This book continues Julie Coleman's acclaimed history of dictionaries of English slang and cant. It describes the increasingly systematic and scholarly way in which such terms were recorded and classified in the UK, the USA, Australia, and elsewhere, and the huge growth in the publication of and public appetite for dictionaries, glossaries, and guides to the distinctive vocabularies of different social groups, classes, districts, regions, and nations. Dr Coleman describes the origins of words and phrases and explores their history. By copious example she shows how they cast light on everyday life across the globe - from settlers in Canada and Australia and cockneys in London to gang-members in New York and soldiers fighting in the Boer and First World Wars - as well as on the operations of the narcotics trade and the entertainment business and the lives of those attending American colleges and British public schools.
The slang lexicographers were a colourful bunch. Those featured in this book include spiritualists, aristocrats, socialists, journalists, psychiatrists, school-boys, criminals, hoboes, police officers, and a serial bigamist. One provided the inspiration for Robert Lewis Stevenson's Long John Silver. Another was allegedly killed by a pork pie.
Julie Coleman's account will interest historians of language, crime, poverty, sexuality, and the criminal underworld.

The starting date of the fourth volume of Julie Coleman's pioneering history marks the appearance of the most influential slang dictionary of the twentieth century, Eric Partridge's Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, produced at a time when the Depression had broken down traditional working-class communities; the United States was a still-reluctant world power; and another world war was inevitable. If the First World War unsettled combatants' minds, the second unsettled society. It challenged values around the world and, as the author shows, offered new opportunities for vibrant self-expression. Lexicographers recorded a rich harvest of words and phrases from around the world, reflecting new-found freedoms from convention, increased social mobility, and the continued rise of the mass media. Julie Coleman's account ranges across the English-speaking world. It will fascinate all those interested in slang and its reflections of social and cultural change.

Dictionary of the language spoken in Tunisia -French-Arabic-, designed for the benefit of beginners and more experienced learners, the fruit of years of research. The vocabulary is in Arabic, and the transliteration helps with the pronunciation. References to literary Arabic make interesting comparisons possible. Dictionnaire de la langue parlA (c)e en Tunisie -franAais-arabe-, destinA (c) aux dA (c)butant et aux plus chevronnA (c)s, fruit da annA (c)es de recherches. Le vocabulaire est rA (c)digA (c) en arabe et la translitA (c)ration en facilite la comprA (c)hension. Les rA (c)fA (c)rences A la langue littA (c)raire permettent des comparaisons intA (c)ressantes.

Lesers wat nie ’n annerlike kontrei se taal kan slat nie, hoef nie daaroor kop te vreet nie. Hierdie omvattende woordeboek plaas die gewoonlike Afrikaans uit die kontreie op skrif vir inkommers en vir ingesetenes wat wil klont oor kontreitaal. Die eienaardig mooie woordeboek ontgin annerlike Afrikaans op so ’n manier dat geen leser meer uitgesluit hoef te wees van diegene wat eenspaaierig handel nie want alles wat hierin opgeteken is, is koek van een deeg. Dit kouboe die taal vir oueres wat daarmee vertroud is en vir jongeres is dit brandhout om vir die oudag bymekaar te maak.

The vocabulary of past times, no longer used in English, is always fascinating, especially when we see how it was pilloried by the satirists of the day. Here we have Victorian high and low society, with its fashionable and unfashionable slang, its class awareness and the jargon of steam engines, motor cars and other products of the Industrial Revolution. Then as now, people had strong feelings about the flood of new words entering English. Swearing, new street names and the many borrowings from French provoked continual irritation and mockery, as did the Americanisms increasingly encountered in the British press. In this intriguing collection, David Crystal has pored through the pages of the satirical magazine, Punch, between its first issue in 1841 and the death of Queen Victoria in 1901, and extracted the articles and cartoons that poked fun at the jargon of the day, adding a commentary on the context of the times and informative glossaries. In doing so he reveals how many present-day feelings about words have their origins over a century ago.

The book is a collection of adapted humour inspired by other writers, interspersed with some original texts and a handful of philosophical views, mostly wrapped in humour. The texts include oblique references to adult obsessions and mild vernacular language in common usage by many aged 12 years and over. It is a joke book from cover to cover, most of which is unsuitable for younger children and anyone who cannot read without moving their lips. The book would have been in colour had I found my crayons.

