The Klallam dictionary is the first-ever dictionary of the language, which previously was only spoken!It weighs in at about six-pounds, contains more than 1,000 pages and took almost thirty years to complete.The language is native to the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State were about 5,000 Klallam live on three reservations.When University of North Texas linguist professor Timothy Montler started the project in 1978 about 100 people spoke Klallam as their first language, today there are two left."The language is a jawbreaker for English speakers, with some words containing back-to-back consonants that are true pronunciation gymnastics"and now it is available in...
On The Road With Minnesota Fats
“I’ve been shooting pool since I was four years old. No con. By the time I was six I was playing for stakes. My first sucker was a neighborhood kid in Washington Heights. I spotted him coming out of a candy store with an enormous bag of gumdrops. He was about five years older than me but I shot him straight pool and I won every last one of his gumdrops. He went home crying. When I was ten I started playing for cash” (Minnesota Fats, The Bank Shot and Other Robberies).My introduction to Minnesota Fats, legendary pool hustler: It’s...
New Online Dictionary For Word Mavens
In the beginning there was the Word.But without a dictionary no one knew how to spell it, pronounce it, how to use it in a sentence, if there was another word that was its opposite or meant the same thing, or where the word came from. In short, the whole story of the word was unavailable to the speaker. For the writer, fugetaboutit; tough enough to carve out those cuneiforms, you had to wing it on spelling and all the rest.Thence wrote Samuel Johnson his dictionary. Then Noah Webster. The Oxford English Dictionary followed. (Yes, I know I’m leaving out...