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timmy
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Has no life at all |
Location: UK, in Devon
Registered: February 2003
Messages: 13751
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Interesting report from Lexis Nobile, a journal of words and letters, regretably not online:
All the neologisms nowadays are making dictionaries longer and longer. We seem unable to turn around before someone has added new words, new phrases, to the ever increasing wordlists. Now the Shorter Oxford Dictionary (actually a weighty tome in its own right) is planning a reshuffle.
The full edition, which we'd really prefer to know as "The whole shebang", will continue to contain and track the English language to the fullest possible extent, based on verifiable words. But "shebang" is a neologsim that will not make the cut for the Shorter dictionary, despite being acknowledged in the language for many years.
Alongside the project they are removing words no longer in common parlance. This includes such terms as stouthrief, and hamesucken, both crimes in Scotland, but wholly non notable anywhere else, one meaning entering a home forcibly with a view to theft, and the other meaning the same, plus beating the crap out of the householder. Other words not to make the cut alongside shebang include "gullible", "palimpsest", and brand names such as "rotovator". The "Corn Flake" remains, despite being a brand name.
Critics have said that this is a precursor to the rationalisation of spelling, potentially on the US model, where apparently redundnat letters are stripped away. They fear that "modelling" will become "modeling", and that "leverage" will also be redefined as a verb instead of a noun.
Never say this forum is not educational.
Author of Queer Me! Halfway Between Flying and Crying - the true story of life for a gay boy in the Swinging Sixties in a British all male Public School
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Ummm very interesting, but I’ll stick with the pan galactic gargle blaster.
OH and always remember DON’T PANIC
People will tell you where they've gone
They'll tell you where to go
But till you get there yourself you never really know
Where some have found their paradise
Other's just come to harm
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cossie
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On fire! |
Location: Exiled in North East Engl...
Registered: July 2003
Messages: 1699
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Despite its origin in a learned journal, this is typical tabloid journalism.
Whilst it is true that new words are being coined more rapidly than was the case fifty years ago, there have been periods in history (the 15th to the 17th centuries, for example) when the coinage rate was even greater.
If something new is invented, it needs a name. Usually, the name ascribed is accepted in other languages - apart, perhaps, from French and Welsh, where national pride is regarded as more important than common sense! Together with some literary coinages - mostly from quality newspapers - this accounts for the 'intellectual' element of language expansion. The 'common' element comes from colloquial speech - and that means the way that most of us communicate face to face. Colloquial speech is transient - some words stick, some have a life of a few years or even a few months. The full-scale Oxford Dictionary tracks colloquial speech more than ever before, but it still contains just about every word that ever occurred in dialect English. It's a record of our history, as well as of our present.
The Shorter Oxford Dictionary - two large volumes retailing at around £100 for the pair - must clearly be selective, though I'm surprised if 'shebang' doesn't appear, as the word is widely used. You want the whole works? You pay for the whole works - and most of us ordinary mortals can't afford it.
But - and this is the important point - unlike France, where the Academie Francaise can legally prohibit the use of foreign words or constructions - the UK has no 'word police'; the Oxford Dictionary doesn't make things happen, it simply reflects what is happening on the street and in academia. If (and I shudder at the thought!) the majority of the UK population spell 'traveller' as 'traveler', then traveler will become the correct spelling. I hope it doesn't happen, because although the rules of British English pronunciation are fickle and inconsistent, there is a general rule that if a vowel is to be short, it should be followed by two consonants. So, in British English, 'traveler' should be pronounced 'traveeler'. But, if the rest of the population decides otherwise, there is nothing that I, or the Oxford Dictionary, can do about it. And, surely, that's the way things ought to be?
For a' that an' a' that,
It's comin' yet for a' that,
That man tae man, the worrld o'er
Shall brithers be, for a' that.
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cossie wrote:
> ....there is a general rule that if a vowel is to be short, it should be followed by two consonants.....