The Concise New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English presents all the slang terms from The New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English in a single volume. Containing over 60,000 entries, this concise new edition of the authoritative work details the slang and unconventional English of from around the English-speaking world since 1945, and through the first decade of the new millennium, with the same thorough, intense, and lively scholarship that characterized Partridge's own work. Unique, exciting and, at times, hilariously shocking, key features include: unprecedented coverage of World English, with equal prominence given to American and British English slang, and entries included from Australia, New Zealand, Canada, India, South Africa, Ireland, and the Caribbean emphasis on post-World War II slang and unconventional English dating information for each headword in the tradition of Partridge, commentary on the term's origins and meaning. New to this second edition: a new preface noting slang trends of the last eight years over 1,000 new entries from the US, UK and Australia, reflecting important developments in language and culture new terms from the language of social networking from a range of digital communities including texting, blogs, Facebook, Twitter and online forums many entries now revised to include new dating and new glosses, ensuring maximum accuracy of content. The Concise New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English is a spectacular resource infused with humour and learning - it's rude, it's delightful, and it's a prize for anyone with a love of language.

This book is the first comprehensive, research-based description of the development, structure, and use of Welsh English, a contact-induced variety of English spoken in the British Isles. Present-day accents and dialects of Welsh English are the combined outcome of historical language shift from Welsh to English, continued bilingualism, intense contacts between Wales and England, and multicultural immigration. As a result, Welsh English is a distinctive, regionally and sociolinguistically diverse variety, whose status is not easily categorized. In addition to existing research, the present volume utilizes a wide range of spoken corpus data gathered from across Wales in order to describe the phonology, lexis, and grammar of the variety. It includes discussion of sociolinguistic and cultural contexts, and of ongoing change in Welsh English. The place that Welsh English occupies in relation to other Englishes in the Inner and Outer Circles is also analysed. The book is accessible to the non-specialist, but of particular use to scholars, teachers, and students interested in English in Wales, Britain, and the world. It provides an unparelleled resource on this long-standing and vibrant variety.

The book presents unique literature in a minority ethnolect - the Germanic dialect of Wilamowice in Southern Poland. The manuscripts, written in the ethnolect at the beginning of the 20th century, were discovered in 1989. The book contains full versions of several texts of various length written by Florian Biesik, who decided to create a literary standard for Wilamowicean in order to prove its non-German, but possibly Anglo-Saxon, Dutch, Flemish or Frisian origin. Thus it presents both the dialectal literature and the most important elements of the local culture during the final stages of its extinction.

This book offers the first comparative discussion of variation in selected areas of structure in the dialects of Kurdish. The contributions draw on data collected as part of the project on Structural and Typological Variation in Kurdish and stored in the Manchester Database of Kurdish Dialects online resource, as well as on additional data sources. The chapters address issues in lexicon, phonology, and morpho-syntax including nominal case, tense and aspect categories, pronominal clitics, adpositions, word order (with special reference to post-predicate constituents) and connectivity and complex clauses. The materials that inform the analysis consist of a systematic questionnaire-based elicitation covering key features of variation in lexicon and morpho-syntax, and an accompanying corpus of free speech recordings, collected in over 120 locations across the Kurdish-speaking regions in Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran and covering mainly the dialects of Northern and Central Kurdish (Kurmani-Bahdini and Sorani), with some consideration of Southern Kurdish. The book will be of interest to students and scholars in fields such as linguistics, linguistic typology, Iranian linguistics and linguistics of the Middle East, and dialectology.

This study examines the effect of race-consciousness upon the pronunciation of American English and upon the ideology of standardization in the twentieth century. It shows how the discourses of prescriptivist pronunciation, the xenophobic reaction against immigration to the eastern metropolises- especially New York - and the closing of the western frontier together constructed an image of the American West and Midwest as the locus of proper speech and ethnicity. This study is of interest to scholars and students in linguistics, American studies, cultural studies, Jewish studies, and studies in race, class, and gender.

Linguistic varieties such as female speech, foreigner talk, and colloquial language have not gone unnoticed when it comes to Classical Greek, but little is known about later periods of the Greek language. In this collective volume leading experts in the field outline some of the most important varieties of Post-classical and Byzantine Greek, basing themselves on a broad range of literary and documentary sources, and advancing a number of innovative methodologies. Close attention is paid to the linguistic features that characterize these varieties, with in-depth discussions of lexical, morpho-syntactic, orthographic, and metrical variation, as well as the interrelationship between these different types of variation. The volume thus offers valuable insights into the nature of Post-classical and Byzantine Greek, laying the foundation for future studies of linguistic variation in these later stages of the language, while at the same time providing a point of comparison for Classical Greek scholarship

This volume presents the results of a research team of the University of Bergamo, whose aim was the analysis of verbal modality in the Helsinki corpus. This corpus includes a large selection of texts compiled in Middle English and Early Modern En

The comprehensive analysis of the segmental and metrical system of the Swiss German dialect of Thurgovian provides a significant contribution to both phonetic and phonological theory. Based on the author's original fieldwork and experimental investigations, it is the first in-depth study of this area, tracing it back also to its Old High German roots, particularly that of the dialect of Notker. Quantity alternations - notably word-initial long/short consonantal alternations - asymmetric neutralization of phonetic-phonological contrasts, stress and weight are most prominent among the theoretical issues on which Thurgovian phonology is brought to bear.

