People in the neighbouring town to me (Darien CT) started using bumper stickers saying something about HSBC and a new ... school (well, there are lots of bankers living there). It turns out that it stands for "High School Building

"CyberCypher" wrote in message ... Jess Askin wrote on 26 Sep 2004: "CyberCypher" wrote in message... I guess I was thinking of ... know if this also happens in any actual Chinese dialects. I don't know about that either.

It is precisely the fact that language changes in an evolutionary fashion which leads me to think that language *must* be as McWhorter describes it. Evolution involves change under the restraint of current conditions: Consider "The

(about sound files for the speech examples in the Handbook of the International Phonetic Association ) Of immediate interest is the fact that the AmE representative is MIMIM. Professor Peter Ladefoged, the author of the American English piece,

Only BizarroRayWise will insist that we have a counterpart to ... Postwar prestige dialect of New York City, race-neutral of course. Again, to those unaware of the DC comics character, Bizarro versionsof characters did the "opposite" of

How did such accent come about?!! Only a backwardly hierarchal society like the aristocracy-obsessed little old England would go to such lengths in enduring the preposterous, utterly preposterous, vowels and intonation invovled and making it the

It's a big joke, seriously. If you take a pause ... it to, say, a Standard American dialect, it's unbelievably unnatural. We'll need to wait for Mr. Riggs, our resident Buddhist, to comment on "if you take a pause and think ...

Some of it could be physiological though. I once knew a person who could not distinguish between the words pen and pin. This was an educated person who read quite a lot. Only one? Many of us have encountered the pen/pin merger. When I was in

The problem is that many (possibly most) adults have lost the ability to recognize and learn "new" sounds that are not part of the sound system of their native language or dialect. False. Anyone can learn new sounds and suppress an

Afrikaans only became an official language in the 1920s, and trek entered English long before that. Of course, but it didn't come from the Dutch spoken by academicians in the Netherlands; it came from the Dutch spoken by farmers in South