a rough draft will probably suffice.

Corollary: some people are daft, and others are still dafter.