GalacticCactus Forum
Forums => English & Linguistics => Topic started by: Porter on February 13, 2008, 07:30:52 AM
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This is a thread where you can post odd/incorrect/interesting/cute/fun/whatever English formations you've heard.
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Xerxes has finally learned that "just a minute" does not mean "no".
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Care Bear uses the word "very" in a fun way. "I very love you." "It very hurts." After I've been talking with her, I sometimes find myself using it the same way."
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When my kid was five, I took him to the museum. I told him that we could see the mummies from ancient Egypt. After a couple of hours of schlepping around the museum, he was starting to get tired. He told me that he wanted to go see the mummies from Ainsh now.
"The mummies from where?"
"Ainsh. I've seen enough Egyptian mummies. I want to see the ones from Ainsh."
"I don't know about any mummies from Ainsh. What makes you think that there are more mummies?"
"But . . . but . . . you said!"
"I said?"
"You said that we were going to see the mummies from Ainsh and Egypt. I've seen enough Egyptian ones. I want to see the ones from Ainsh now."
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When Mario was a toddler and learned how to demand "cookie", we started giving him crackers and calling them cookies. They were usually goldfish crackers.
When we went to Sea World, he'd point to all the fish and yell out "Cookie! Cookie!"
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John's been learning to count. Yesterday at lunch someone said "one" and he immediately responded "two." We said, "very good, what comes after two?" He thought for a second and answered, "Grape!"
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Liam obviously thinks "other one" is a single word or idea. So he'll say things like, "other one shoe."
He also is using "it" as his one-size-fits-all personal pronoun. Where's Daddy? There it is! Where's Liam? There it is! He does use I as the subject of sentences, though: "I need a spoon," "I want more chocolate milk," etc.
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I find myself dropping articles when I speak English with Asian people. "I would like banana." "You will bring book?"
I have no idea why I do it. It would be more helpful for their learning if I used correct English, but for some reason I unconsciously strip down the grammar.
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Eh, they got to level up gradually, like the bosses in a videogame.
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Is very smart. Thank you, Pooka.
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The four-year-old uses yester + night/day or week + when we [did/saw this one thing] when telling stories.
"Remember yesternight when I was at Grandma's house and we had popsicles for dessert?"
She'll also use days or occasions or events + months. "Remember the Saturday in March when we all went to the movie?"
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I think it's cool to see what innovations kids come up with.
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Is the "yester" in "yesterday" or "yesteryear" related to the word "later"?
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I was just wondering where yester comes form, but I can say without looking it up that it almost certainly isn't related to later. I'll go post about it in the Etymology of the Day thread.
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Yeah, I heard about this before in yesterthread.
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By the way, the OED has entries for yestereve/even/evening, yestermorn/morning, yesteryear, and yesternight. Forms of yesternight and yestereve appear to go back at least a thousand years, but it looks like the others were coined during the 1700 and 1800s.
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I sometimes use yesterweek and yestermonth.
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Japanese has words for the day before yesterday and also the day after tomorrow. And they have fun ways to do the same thing with years and weeks and months:
rai shu = next week
sa rai shu = week after next
sen shu = last week
sen sen shu = week before last
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Some arabic dialects have funny borrowings from English. Like, they use "stock" (or the phonetic equivalent thereof) to mean "old fashioned" and "model" to mean "year."
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I'd like to see a book of English loan words in different languages - that would be funny. One of my favorites in Japanese is manshon, which means a small apartment complex. My companion gave me directions one day when I was practicing leading the way. "She lives in the manshon on the left."
I rode past it about 3 times. "The manshon! The manshon!" she yelled from behind.
I don't know what she was talking about. There were NO mansions in that part of town.
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Mansion always makes me think of maison.
One of the arteries through ours subdivision is Mansion House. I just wonder where they got that, I mean, if it wasn't Joseph Smith's Mansion House in Nauvoo.
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Japanese has words for the day before yesterday and also the day after tomorrow.
Hebrew does too.
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Japanese has words for the day before yesterday and also the day after tomorrow.
Hebrew does too.
So does French.
Hindi uses the same word for both "yesterday" and "tomorrow". I'm sure many other languages do as well.
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What are the words in French?
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Isn't lendemain "day after tomorrow"? I don't remember a "day before yesterday" word.
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Isn't lendemain "day after tomorrow"? I don't remember a "day before yesterday" word.
avant-hier: day before yesterday
surlendemain: day after tomorrow
lendemain is "the next day"
German has them as well:
übermorgen: day after tomorrow
vorgestern: day before yesterday
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manshon
I like ????? waishatsu, from "white shirt", but it refers to shirts of any colour.
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avant-hier = literally "The day before yesterday."