Present-day Dialectology does not treat dialectology as an isolated discipline. Instead, it discusses dialectological topics within the framework of present-day linguistics. The book contains papers which seek to confront recent phonological, morphologic, syntactic and semantic theory with dialectological data. In addition, it explores the link between dialectology on the one hand and sociolinguistics and the study of language contact on the other.

The concern of this book is the nature of religious belief and the ways in which philosophical enquiry is related to it. Six chapters present the positive arguments the author wishes to put forward to discusses religion and rationality, scepticism about religion, language-games, belief and the loss of belief. The remaining chapters include criticisms of some contemporary philosophers of religion in the light of the earlier discussions, and the implications for more specific topics, such as religious education, are investigated. The book ends with a general attempt to say something about the character of philosophical enquiry, and to show how important it is to realise this character in the philosophy of religion.

The publication of Francis Grose's Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue revolutionized the lexicography of non-standard English. His influence is felt in most of the dictionaries covered in this volume which copy, variously, his carefully documented reliance on written sources, his delighted revelation of first-hand experience of the seedier side of London life, and his word-list. During this period, glossaries of cant are thrown into the shade by dictionaries of slang, which include the language of thieves, but cover a much broader spectrum of non-standard English. While cant represented a practical threat to property and life, slang was a moral threat to the very structure of society. In the 1820s, Pierce Egan's Life in London demonstrated how popular and successful slang literature could be among the masses. This volume also includes the earliest Australian and American slang glossaries, by individuals like James Hardy Vaux (a convict transported three times) and George Matsell (New York's first chief of police).

The present study explores the aesthetic productivity of idiomatic ambiguity in children's literature. Looking at the connection between context and understanding of idiomatic expressions in either their phrasal or their compositional reading, the study investigates how ambiguity is activated, if, how, and when it is perceived on the different levels of communication, and how literary texts use this ambiguity in playful ways.

New York City English is one of the most recognizable of US dialects, and research on it launched modern sociolinguistics. Yet the city's speech has never before received a comprehensive description and analysis. In this book, Michael Newman examines the differences and similarities among the ways English is spoken by the extraordinarily diverse population living in the NY dialect region. He uses data from a variety of sources including older dialectological accounts, classic and recent variationist studies, and original research on speakers from around the dialect region. All levels of language are explored including phonology, morphosyntax, lexicon, and discourse along with a history of English in the region. But this book provides far more than a dialectological and historical inventory of linguistic features. The forms used by different groups of New Yorkers are discussed in terms of their complex social meanings. Furthermore, Newman illustrates the varied forms of sociolinguistic significance with examples from the personal experiences of a variety of New Yorkers and includes links to sound files on the publisher's site and videos on YouTube. The result is a rigorous but accessible and compelling account of the English spoken in this great city.

Southern Min (also known as Hokkien or Minnan) is a major branch of Chinese spoken mainly in Fujian and Taiwan, but also in Guangdong, Hainan and Hong Kong, as well as in many countries of Southeast Asia. Highly conservative in its linguistic profile, it is considered by many scholars to be a living language fossil due to the preservation of many archaic features that reflect its long-lasting history and culture. Yet to date there has been no comprehensive study of Southern Min using a typological framework, as the tendency is to base analyses on the model of Mandarin Chinese, the standard language. This grammar aims to present a systematic description of the Hui'an variety of Southern Min, mainly based on data collected via naturally occurring conversation. The volume includes four parts: nominal structure, predicate structure, clause structure and complex sentences, as well as a brief overview of phonology. It will have great appeal for heritage speakers, graduate students and scholars in both Chinese linguistics and typology.

This is the first systematic attempt to trace the beginnings of modern literary Yiddish, an issue of great significance in the linguistic, literary, and social history of the Yiddish language. The eighteenth century marked the turning point in the history of literary Yiddish, a period of rapid linguistic assimilation to German and Dutch in the West and, by sharp contrast, the increasing cultural autonomy of Eastern European Jewry. Books printed in the West reflected the impact of New High German and contemporary Western Yiddish. Books published in Eastern Europe, the new centre for Yiddish printing, used Eastern Yiddish both for new works and for new editions of old Yiddish works. Dr Kerler examines hitherto neglected Yiddish books from the period in order to analyse the linguistic changes manifest in both the transition and shift from old to nascent Modern Literary Yiddish within the broader context of genre and literary traditions and in the framework of Yiddish dialectology, grammar, and sociolinguistics. Many of the grammatical norms of nineteenth and early twentieth-century literary Yiddish are shown to have their origins in the eighteenth century. A major work of linguistic scholarship, The Origins of Modern Literary Yiddish is an important contribution to the study of the crystallization process of literary languages, highlighting in the case of Yiddish the dynamics of emergence in the absence of the usual governmental support.

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