92
Clipping
“cutting” a word,
clippings nearly always
refer to everyday objects
ad
fax
math
pub
advertisement
public house
mathematics
facsimile
Reduplication
bye-bye
super-duper, teeny-weeny,
splish-splash, zig-zag
Not
very productive in English
Speakers will sometimes use it when being
patronising or sarcastic
94
Early 1600’s:
The first wave of English-speaking settlers arrive in North America as
part of the British colonization movement.
They bring English, now
an “emigrant language,” to native North Americans; in addition, the
settlers and their families continue to speak their own native tongue.
The process of an emigrant language’s evolution:
1) The language evolves from a specific homeland language.
2) The emigrant language begins to change course because of
lack of direct contact with the homeland.
3) The emigrant language continues to evolve away from
the homeland, gradually creating a new dialect.
4) The homeland dialect continues to evolve as well, diverging
further away from the emigrant dialect of the language.
Between the end of the 17
th
century and the 21
st
century, many
gradual changes to the form of the English language have
taken place under this process.
The process caused the Americans and the British to diverge so
drastically in terms of the forms of their languages that they are
now considered two separate English language dialects.
1806 – Noah Webster publishes his first dictionary,
A
Compendious Dictionary of the English Language.
Up until this time, English dictionaries included strictly British
vocabulary, spellings, and pronunciations.
Webster was convinced that an outline of a common,
American
, national language would unify his country.
95
1828 –publishes
American Dictionary of the English Language
1890 – Merriam brothers {who received the rights to Webster’s
dictionaries after his death} publish
Webster’s First International
Dictionary, an all-encompassing look at the English language
Noah Webster’s intentions?
To prove that Americans spoke a different
dialect than the British {but a dialect that was in no
way inferior – he believed it deserved a unique
documentation of its own trends}
Merriam’s intentions?
"The purpose of the dictionary is to provide a record of
the language as it is used by educated people who
have been speaking and writing it all their lives.“
-- H. Bosley Woolf {Merriam's editorial director}
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