Neologisms, Dictionaries, and Etymology

If you'd like to explore any of the neologisms we discussed at the beginning of session three, this article on the Oxford Dictionaries Online blog provides a brief overview and some handy links to online dictionary definitions.  Elsewhere on the web, the term celanthropy is discussed on the Economist website, and the Washington Post encourages its readers to coin creatively in its annual neologism competition.

If "a game of cat and mouse" sparked an interest in everything catish*, the ODO entry for cat is worth looking at. Interestingly enough (or not, perhaps) etymological details are provided below definitions and related phrases. Do you think this kind of information is useful for students?  The archives of the ELT Journal contain two articles from the 1980s on the value of etymology to the language learner - click here for "Etymological information : can it help our students?" and here for "Using Etymology in the Classroom". For an online dictionary of etymology, click here.

Do you think that etymological information is useful for language learners?  Please don't be shy: post your thoughts as a comment below.

* Thanks to Kriang for coining this term. I wonder, though, if "cattish" would be better than "catish".  What do you think?

Morphology

I set "Types of Morphemes" - the third chapter of Morphology by Katamba and Stonham - as preparatory reading for our week 4 IA902 session, but perhaps we need a few definitions before you start reading.  For those of you who would like to participate as blog authors, can you write a post explaining how you would define the terms MORPHOLOGY and MORPHEME?  You can either define these terms in your own words, or present definitions that you like from other authors, but if you take the latter option, please make it clear where your definition originates.

Teaching pronunciation

We discussed several resource books for teaching pronunciation in yesterday's session, particularly Mark Hancock's Pronunciation Games and Ann Baker's Ship or Sheep.  There's also an apparently unrelated website named Ship or Sheep (not sure if it was possible for Ann Baker to copyright the expression "ship or sheep"), and I referred to some clunky but potentially interesting exercises on the Centre for Independent Language Learning website.  Further suggestions will come in future sessions, but I am also very keen to read about your experiences of teaching (or being taught) English pronunciation.  Do you have any tasks or exercises that have worked particularly well for you?  Has reading and discussing the topic sparked off any ideas that you'd like to share?  I'd be very happy to read your thoughts either as comments on this post, or as individual blog posts of your own.

From voice-setting phonology to mondegreens

Scott Thornbury's suggested task of getting students to converse in their mother tongue but with "English accents" (in "Having a good jaw: voice-setting phonology") put me in mind of a couple of topics that seem to be discussed with much enthusiasm online. One is the notion of "fake English", which has spawned hundreds of Youtube videos of people trying to sound English without necessarily being able to speak any of the language.  My personal favourite amongst these is this Italian song:



The second topic is more closely-related to music. A "mondegreen" is a misinterpretation of a lyric in a song (the term originates from the mishearing of the phrase "laid him on the green" as "Lady Mondegreen") and there are websites and online discussion threads devoted to listing such misunderstandings.  This clip from a Bulgarian TV show in which a contestant misinterprets the whole of a Mariah Carey song (actually it's by Harry Nielsen but that's a different matter) has received over 4 million hits on Youtube.



But, to return to articles published in the Journal of ELT, there's an interesting angle on this for language teachers in the form of Geoff Smith's 2003 article "Music and mondegreens: extracting meaning from noise". The author discusses the classroom task of transcribing song lyrics and attributes his students' 'mondegreens' to "an inadequate awareness of the full range of English phonological distinctions".

A short survey on terminology

I'd be grateful if you could each click on the link below and complete my simple 10-question survey on terminology.  I used Survey Monkey for this task, and hopefully we'll get the chance to discuss both the results and the shortcomings of the survey itself in a session soon.

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/J5597LT

P is for...

There are two relevant posts on Scott Thornbury's A-Z of ELT Blog - P is for Prescription and P is for Phonemic Chart.

IPA Tools from the University of Victoria

Two resources from the University of Victoria in Canada.  First, a simple graphical keypad to create IPA transcriptions, and then a similar tool employing a more visual layout.  I first came across these pages via the Phonemic Script Typewriter webpage:

The Sounds of Spoken English

Interactive Phonemic Chart

The Etymology of Morphology by Marc Quinn

Tate Collection | The Etymology of Morphology by Marc Quinn:

Morpheme maze

IPizz, Podaholics, Podestrians

IPizz, Podaholics, Podestrians: "IPizz, Podaholics, Podestrians"

English Module 2.4: Concordance programs

English Module 2.4: Concordance programs:

'via Blog this'

Unicode Phonetic transcription : a link

A UCL page on Unicode Phonetic transcription: specifically, how to put phonetic symbols in a Word document.

Diphthongs : "The Rain in Spain Stays Mainly in the Plain" from My Fair Lady

Find more details of the film from imdb.com, or explore the George Bernard Shaw play on which it was based (Pygmalion) via Bartleby.

Peter Roach on Prosody

Click here to access the rest of this lecture via Youtube.

BBC Pronunciation Tips

A video about the Pronunciation Tips pages of the BBC Learning English website: