Free Speech, Lauren Southern, and Stefan Molyneux: A Short Comment

Background Auckland Mayor Phil Goff was recently involved controversy around the cancellation of an event booked at the Bruce Mason Centre involving the Canadian far-right speakers, Lauren Southern and Stefan Molyneux. He tweeted: https://twitter.com/phil_goff/status/1015056094945611776 Elsewhere he elaborated, "I'm not going to aid and abet people who spout racist nonsense by providing them with a venue." And, "I …

In Defence of the Nominative Me

In many registers of spoken English, it has become acceptable usage to say "me and you did this," etc, that is, using "me," typically the accusative or dative form of "I," in the nominative, though only when there is more than one subject. It is rarely said "me did this," because these rules tend to …

Follow-up on the Clod-God Split in NZE

This is a follow-up of my earlier post, The Possibility of Rhyming 'Clod' and 'God', in which I claimed there was a split between the words "clod" and "god" in NZ English, as many other Englishes pronounce them with the same vowel length. Since then I have had replies ranging from "That's not how I say …

The Possibility of Rhyming “Clod” and “God”

Moltmann is fond of quoting a couplet penned by Robert Browning in the nineteenth century. It reads: For the loving worm within its clod Were diviner than a loveless God The first time I read this, however, I was confused. In what world do clod and God rhyme? Possibly in the world of nineteenth century England, and …

New Zealand English 4

This is the fourth post in a series on Hay, Maclagan, and Gordon's New Zealand English. In the fourth chapter, the authors explore NZE vocabulary and related discourse features. Already in the 1679 visit of James Cook to Aotearoa (New Zealand), Māori words such as pā were adopted into the English language. Up until about 1860 though, NZE stopped …

New Zealand English 3

This is the third post in a series on Hay, Maclagan, and Gordon's New Zealand English. In the third chapter, the authors introduce the reader to NZE's morphosyntax. Morphology concerns how different parts of a word work together to create meaning. After something is done it can be undone. The un here signals the reversing of the action, though …

New Zealand English 2

This is the second post in a series on Hay, Maclagan, and Gordon's New Zealand English. After addressing consonants and vowels, i.e., segmental features, features pertaining to a single segment in a word, the authors move on to suprasegmental features. These still concern how New Zealand English (NZE) sounds. They belong to phonetics and phonology, rather than …

New Zealand English by Jennifer Hay, Margaret Maclagan, and Elizabeth Gordon

Over the holiday period I thought I'd dip into some books on New Zealand English (NZE). After Q & Eh: Questions and Answers on Language with a Kiwi Twist, I have found Hay, Maclagan and Gordon's more formal introduction to be quite accessible to the non-specialist. After introducing the reader to the geographical and historical context of NZE …