If that rule was in effect, wouldn't the words be spelled:
travveller or consonnants or even Brittish.
I think that there is only one constant in the english language (British or American)as far as rules go and that is that there is ALWAYS an exception.
(\\__/) And if you don't believe The sun will rise
(='.'=) Stand alone and greet The coming night
(")_(") In the last remaining light. (C. Cornell)
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I'm not a linguist, so most of this is guesswork.
I think Cossie's rule "there is a general rule that if a vowel is to be short, it should be followed by two consonants" is incomplete -- I think it also depends on what vowel comes after those consonants.
E.J. gave examples,
>travveller or consonnants or even Brittish.
I think the double letters are often put in to denote where the syllables divide. In the case of 'traveller',
Trav - el - ler (a good approximation of how it should be prononced)
Trav - el - er could be trave - ler or trav - ele - r, so is more ambiguous.
Like Cossie, I find that 'Traveler' looks like it should be 'trav - eeler', because the final 'e' lengthens the earlier 'e'. In the first case the double consonant ('ll') prevents that happening.
I don't think double vv exists in the English language, so I don't think this counts as an exception as such.
Cossie'll probably know better than I do.
consonnants:
Short vowels like 'a' do not usually lengthen the length of a previous vowel in the same way as 'e', so the second n is redundant (I suppose).
Brittish:
Likewise, short 'i's are not normally used to lengthen previous vowels. I appreciate that there is a slight ambiguity over 'British', but at least it is consistent in words like 'Britain', 'Briton' etc. These are all derived from Latin rather than English or Old English, which may explain the discrepancy.
David
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Deeej wrote
>I don't think double vv exists in the English language, so I don't think this counts as an exception as such.<
To chivvy (as an alternative to chivy) - Concise Oxford Dictionary
I dream of boys with big bulges in their trousers,
Never of girls with big bulges in their blouses.
…and look forward to meeting you in Cóito.
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I stand corrected.
In the case of chivvy, though, I think the syllables are chiv - vy (a stronger v sound) whereas I have always pronounced travel "trav - el" rather than "trav - vel", in accordance with there being only one v. The v is more subtle in travel, at least in my pronunciation.
David
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Is it not true that as a language ages, it becomes softer, the words become more rounded.
Kol says English is damn hard. He told me where Magyar is structured, English has a very loose structure and there are always exceptions.
I believe in Karma....what you give is what you get returned........
Affirmation........Savage Garden
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timmy
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Has no life at all |
Location: UK, in Devon
Registered: February 2003
Messages: 13751
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English has a very strict structure. It is just that verbs hardly conjugate, nouns hardly decline and genders have vanished long ago.
However, the underlying grammar and syntax is rigid as Latin. It is just concealed.
Author of Queer Me! Halfway Between Flying and Crying - the true story of life for a gay boy in the Swinging Sixties in a British all male Public School
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cossie
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On fire! |
Location: Exiled in North East Engl...
Registered: July 2003
Messages: 1699
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I should really apologise for being so superficial in the above post, but I'd already made a rambling post on another thread, and I didn't want to ramble too much on this one – but since you raised the point ….
The rule only applies to words consisting of a stem and a suffix; the most common suffixes are -ed, -ing, -er, -est, -able, -age, -en, -ery, -ish, -ous and -y.
It works like this:
If the final letter of the stem word is a consonant, it is doubled when the suffix is added if –
– the preceding vowel-sound is a single letter (so bed, but not head) or is a single letter preceded by ‘qu’ (as in quit), AND
– that vowel is the most strongly stressed (which means that all single-syllable words are included.
So ‘bed’ gives us ‘bedding’, but ‘head’ gives us heading. ‘Quit’ gives us ‘quitting’. ‘Occur’ (where the second syllable is stressed) becomes ‘occurring’, but ‘offer’ (where the first syllable is stressed) becomes ‘offering’.
