And So It Begins…

A language journal! What an idea. Well, it’s not a new one. I was actually going to make this “blog” part of my webpage, but then decided that putting it here would be a much better idea, because not only could I bore the world with it, but I could also make it searchable and use it for my classes.

What am I going to do with a blog about language? I’ll tell you. Whatever occurs to me. Here’s what occurs first.

My son has a blog somewhere on myspace. I’ll leave it to you to guess which one of the million-odd profiles is his. In it, he writes, “Look out, I think I’m gonna blog!”

This is a perfect example of words that sound like they should mean one thing and, in fact, mean another. Words sometimes sound a certain way to us. For example, this is an example of an onomotopoeic word — now don’t let the big word throw you. Onomotopoeia is just a greek-derived word for the idea of a word that sounds like the sound it represents, like BAM, SPLASH, BOOM, WHOOSH, and BANG. Blog, if it truly meant regurgitating one’s lunch, would be onomatopoeic because it sounds vaguely like barfing (which is itself slightly onomatopoeic).

But blog is not onomatopoeic because it doesn’t have that meaning. It comes from the last four letters of “web log,” and this has another interpretation altogether. Which brings us to my point today. Many people try to convince us, both in the scholarly world and in the day-to-day, that we give names to something based on their characteristics. After all, don’t we have the whole idea of onomatopoeic as an example?

Well, sure, that one time it works out that way. But we don’t name that thing you drove to work in “car” because it has some inherent element of “car-ness” to it. It just is.

Today’s lesson then? Words are random. They developed from random sounds and random names given to objects.

Except when they didn’t. Next we’ll talk about LANGUAGE UNIVERSALS. Sounds cool, right? Trust me, they are.