dolphins_log

"There be treasure in there."

You find some surprises at Sci Fi cons. ...Things yo don't expect. Sure, I did the traditional things. I bought books in the dealers room. I picked up the t-shirt, I cruised the art show and bought a piece of art.

But the panel on "word fossils", not something you would expect to find at a sci fi convention, belongs here as much as anything does. We discussed the drift of the English language, and further, the drift that caused it to branch out from Latin roots, and further still, from the Proto-Indo- European. Then we went the other direction... where it is going from here.

On thing I found interesting, we call our long vowels "long" because they used to be pronounced long. A long "A" was pronounced "aahhhhh". A long "E" was pronounced "Aaay". A long "I" was pronounced "Eeeee". And so on.   For it becoming what it is today... It's apparently called "the Great Vowel Shift", and it is the transition from Old and Middle English to English of today.

...and we're shifting again. It seems that New England is thought to be invading the rest of the country. Soon we may all be Pahking our Cahs ins the Cah Pahk.   .. that is if we still have Cahs.

Sadly, like many of these cool panels, it's only a brush of a taste of what could be a real cool 10 week collage course. I mentioned it to