I'm trying to figure out why this isn't as cool to me as the Japanese words ototoi and asatte. At first, I thought it was because the words weren't related to the words yesterday and tomorrow at all, but I looked at the kanji and it turns out they are.
?? = kinou = yesterday
??? = ototoi = day before yesterday (lit: one-previous-day)
?? = ashita = tomorrow
??? = asatte = day after tomorrow (lit: bright-after-day)
Those aren't cool and original at all.... only their readings. My guess is that native Japanese already had pronunciations like ototoi and then when the Chinese introduced writing, they just assigned some kanji to go with it, rather than give it a new name based on the Chinese pronunciation of the kanji.
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So you're looking for words for "day after tomorrow" and "day before yesterday" that are opaque or not analyzable into components or whatever the term is. The Japanese words might have been opaque back in the day.
Telugu has
????????? ?valimonna n. the day before the day before yesterday.
????????????? ?valellu??i adv. the day after the day after tomorrow.
???????? a?umonna adv. the day before the day before yesterday, three days ago.
????? monna n. and adv. the day before yesterday
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Interesting.
Goofy, who are you, by the way?
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Interesting.
Goofy, who are you, by the way?
I'm just a guy who reads Jonathon's blog and I sort of invited myself on here.
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It's not like you needed an invitation. My policy has always bee that anyone's welcome to join, though so far almost everyone here I either know from Hatrack (http://www.hatrack.com/cgi-bin/ubbmain/ultimatebb.cgi) or am directly related to.
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Invitations weren't required? I'd have been here sooner if I hadn't waited for mine to come.
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I didn't mean to sound hostile. I was just admiring your skills of a linguist. :)
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So you're looking for words for "day after tomorrow" and "day before yesterday" that are opaque or not analyzable into components or whatever the term is.
I was going to observe that the german terms are fairly predictable for german morphological habits. English is the weird one, but I guess that's why this is the Fun English foibles thread.
I do have a habit of calling my boss' boss and friends of friends grandboss and grandfriend. Then I can talk about my great great grand boss and so forth. But it probably annoys people the way it annoyed me how my mom used to stress the penultimate syllable of daffodil. Freak.
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That sounds kind of similar to weird missionary lingo, such as "mom" (or "dad") referring to the companion who trained you. And if you had a new companion your second transfer (when you're still a "new missionary" and thus in your childhood), she is your stepmom. And when you go home you die.
This had some pretty disastrous results when I met up for lunch with some old companions a while ago. "Did you know that Elder C died? I can't believe it!"
"Elder C?! He's DEAD?!"
"Yeah. Shinjirarenai, ne?"
(a third companion:) "He's dead? Oh my heavens. What happened?"
"I know. We're so old!" *pause* "You do know I'm talking about mission dead, right?"
"Oh," visibly relieved. "I forgot. Yikes. I'm glad he's OK."
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That sounds kind of similar to weird missionary lingo, such as "mom" (or "dad") referring to the companion who trained you. And if you had a new companion your second transfer (when you're still a "new missionary" and thus in your childhood), she is your stepmom. And when you go home you die.
I've never heard any of that before.
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I was going to observe that the german terms are fairly predictable for german morphological habits. English is the weird one, but I guess that's why this is the Fun English foibles thread.
How is English the weird one? Yesterday and tomorrow are as unalysable as hier and demain, or ototoi and asatte.
Speaking of Japanese, check out this cool phonological/mathematical pattern in the numbers. It's clearer if we look at Old Japanese:
fitö- 1
futa- 2
mi- 3
mu- 6
yö- 4
ya- 8
In modern Japanese:
hitotsu - 1
futatsu - 2
mittsu - 3
muttsu - 6
yottsu - 4
yattsu - 8
A change in the vowel indicated a doubling of the number.
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...which is really handy unless you have a hard time differentiating between yokka and youka, and you show up for an appointment on the 8th day of the month instead of the 4th. :)
Japanese numerals are pretty fascinating. A lot of the counters use the native Japanese pronunciations, but a lot use the Sino-Japanese numerals. So whereas one number concept has one word associated with it in my English brain, in the Japanese brain, "4" can have multiple linguistic equivalents, all based on two basic roots that sound nothing like each other.
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How is English the weird one?
Because we have to use a phrase to express "day before yesterday" and "day after tomorrow" rather than employ agglutinative morphology, which is certainly available in other aspects of the language. I think it may be more common with Latin stems, though, while our units of time descend from the Germanic line.
I think I've heard "die" with respect to a last area. It's the opposite of being green. We get so many greenies in our area, it's crazy. More than half, for sure, and we've only had two die in the two years I've been on the mission committee. One was sneaky and never let on that that was the case.