http://blogcritics.org/ A sinister cabal of superior bloggers on music, books, film, popular culture, politics, and technology - updated continuously. en Copyright 2002-2006 by the authors Thu, 26 Sep 2002 10:52:40 EDT http://backend.userland.com/rss Blogcritics.org custom software http://blogcritics.org/archives/2002/09/25/171057.php#comment-946 I read a short story once - I think it was by L. Sprague de Camp - in which an effort to modernize the language is undertaken. First certain extraneous silent consonants are eliminated, followed by vowel blends. Then similar consonants are combined and so on and so forth, all in the name of efficiency, until the last sentence of the story reads something like: Ths df eri s wt k. It helps that the author (I'm pretty sure it was de Camp) was a linguist by trade. ]]> 946@blogcritics.org Thu, 26 Sep 2002 10:52:40 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2002/09/25/171057.php#comment-945 So I should thump all the instructors and science show narrators I've ever come into contact with up until then? :) ]]> 945@blogcritics.org Thu, 26 Sep 2002 08:18:04 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2002/09/25/171057.php#comment-944 Actually, "Neandertal" might not be that inaccurate. Neanderthal Man is so named for the Neander Valley in Germany, which in German would be "Neander Tal" ("Thal" being the outmoded spelling for valley in German)... ]]> 944@blogcritics.org Thu, 26 Sep 2002 06:56:00 EDT