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I love humour geared towards language fans. We definitely need more of it! Linguagons are really cute. I love the hijinks they get up to. I always imagined languages as little people running around and getting into trouble. They guy who draws these has made quite a few already. Check them out on his Facebook page.
Kevin Spacey speaks with a southern US accent. One important aspect of this accent is rhoticity, which is whether Rs are sounded or not. In non rhotic accents, car sounds like kah and customer sounds like kustomah. But there are still places in the south where they do speak their Rs. And there are places in the north, such as New York and Boston where they don’t pronounce Rs.
Why are geese in a gaggle? And are crows really murderous? Collective nouns are one of the most charming oddities of the English language, often with seemingly bizarre connections to the groups they identify. But have you ever stopped to wonder where these peculiar terms actually came from?
Collective nouns are weird! Someone just decided that a group of something would be given a specific name, and that’s that. Of course, language is defined by usage, not really by people making proclamations, so not all of these have survived the test of time.
British people call it a tap, Americans call it a faucet. British people call it a pavement, Americans call it a sidewalk. There are many other examples. Sometimes, even if they use the same word, they spell it differently, like check instead of cheque.
Boston is famous for having what is called a non rhotic accent, which means that Rs are not pronounced in words such as car and enter. Another nearby area where people speak with a non rhotic accent is New York. Someone went around Boston and held up “ah” where “ar” or “er” appeared and much hilarity ensued 😀
Being surrounded by your native language, you can sometimes think that the way it does things is the best way to do things. But not only that, you don’t realise some of the peculiarities of your own language because you are so used to them. So some features of English are weird, but there are also some omissions which could have been a really useful addition to the language.
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