18 Oct
2010
18 Oct
'10
5:22 p.m.
From: Patrick Finnegan
Sent: Monday, October 18, 2010 4:42 PM
On Monday, October 18, 2010, Rich Alderson wrote:
> Doesn't matter that it's crap if it
contains an interesting verb form
> not seen before, or mentions an historical fact only known previously
> from a single source.
Like the Roman or ancient Greek version of misspelled
words, improper
grammar, "hillbilly english", street slang, etc?
Very good examples, all of them.
Poetry is also a good source for archaisms in a language, so that we learn
how things were said at a less well attested stage. "Bad" poetry can be
just as good as "good" poetry for this.
One of my favourites is the evidence provided by spellings of Latin names
in Greek. In the first century BCE, the Roman name _Valerius_ is spelt in
Greek as _Oualerios_; if you know that "ou" spelt a long u in Greek, you
understand one of the reasons that we believe that Latin "v" was pronounced
like modern English "w". We know from the Romance languages that that
changed, but when? Greek spelling of the same name as _Balerios_ in the
first century CE gives us a very narrow time frame, two to three
generations, for the change.
LOLcats? Not so much. :-)