Supergrunch

Hmm, well I think port is amazing.

I had to get up at the ungodly time of 8am (quiet you, people with jobs ) to let the plumber in, and am still waiting for him to finish so I can have a shower and feel moderately human. I'm whiling away the time by watching episodes of Hellsing (can't decide whether I prefer the subs or the dubs, which is rare praise indeed for the latter) and reading food blogs, but should really be reading and thinking about wh-the-hell phrases. Ah well, that'll have to wait until I'm actually awake. The perils of returning home for Christmas!

I have a friend who left it until the night before the deadline to both read Middlemarch and write an essay on it. And I think he managed it, too, though God knows how...

Happy birthday! There's something really awesome about owls. Chouette, even... [/bad joke]

To be honest Oxigen, can you think of any human activity that isn't ultimately in some way masturbatory? You just end up with the selfless good deed debate.

Erm, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax and Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C.S. Lewis. And my parents said they'd give me some money towards a short holiday with my girlfriend, which is nice (didn't go anywhere in Summer).

Happy birthday!

Hmm, I'd say NHK is somewhat too serious to go in the funny category. But it's amazing, one of my favourite shows ever. More funnies: Azumanga Daioh, Yakitate!! Japan, School Rumble. More thoughtful (well perhaps): Higurashi no naku koro ni, Elfen Lied. More Shounen (ish): Mai-HiME. Some Shoujo: Honey and Clover, Maria-sama ga Miteru.

Because people who make up prescriptive rules are often silly - see my post on Molly's profile. Here, however, is a place of sexuality and not of grammar.

(Contrary to popular belief, linguists study how people use language, not tell them how to use it. The first of these is scientific, the second is pointless, and this view isn't at all controversial in linguistics. And you have to be very inflexible and prescriptive indeed to insist that nobody should start sentences with conjunctions - see this guy for instance. )

David Crystal's Langauge and the Internet (CUP, 2001) might make a good starting point, and his txting: the gr8 deb8 (OUP, 2008) probably has some relevance. Both of these are very accessible and are likely to lead you on to other references if you need them. Although of course that's not quite what you were asking for - other people will probably have ideas about IM examples though. Oh, and I merged this with the degree help thread, as it's probably best to keep academic help in one place, even if it's not for a degree (unless of course it is).

And he also came up with the universal Turing machine and the halting problem. The other day one of my lecturers mentioned modal operators and was like "but these never really helped anybody," and I felt like pointing out that they were fairly fundamental to the development of the computer... I posted the petition for that a while back in this thread, but I'm not sure if anyone responded.

Stuwii, it's a general rule that when you have a medical problem, doctors will give far better advice than randomers on forums, especially when you're describing the symptoms so vaguely. So yes, go to a doctor to put your mind at rest.

I respond! A more accurate version of "i before e" that I've heard is "i before e, except after c, when pronounced [iː]." This works a little better (and excludes weird, which OED claims is pronounced [wɪəd], which is perhaps a little off, but it's definitely not [iː]) but creates more exceptions like friend, which obeys i before e, but is pronounced [ɛ] rather than [iː]. Ultimately though, anything you come up with is probably just going to be a fallible metric, as English spelling is idiosyncratic, with the spelling of words sometimes reflecting arbitrary facts about their etymologies and/or previous pronuciations rather than any kind of phonemic representation. For instance, in the case of weird: Though a nominal form of weird has been around since Old English, e.g. "Hie wyrd forsweop on Grendles gryre" from Beowulf, where the meaning is something a bit like fate, the adjectival form is much more recent, and originally had a similar meaning to the old nominal form. This seems to have first emerged in Middle English, as in "A werde-sister, I wait neuir how" (1400ish), but it seems that it's Shakespeare that really got the usage going, and he (or perhaps the typesetters) spells it as weyard and weyward (some analogy with wayward was obviously going on). I guess the OE form was really just pronounced as one syllable with a dipthong, and with a monopthong for the form werde, but the meter of Shakespeare often suggests the word was bisyllabic - for example, try picking out the four iambs in "The weyward Sisters, hand in hand." The y was later changed to an i with an umlaut, indicating the bisyllabic nature, leading to weïrd, but the diacritic was dropped at some point, and the word often isn't bisyallabic these days. At some point vowel shifting led to the first vowel being pronounced higher in the mouth, more like or [ɪ] than the original [ɛ], giving us today's pronunciation alongside the spelling weird. You can make sense of this in various ways, and it's a fairly sketchy account that probably has some inaccuracies (also it's incomplete - rhotacism, for instance, makes everything more complex), but it demonstrates the somewhat arbitrary nature of English spelling and how it's often unrelated to the phonemic form of words. This is a somewhat recent phenomenon - both OE and ME had more consistent and phonemic spellings, but influences like vowel shifts and import words have lead to the more scatterbrained nature of Modern English spelling. It's the same story here - though both have OE forms (híehþo and wiht respectively - very different), various influences have led to different pronuciations but the same spelling, really as a result of chance. The height form was pronounced with an [eɪ] for a while (the same vowel Shorty transcribes as /ā/), which fits the spelling better, but analogy with high and Northen English uses led to a different vowel (today realised as [aɪ]), and for a while the two different vowel spellings - Milton for instance, uses highth; "To attaine The highth and depth of thy Eternal wayes," - but the ei spelling was settled on, probably mostly by chance. Weight seems to have gone the other way, starting out with more of an [ɪ] sound, but changing both in spelling and pronunciation through analogy with Old Norse forms with [eɪ] vowels and the verb weigh. So yeah, it's all a tanged mess of etymologies, and not really the sort of thing most linguists tend to look at, as they focus more on generalisations than on specifics. Some people are more interested in this kind of thing though - I did all my research for this post using the etymology section of the OED. One final point: though English has a fairly crazy spelling scheme, it's by no means a total disaster - consistent patterns can be identified, although they change depending on the type of words you look at. Okay, it's not as neat as something like Spanish, but be thankful we haven't got a writing system like Japanese. Note: I've used (very) broad phonetic transcriptions throughout so that I don't have to commit to phonemes, hence the square brackets rather than the slashes. If you don't know the sounds that the IPA symbols represent, Wikipedia has a reasonable guide.

Gah, spent most of Saturday, Sunday, and this morning doing an essay on linguistic politeness (get out of my linguistics, sociology ) that just kept on going. I got about two hours sleep last night too... But happy times ahead, for it is done.

ReZ is my joke account.

I don't see how you intend to get an answer to a question that's so subjective.

Yep, I've also come across this before, and the answer to (a) is indeed 23. I guess you can adapt the method used to reach this to answer part (b). I really am, or at least when it comes to handwriting. Even I can barely read my notes, I should post a sample some time.