Though words of more than one syllable in which the last syllable is NOT stressed don’t normally double the consonant, it is almost always doubled if the final consonant is ‘l’. Exceptions are ‘parallel’, which gives us ‘paralleled’ rather than ‘parallelled’, and ‘devil’, which gives us ‘devilish’ and ‘devilry’, but ‘devilled’ in the culinary term ‘devilled kidneys’.
This part of the rule does NOT apply in US English, so that US spelling is ‘traveler’, ‘marvelous’ rather than ‘traveller’, ‘marvellous’, but the main rule does apply, so that ‘compel’ (with the stress on the second syllable) gives us ‘compelling’.
The final consonant is sometimes doubled if the preceding syllable is fully-voiced, even though it isn’t the most strongly stressed, so ‘format’ gives us ‘formatted’; other examples are ‘handicap(ped)’, ‘kidnap(ped)’, ‘nonplus(sed)’, ‘sandbag(ged)’ and ‘worship(ped)’. Curiously, under the influence of US pronunciation of the stem word, doublings are beginning to appear in British English where they did not exist before, as in ‘banquet(t)ing’, ‘combat(t)ed’ and ‘focus(s)ed’.
The rule doesn’t apply if the final consonant of the stem word is ‘c’, ‘h’, ‘w’, ‘x’ or ‘y’, nor does it apply if the final consonant is silent – usually in foreign words. So we have ‘sawing’ rather than ‘sawwing’, ‘faxing’ rather than ‘faxxing’ and ‘crocheting’ rather than ‘crochetting’ – ‘crochet’ being a French-derived word pronounced ‘Croe-shay’.
Even the above is a simplification of the rule, but I’m sure no-one wants me to ramble any further. But the one certain thing – and the reason why language fascinates me – is that the rule will change within the next fifty years … and the next … and the next.
For a' that an' a' that,
It's comin' yet for a' that,
That man tae man, the worrld o'er
Shall brithers be, for a' that.
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cossie
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On fire! |
Location: Exiled in North East Engl...
Registered: July 2003
Messages: 1699
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... the fact that our language has been adapted by so many waves of immigrants.
There are two basic ways of distinguishing the subject and object in a sentence. Many languages do it by adding suffixes to the noun. If, as an example, we assume that the object noun is indicated by adding '-en', then 'The Kingen saw the cat' would mean the cat saw the King. Because the ending identifies the object, the order of the words doesn't matter. In essence, Latin and most Germanic languages work this way. English works differently, distinguishing the object by the order of the words - 'The cat saw the King'.
In English history, the term 'Anglo-Saxon' is often used as if the Angles and the Saxons were indistinguishable - but they were, in fact, very different. One race used word-endings in the Germanic way, the other used word order. As the various smaller kingdoms were united, eventually creating a single 'England' under King Athelstan in the 10th century, some sort of compromise was needed if Englishmen were to have any chance of understanding each other, and in the event the use of word order triumphed.
Then came the Norman Conquest; for several centuries the Church and aristocracy spoke French or Latin, and English was used only by the common people – but, against the odds, it survived and eventually became the official language of the State. It would be fair to say that during this period of exile - despite the efforts of authors like Geoffrey Chaucer - it was buggered about quite a bit! In the late medieval and early modern periods, writers were anxious to elevate the status of English. Fancy new words, constructed mainly from Latin, Greek or French, were invented, but were fitted into the existing, very cosmopolitan structure of English grammar. That’s why learning English is so difficult for those who grew up with a highly-structured language; English does have a structure, but – as Timmy says – it’s pretty deeply buried.
The main aspect of English which betrays its Germanic roots is the concept of ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ verbs. Weak verbs form the past tense and past participle by adding ‘-ed’ – I walk, I walked, I have walked – or a close phonetic equivalent – I sleep, I slept, I have slept. Strong verbs change the vowel sound – I sing, I sang, I have sung – and there is a reasonable correspondence between verbs which are strong in English and those which are strong in German.
