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Incidentally, the important thing about Shakespeare is he represents the hegemony of English as we understand it today; anyone who's read the Canterbury Tales or Sir Gawain... will explain that English English, before Shakespeare, was a massively diffuse mess. His artistic merit, to me, has always been clouded by his Linguistico-political merit.
Also, the fact of English being the lingua franca for a lot of the world now is almost a shame (except I speak it). |
Hegemony? Linguistico? lingua franca?
Oh, fuck me. (ref Gordon Ramsey) |
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Do you not understand, or are you just being awkward?
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OR Fuck off you useless cunt.
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Yeah I know I'm talking crap, I'm just responding to goomuckoo. |
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And I was going to mention that there's a brilliant irony attached to saying that English is a lingua franca using a term that's clearly from Italian (a romance language to boot). |
Glice, if you're not careful, I'm going to start a thread like this about you.
Lurker, you, too, for that matter. You're both on my short list right now. |
I suspect, of myself and Diesel, you'd find my natural accent less understandable. Geordies are worlds clearer than my bredrin.
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Well, you know that deep down I love you, Diesel, and Lurker. Christ, I'm Bond, after all. I've sworn to defend mother England against all enemies foreign and domestic and all that bloody rot.
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I've read Gawain in translation and bits of the Canterbury Tales. I wouldn't say it's a diffuse mess but of course different areas had different dialects. You're talking crap. What do you mean clouded? The beauty of the language is part of what's great about Shakespeare. |
Shakespeare's one of my favorite novelists.
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That's reassuring. Lets shake hands and make up. |
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Who are you talking to here? |
Show me your pockets first. Very slowly.
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I suspect he means me. I'm fairly useless, though the cunt part throws me. |
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The point I was making is that with earlier English literature there isn't the notion of a 'standardised' English; Shakespeare comes to represent the Standarisation of English. It's not that he personally was responsible for it, it's that Canterbury Tales is one form of English that wasn't necessarily the same form of English spoken in, say, Yorkshire or Devon. The notion of dialect requires the notion of a standardised form of a language which didn't exist prior to Shakespeare epoch, so far as I understand (and please bear in mind, I'm not a linguist by any means). I have the further problem that I don't really like Shakespeare, but that's neither here nor there. |
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Yeah but remember there was no standard spelling at that time and the form that we read Shakespeare in now, although the words are the same, the spelling has been changed. Oh well I've come to love Shakespeare. And anyway English has changed since then and is still changing. Dictionaries recognise. This whole conversation shouldn't have happened. I was being an arsehole. But I would like to point something out: the unconscious refusal of Americans to call English people English and to only call them British. It's quite odd. My theory behind this is that they feel uncomfortable about the word 'English' because if the English are speaking their own language then what are the Americans speaking and why is it different? The word 'British' avoids this and maintains American arrogance and identity which they've had to create, though it shouldn't be a problem for any reasonable person. |
Standard English is a dialect. It is quite dangerous to think of it as a benchmark or norm of English, because that necessarily follows that other forms are deviated from it, which is not only incorrect, but also anachronistic. What we now know as Standard English was first established by Chaucer, not Shakespeare, and it was thought then as a base form of language that was used by the ill educated. It was, however, the dialect that, originating in London, was adopted by government and commerce and, therefore, became understood nationwide. It exists not as a prestige form, then, but as a universally comprehensible form. Prestige forms generally employ more latinate lexis and convoluted sentence constructions.
Shakespeare rules ok. |
^^ lol nice name.
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