Recent Posts

11

English & Linguistics / Re: Interesting language stuff

« Last post by Porter on May 24, 2025, 10:28:18 PM »

I could only make sense of it by thinking hard about what the Latin roots are for words like "atom", "hydrogen", "proton", "helium", "element", etc..

Most of those words, as commonly used, have nothing to do with their root.

I normally think of word "helium" is just the word for element #2.  I could use it or hear it 10,000 without thinking about its connection to "helios".

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English & Linguistics / Re: Interesting language stuff

« Last post by rivka on May 20, 2025, 09:50:30 PM »

Indeed.

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English & Linguistics / Re: Interesting language stuff

« Last post by Brinestone on May 20, 2025, 06:06:36 PM »

That is almost impossible to make sense of.

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English & Linguistics / Re: Interesting language stuff

« Last post by Tante Shvester on May 19, 2025, 10:56:03 AM »

Here's an article about Atomic Theory written in Anglish, which is English purged of all words of non-Germanic origin.  It reads like a fantasy novel.

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English & Linguistics / Re: Interesting language stuff

« Last post by rivka on April 03, 2025, 09:09:03 AM »

Fascinating.

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English & Linguistics / Re: Quotes from work

« Last post by rivka on February 28, 2025, 01:06:32 PM »

Quote from a financial-aid-related podcast I am listening to: "Well, when the zombie apocalypse finally does come, just sign me up for hiding in a cave with a bunch of financial aid administrators!"

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English & Linguistics / Re: Strange Proununciations

« Last post by Ela on January 30, 2025, 09:26:50 PM »

Yeah, apparently it was a legit pronounciation. And it is close to the French pronounciation. But I've never heard it pronounced that way by an American before.

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English & Linguistics / Re: Strange Proununciations

« Last post by Noemon on January 30, 2025, 09:55:23 AM »

There's was a story on NPR about President Jimmy Carter's malaise speech and the NPR reporter pronounced it ma-lez, which I guess is close to the French pronounciation, but not the way I've ever heard it pronounced in English.

I heard that! It completely pulled my attention away from the content of the piece. I thought maybe she'd just kind of stumbled over the pronunciation, but then she did it again.

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English & Linguistics / Re: Funny English and Linguistics stuff...

« Last post by Noemon on January 30, 2025, 09:53:16 AM »

I have been using captions on Netflix and Prime a lot lately. And have noted when they do (or do not) indicate in the caption when speakers elide letters. (As in the example, do the captions say "gonna" or "going to" when what was said was definitely the former, etc. Do the captions reflect accents, real (either of the actor or the character) or temporary (like funny voices when a parent is reading a book to a child), and so on.) It's quite interesting.

Do you have opinions about spelling those out in, say, a novel or short story?

Personally, I find it very hard to read dialog that is attempting to reflect the accent.

In Philip Jose Farmer's Riverworld books who spoke with a lisp. Farmer insisted in writing all of his dialogue with the lisp preserved. He was a fairly major character. It was maddening to me when I read the books in late grade school/early junior high.

I loved those books, but recognized that they were pretty badly written even at the time. I had a lot more patience for bad writing back then, apparently.

Eesh, you can tell I wrote that on a phone. Sorry!

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English & Linguistics / Re: You keep on using that word

« Last post by Tante Shvester on January 30, 2025, 03:12:37 AM »