Talking about language…

I had dinner this evening with my Extreme Blue team, my second line manager, and one of my other co-workers (notice how carefully I don’t name names here — Facebook is a different story!), and the topic of languages came up — not, in this case, computer languages, but rather human languages.

I’d recently read two books and listened to a course by John McWhorter about the evolution of language, and I wanted to pass along the pointers here.

The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language covers language in general, with an emphasis on how languages mutate and how grammar works. I really enjoyed this book, though it’s a little repetitive at times.

Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold Story of English covers the history of English — this was a very fast read, but enjoyable. There’s more to the history than English’s habit of assimilating words from other languages — in particular, it’s interesting to see McWhorter’s explanation of why English has so little in the way of grammatical mechanisms (no gender, nearly no endings, and so forth).

If you’d rather listen (or watch) than read, the same material is covered in a set of lectures from The Teaching Company called The Story of Language (which is “on sale” as I type this — and you should never buy a Teaching Company course which isn’t “on sale”). I got them as audio downloads and played them in the car; there were a few moments where watching on DVD would have been useful, but very few — and I find it much easier to make time to listen to something than I do to watch it.

Staycation

When I decided to mentor an Extreme Blue project team this summer, I knew it would throw a monkey wrench into our usual vacation pattern, but I thought we’d manage to get to Worldcon and take at least a one-week vacation in mid-summer.

Worldcon fell victim to the scheduling of Extreme Blue Expo — we could have gone to the con, but I would have had to leave before the Hugo ceremonies, and we decided to skip it instead. But Diane and I knew we could get free this week, so we were all set to do something…until Jeff told us that it was a busy week at his internship (at the JCRC).

So we’re taking a staycation. Jeff’s free on Wednesday, so we’ll do something as a family that day (probably something farther away than San Jose, though at this point, I wouldn’t bet on it), and the rest of the week, Diane and I will have some time to ourselves. Except Thursday, when she’s going to help him with a food distribution project, which required a trip to the county health department this morning to get a TB test read. And Thursday night, when I have improv class.

Maybe after school starts….