Curiously, the verbs which are strong in US English seem to be diverging from those which are strong in British English – American English speakers seem to have changed ‘dive’ from weak to strong – British ‘dived’, American ‘dove’, while changing ‘shine’ from strong to weak – British ‘shone’, American ‘shined’. But that’s what makes the subject so interesting!
For a' that an' a' that,
It's comin' yet for a' that,
That man tae man, the worrld o'er
Shall brithers be, for a' that.
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timmy
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Has no life at all |
Location: UK, in Devon
Registered: February 2003
Messages: 13751
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Ah, and also the tomes of the great linguist Afferbeck Lauder are highly relevant here. They do take some reading, though.
Author of Queer Me! Halfway Between Flying and Crying - the true story of life for a gay boy in the Swinging Sixties in a British all male Public School
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marc
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Needs to get a life! |
Registered: March 2003
Messages: 4729
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If I am not mistaken.....
All books take some reading.......
Life is great for me... Most of the time... But then I meet people online... Very few are real friends... Many say they are but know nothing of what it means... Some say they are, but are so shallow...
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timmy
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Has no life at all |
Location: UK, in Devon
Registered: February 2003
Messages: 13751
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A lot of Prof Lauder's books are written in a dialect, though. Indeed some of the titles are dialect, too.
Author of Queer Me! Halfway Between Flying and Crying - the true story of life for a gay boy in the Swinging Sixties in a British all male Public School
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Yup, Cossie, definitely a contender for the Pedant of the Year contest!
David
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It is strange, but I find that most people who have a germanic language as first home language - like myself and most of everyone in my school - tend to want to spell 'travveler', 'consonnants', and acasionally do spell 'Brittish'. This is, I beleive, because that is how it is pronounced. It is also the rule of pronounciation and written language of many slavic and most germanic languages
A truth told with bad intent
Beats all the lies you can invent
-William Blake
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marc
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Needs to get a life! |
Registered: March 2003
Messages: 4729
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So......
Are you saying that other books do not require reading?
Life is great for me... Most of the time... But then I meet people online... Very few are real friends... Many say they are but know nothing of what it means... Some say they are, but are so shallow...
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Welcome back. What have you been doing all this while?
Hug
Nigel
I dream of boys with big bulges in their trousers,
Never of girls with big bulges in their blouses.
…and look forward to meeting you in Cóito.
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.. and to some of us foreigners it may be a nightmare!
Ask my students!
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Aussie
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Really getting into it |
Registered: August 2006
Messages: 475
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Timmy, I guess you meant 'some fathoming'. It even took a while for the penny to drop for me when I read some of them too.
Of course none of this was meant to detract from Cossies serious and very interesting post on English. Thanks Cossie, yor explanation reminded me of the main reason why I disliked English classes at school. About the only thing I did grasp reasonably well was how to spell.
And yes, the way the Americans have changed words like dived into dove does bug me. But of course English has been under change forever so there is no reason why it should, I am just resistant to change.
Sailor, I can understand how Strine would be total gibberish to a Norwegian.
Aussie
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cossie
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On fire! |
Location: Exiled in North East Engl...
Registered: July 2003
Messages: 1699
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Welcome back to our little corner of the universe - I hope you stick around and enjoy yourself!
The consonant-doubling thing is common among Brits, too. There's a broad rule of English (and I'm NOT going into detail!) that a vowel is short unless there's some specific grammatical rule to make it long. The commonest rule of this kind is to add an 'e' if the vowel is followed by a single consonant, so that adding an 'e' to 'hat' (ha-t) gives us 'hate' (hay-t). The real problem is that - unlike most Germanic languages - English doesn't have any universal rules for pronunciation. You need only think of the '-ough' words: 'bough' (pronounced 'bow' - as in bending forward at the waist, not as in the implement for shooting arrows!), 'cough' (pronounced 'coff'), 'dough' (pronounced 'doe') and 'rough' (pronounced 'ruff'). There are even differences between English regions. In the South, the surname 'Haughan' is usually pronounced 'Hawn', but in the North it's usually pronounced 'Haffan'. In the North-West, the word 'haugh' (flat, low-lying land in the bottom of a valley) is pronounced 'haff'; in the North-East, barely 50 miles away, it's pronounced 'hoff'.
