The Internet offers endangered languages a chance to have a public voice in a way that would not have been possible before.
David CrystalRead
Every usage, no matter how bizarre or nonstandard, fascinates me, as it tells me something about the way language is evolving.
Interpretation
Language evolves over time, and every unique usage reveals insights into this evolution.
David Crystal expresses his fascination with the diverse and unconventional ways language is used. He believes that each instance of unique or nonstandard language offers important clues about the progress and changes in linguistic expression, reflecting how society and culture influence communication.
In practice
In a lecture about linguistic dynamics, one might say, 'As David Crystal noted, every usage, no matter how bizarre or nonstandard, fascinates me.'
The Internet offers endangered languages a chance to have a public voice in a way that would not have been possible before.
The main effect of the Internet on language has been to increase the expressive richness of language, providing the language with a new set of communicative dimensions that haven't existed in the past.
Bilingualism lets you have your cake and eat it. The new language opens the doors to the best jobs in society; the old language allows you to keep your sense of 'who you are.' It preserves your identity. With two languages, you have the best of both worlds.
Language has no independent existence apart from the people who use it. It is not an end in itself; it is a means to an end of understanding who you are and what society is like.
Enshrined in a language is the whole of a community's history and a large part of its cultural identity. The world is a mosaic of visions. To lose even one piece of this mosaic is a loss for all of us.
Likewise, there is no evidence that texting teaches people to spell badly: rather, research shows that those kids who text frequently are more likely to be the most literate and the best spellers, because you have to know how to manipulate language.
When a physician is called to a patient, he should decide on the diagnosis, then the prognosis, and then the treatment. ... Physicians must know the evolution of the disease, its duration and gravity in order to predict its course and outcome. Here statistics intervene to guide physicians, by teaching them the proportion of mortal cases, and if observation has also shown that the successful and unsuccessful cases can be recognized by certain signs, then the prognosis is more certain.
I have been struck again and again by how important measurement is to improving the human condition.
Matter, though divisible in an extreme degree, is nevertheless not infinitely divisible. That is, there must be some point beyond which we cannot go in the division of matter. ... I have chosen the word βatomβ to signify these ultimate particles.
My study is NOT as a climatologist, but from a completely different perspective in_x000D_ which I am an expert β¦ For decades, as a professional experimental test engineer, I have analyzed experimental data and watched others massage and present data. I became a cynic; My conclusion - 'if someone is aggressively selling a technical product who's merits are dependent on complex experimental data, he is likely lying'. That is true whether the product is an airplane or a Carbon Credit.
I remember my friend Johnny von Neumann used to say, 'with four parameters I can fit an elephant and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk.'
Every living being is also a fossil. Within it, all the way down to the microscopic structure of its proteins, it bears the traces if not the stigmata of its ancestry.
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