Spoken Language

I don't really know what I could do for my Practical Investigation.

I guess that I could do a Gender study because there are a lot of debates about the differences between male and female speech. And it would be interesting to test those. This would basically involve two groups of people, the same age, discussing the same subject, one made up of males and the other females. Then I can do all of the analysis from that. I could also look at the conversations to decide if either gender is better at giving a more succinct view for a more successful line of conversation.

My other idea, is that I could analyse some clips of people from different regions to investigate accent and dialect in a higher detail. This would be under the same conditioning of them talking about the same subject. This, I assume, would allow me to investigate more fully the history of accents and how they have developed. Which would also be quite interesting.

Dictionaries!

The story of the dictionary is truly a fascinating tale. The idea that just over 500 years ago, there were no dictionaries is baffling. Even more baffling is that up until that point no one had even questioned why such a concept hadn't been thought up before. Thank goodness Mulcaster did think up the original concept that became the dictionary, without his pioneering work, I wouldn't be able to correctly spell 'fascinating' earlier in this post.
     But the thing that I would say was the most amazing thing about the history of the dictionary is that it is ever changing. Already the dictionary is so complex due to all of the language change that has occurred since the birth of the English language. That the language will continue to grow and change and distort and become unrecognisable as it is in its present format, is just mind-numbing. Even the dictionary itself is a changing concept. Today, I marvel at the fact that the dictionary wasn't invented sooner, but perhaps in another 500 years another Language student may be researching this same topic and marvel at the fact that we used to have dictionaries in printed and bound books. What about a thousand years in the future... is the dictionary just uploaded into your brain at birth?
     It is just amazing that we as a species have developed so much in what is a relatively small amount of time. That is why I am inclined to agree with the Descriptivists, as language is always going to change, and we must accept that words will never remain the same forever. We have to adapt to the ever changing language, and just go with it. To be Prescriptivist on this subject seems odd. To want the language to remain pure makes no sense when the language that you speak now itself had developed and distorted since its creation already. Language just keeps going, and you have to just live it. It's not like it changes over night, it's a slow change that is easy to follow. That is why Descriptivist is so important, because they just accept that language is changing and they keep up with it.