Australia

Making fun of the English language

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Lingoblog forsider 3

Girls and boys in airports, they may get bored. It could be you. What do you do? You find a bookstore. There you find a book that looks interesting, and you buy it, and you will start reading it – if you can find a place to sit. The book is non-fiction, and of course it is about language.

This happened to someone I know (I, on the other hand, take the train whenever I can), and she bought the book for me, not for herself as she works in the hard sciences, and I found it under the Christmas tree. Thank you.

The book is called The Language-Lover’s Lexipedia and has the subtitle an A-Z of linguistic curiosities. … ↪

Documenting fishing records and wet placenames around Dudley Peninsula, Kangaroo Island, South Australia

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Screenshot 2023 10 30 at 14.20.24

A definition of history I heard recently is that it is the discipline concerned with the writing of the science of change in past events and human affairs. Born in South Australia, I am surrounded by documentable change and evidence of previous happenings.

This article considers the fishing ground names — wet placenames — located offshore to the north from Penneshaw and American River as local Kangaroo Island ephemera and historical capital of parochial importance.

I chose Dudley Peninsula, Kangaroo Island, in 2009 as a comparative island case study for my toponymic research toward my PhD in linguistics at the University of Adelaide. Dudley Peninsula has a colourful and varied placenaming history. My brief was simple: compare the placename data … ↪