There are lots of English words (mostly medical terms) ending in '-itis', pronounced 'eye-tis'. So how is anyone learning English as a second language supposed to know that 'British' is pronounce 'Brit-ish' rather than 'Bry-tish'? But, as Dee implies, the doubt would be removed if the 't' were to be doubled. (Actually, the single ‘t’ derives from the Latin ‘Britannia’, but if you were to ask a random hundred Brits to spell ‘Britannia’ I doubt whether half of them would get it right – despite patriotic songs like ‘Rule, Britannia; Britannia rules the waves’ – or, as I prefer, and perhaps more accurately – ‘Rule, Britannia, Britannia waives the rules’!)
There really isn't any defensive argument; English is a nightmare language. But it's fascinating, and I love it!
For a' that an' a' that,
It's comin' yet for a' that,
That man tae man, the worrld o'er
Shall brithers be, for a' that.
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timmy
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Has no life at all |
Location: UK, in Devon
Registered: February 2003
Messages: 13751
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Now, a fathom is 6 feet........ Oh wait. Wrong fathom.
Author of Queer Me! Halfway Between Flying and Crying - the true story of life for a gay boy in the Swinging Sixties in a British all male Public School
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timmy
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Has no life at all |
Location: UK, in Devon
Registered: February 2003
Messages: 13751
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The phrase "some reading" appears not to cross the Atlantic. It is used here to imply that they are challenging to read and/or understand.
There are books that rquire no reading at all, with the possible exception ot cover and general blath. Picture books come to mind. Others are empty school exercise books. But it ought to be clear that I was not referring to either of those 
Author of Queer Me! Halfway Between Flying and Crying - the true story of life for a gay boy in the Swinging Sixties in a British all male Public School
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That phrase does cross the atlantic, at least in the south. Ive heard my grandfather use that befor. Oh, and the meaning is the same.
I believe in Karma....what you give is what you get returned........
Affirmation........Savage Garden
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cossie
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On fire! |
Location: Exiled in North East Engl...
Registered: July 2003
Messages: 1699
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... that sounds like the name of some far-flung and best-forgotten rock on the fringes of human knowledge. Hey! I've heard of a place like that! It's inhabited, but the natives speak a curious and unfathomable language called 'Strine', and display no discernable signs of intelligence. In fact, I've heard it said that the only intelligent life-form on Strya (and, co-incidentally, the most visually attractive!) is the duck-billed platypus. Oh, yes, and the most numerous species, the ape-like 'Strine' conducts a strange courtship ritual, displaying elements which have a certain similarity to Victorian social gatherings, concealed in ritualistic areas known as 'billabongs'. The male Strine is known as a 'Bruce', and the female as a 'Matilda'. Aussie, am I right so far?
For a' that an' a' that,
It's comin' yet for a' that,
That man tae man, the worrld o'er
Shall brithers be, for a' that.
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Aussie
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Really getting into it |
Registered: August 2006
Messages: 475
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Cossie, as usual your research is impeccable. The only thing you appear to have omitted is that the male of the species have a tinny or stubby of VB permanently welded to the right hand and of course keep well away from the women of the species (well you would wouldn't you),whilst standing around the BBQ sucking on their tinnies.
BTW G'day mate.
Aussie
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>The male Strine is known as a 'Bruce', and the female as a 'Matilda'.
Is that not a 'Sheila'? Or does that apply only to the non-waltzing variety?
David
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