THEORKIS

Новоприбывшим (если вы не робот):

Я хотел поиграть со словом запись, но мне стало скучно, поэтому перехожу к делу. Если вы меня добавили в друзья или намереваетесь это сделать, было бы неплохо, если б вы отметились в комментариях к этой записи. Можете, например, представиться или просто сказать что-нибудь на отвлеченную тему.


To newcomers (if you're not a robot):

I wanted to play with the word entry, but got bored, so I'm going to come straight to the point. If you've added me as a friend or intend to do so, it would be nice if you checked in by leaving a comment here. You could introduce yourself, for example, or just say something random or abstract.


 

Just as I’d long suspected, Engl. ‘read’ and the Germ. ‘reden’ (to talk) are closely related: “Middle English reden to advise, interpret, read, from Old English rǣdan; akin to Old High German rātan to advise.” Raten still means ‘to advise’.

I’ve always fantasized about a step-by-step reconstruction of the actual process of mutation in the phonetics, orthography and semantics of lexical units. Wouldn’t it be awesome to be able to track the teeny-weeny microevolutionary changes through social and intercultural recontextualization? A whole big-ass project consisting of conjuring up, reviving and compiling situations where a word might have been mispronounced or misspelled, or whose spelling might have gotten adjusted for simplicity’s sake or adapted to local phonological standards or maybe even grammatical features.

I mean, just to think that entire languages as systems and sets of communicative competencies are but series of accidents and quite often mistakes. Ring familiar? Yeah, kind of like human history and genetics. In this sense etymology and anthropology – cultural and physical – may not be too far apart, either.  Speech development and language acquisition in children and second language learning by adults also resemble these instances o f word transformation. So the essence of the project would be to catch the speakers at various stages of interlanguage, prior to error fossilization, and deriving, among other things, illustrations of the context dictating the meaning, the sounds and the written form and causing them to change. From discrepancy to neologism to norm (the same goes for grammar).

Hey, all y’all academics out there, is there research being done in these areas? All y’all corporate-type people and business types, just picture: books, animated films and different dramatizations, board and computer games, all sorts of websites, etc. We’re talking potentially major dough.

If you’ve read ([red] -> reden?) this far, you deserve an example. In the case of ‘read’, imagine a tribal council sitting around the fire (der Rat; see Ukr. Rada?), stinking, talking, laying down the law or praying or carrying on in their oral historical tradition. Then, often from the outside, comes literacy, information gets recorded (now there can be more of it because it doesn’t need to be memorized as much). Elites are redefined by having access to knowledge through their ability to read. Thus linguistic innovations in turn modify the sociocultural scenery. Now the elders read texts aloud, still talking as it were, though presently citing and reciting sacred books (citare – читать?). In other words, the concept of reden undergoes considerable changes: a) the source of information shifts from individual to text, b) reden turns into a more physical and multisensory activity as not only hearing but also eyesight is involved, c) the act of reading itself becomes less private and more of a group endeavor and d) reading is no longer an exclusively receptive skill – it is functionally productive. Or something along these lines.

Кто такой и откуда тут взялся, не знаю, вернее, не помню. Не отесан, но талантлив. Или наоборот: талантлив, но не отесан. На любителя.