#mario pei

[basicallyanotherwitchesthing]

Mario A. Pei - Tales of the Natural and Supernatural - The Devin-Adair Company - 1971 (designs by Laura Torbet)

[skjam]

Latest review at my blog!

Song of Roland fanfic.

http://www.skjam.com/2020/10/30/book-review-swords-for-charlemagne/

[language-of-the-opera]

"The present generation? Let it do what it wants. It will be dead within a century anyway"

Mario Pei

[lydiekate]

If one will scoff at the study of language, how, save in terms of language, will one scoff?

Mario Pei

[lowestofjinks-blog]

Wordy prognostications in the Atomic Age, from Mario Pei's "The Story of English": "There are more things, more qualities, more actions in the modern world than there were in the ancient, and the number of nouns, adjectives and verbs has accordingly increased. ... It's as simple as that. The prospect for the future is that things, activities and concepts will continue to multiply, and the vocabulary with them. Only a reversal to barbarism or savagery, the sort of thing that might quite possibly attend full-scale atomic warfare, could lead to the impoverishment of the vocabulary by reason of the dropping out of human activities. Fearsome as is the increase in words, the alternative is even more fearsome."

[lowestofjinks-blog]

New (to me) words for the day, as seen in Mario Pei's "The Story of English": -- vellicate (twitch, nip, pinch, tickle, titillate) -- serous (resembling serum, especially in thin watery constitution) -- horripilating (to produce -- as by sudden fear -- a bristling of the hair of the head or body, as from disease, terror, or chilliness)

[lowestofjinks-blog]

Unless we choose to accept the doctrine of predestination, it is chance that makes history. The panoramic future of men, nations, races, religions, languages, often depends upon the cast of a die, the turn of a card, the whim of a historical moment.

The Story of English, Mario Pei

[eccebitch]

While slang may be condemned by purists and schoolteachers, it should be remembered that it is a monument to the language's force of growth by creative innovation, a living example of the democratic, normally anonymous process of language change, and the chief means whereby all the languages spoken today have evolved from earlier tongues.

—Mario Pei, American linguist, The Story of Language, 1949

THAT'S ALL VERY WELL AND GOOD, MARIO, BUT DIDN'T YOU JUST CONDEMN THE EVOLUTION OF PROTO-ROMANTIC LATIN LIKE FOURTY PAGES AGO. NOT TO MENTION THAT CHAPTER ABOUT DIALECT WHERE YOU WROTE IN DIALECT.