"Buenos dias", "buenas noches" -- this was the first words in a foreign language I heard in my life, as a three-year old boy growing up in developing post-war Western Germany, where the first gastarbeiters had arrived from Spain. Fascinated by the strange sounds, I tried to get to know some more languages, the only opportunity being TV courses of English and French -- there was no foreign language education for pre-teen school children in Germany yet in those days. Read more
To find some answers Tim Machan explores the language's present and past, and looks ahead to its futures among the one and a half billion people who speak it. His search is fascinating and important, for definitions of English have influenced education and law in many countries and helped shape the identities of those who live in them.
This volume provides a new perspective on the evolution of the special language of medicine, based on the electronic corpus of Early Modern English Medical Texts, containing over two million words of medical writing from 1500 to 1700.
For many different reasons, speakers borrow words from other languages to
fill gaps in their own lexical inventory. The past ten years have been
characterized by a great interest among phonologists in the issue of how
the nativization of loanwords occurs. The general feeling is that loanword
nativization provides a direct window for observing how acoustic cues are
categorized in terms of the distinctive features relevant to the L1
phonological system as well as for studying L1 phonological processes in
action and thus to the true synchronic phonology of L1. The collection of
essays presented in this volume provides an overview of the complex issues
phonologists face when investigating this phenomenon and, more generally,
the ways in which unfamiliar sounds and sound sequences are adapted to
converge with the native language’s sound pattern. This book is of interest
to theoretical phonologists as well as to linguists interested in language