A Feature Of English That

Several Of Us Linguists At That Time Would Record Our Own Kids, Just To Get Some Data. There Was Some Literature On It Then, But No Day-by-day, Blow-by-blow Examples. I Recorded All My Children Over The Years In Some Shape Or Form. It's What Linguists Do. You Don't Talk To A Linguist Without Having What You Say Taken Down And Used In Evidence Against You At Some Point In Time.

English Has Been This Vacuum Cleaner Of A Language, Because Of Its History Meeting Up With The Romans And Then The Danes, The Vikings And Then The French And Then The Renaissance With All The Latin And Greek And Hebrew In The Background.

Word Books Traditionally Focus On Unusual And Quirky Items. They Tend To Ignore The Words That Provide The Skeleton Of The Language, Without Which It Would Fall Apart, Such As 'and' And 'what,' Or Words That Provide Structure To Our Conversation, Such As 'hello.

Sending A Message On A Mobile Phone Is Not The Most Natural Of Ways To Communicate. The Keypad Isn't Linguistically Sensible.

The Story Of English Spelling Is The Story Of Thousands Of People - Some Well-known, Most Totally Unknown - Who Left A Permanent Linguistic Fingerprint On Our Orthography.