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Post by hermoine on Jun 4, 2004 8:11:06 GMT -5
You know I often wonder, what is really the difference between program and programme?
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Post by En on Jun 5, 2004 11:49:50 GMT -5
Doing Romeo&Juliet for English Literature, the teacher told us of this thing when the actors seem to be talking to themselves. It's called a soliloquy. I found it a bit hard to say it at first, I couldn't say it, the 'l' kept coming. Oo, I like that one - from "solo" alone and "loqu-" words. So much more eloquent sounding than a 'monologue' which essentially means the same thing
On program/programme - people in the States only use 'program.' I've always used 'programme' for television shows, plans of study at school, and to describe the order of events for a planned ceremony (graduation, etc), but I do use 'program' for items of computer software?
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Post by hermoine on Jun 5, 2004 12:10:34 GMT -5
K. Thanks for the clear-up.
Yeah soliloquy does sound better than monologue. Infact now you mention it, when doing Romeo&Juliet the teacher referring to it as soliloquy and when doing prose she said monologue. Could be just to evitate confusion though.
I also used to get mixed up when writing the word metaphor. I used to write it with an ere.
Lats time, this same English teacher, started sort of singing to show us how to write the word onomatopoeia. Yup, I even did it to write it now. She said "Onomato" then "p-o-e-i-a" in a sort of sing song voice going from one side to the other. Believe it or not, it's a good way of learning things. We all remembered it pretty clearly. She told us her daughter tells her how silly she looks, but she said she doesn't care, as long as her students learn it.
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Post by En on Jun 7, 2004 10:46:16 GMT -5
That's funny. I never thought there might be a difference between soliloquies and monologues because the words are so similar The root word "loq-" and "log-" are both from the Greek word "logos," word. But I bet you're right, the difference is probably between poetry and prose....
Heh. I do dorky things when in teaching mode as well, and I'm sure my younger siblings get annoyed with me when I'm doing it, but if it works... That's a good way to teach the word 'onomatopoeia' considering what it means ;D
I wonder if the word for 'hope' in French/Spanish/etc (espere, esperanza) is related to the words 'inspiration' and 'expire'? Both of them come from the Latin 'spir' breath - with all of the religious connotations attached to that because of the story of Adam in Genesis. Hm. I don't have a French etymological dictionary
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Post by hermoine on Jun 8, 2004 8:34:17 GMT -5
Yeah that's true.
How can we ever know from where certain words originated? I mean we say some words come from Greek or Latin words, but what happened before? How did the people of ancient times come up with the words? It's not like they just sat down and started writing down the noises which was the lnguage they used was it?
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Post by Sphi on Jun 8, 2004 16:03:32 GMT -5
Yay.
I would expect that esperanza comes from spiro. In particular, it would be ex-spiro, which (taken literally) means to breathe out. And you know the expression "to hold your breath"? It would be like that, then. You hold you're breath because you're hopeful and expecting something, I suppose.
Well, language has to start somewhere, right? The really basic words we can only guess at. Maybe because it started with hieroglyphics and pictographs, and then maybe those looked like the words. But then the more "complex" words (something like "introspective") came from putting together the basic ones (in-specto = look into)
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Post by En on Jun 9, 2004 11:20:04 GMT -5
Hm... 'expire' as a euphemism for death comes from the idea that you could breathe out the 'breath of God' that was supposed to have animated Adam. That doesn't sound very hopeful But you could be right.
Zeph, I don't know if this is still the case because I haven't followed linguistics news in some years, but there was a time when linguists were very hot to try to figure out a sort of 'proto-languge.' They do have an increasingly clear picture of Indo-European, the language from which Latin, Hindu and several other 'core' languages in Asia and Europe evolved, but I'm not sure how far along we are in connecting Indo-European back to other language roots.
As far as writing - that was developed quite a bit after spoken language, as far as we can tell. The earliest systems of writing were essentially tally-marks, for counting and keeping records; these were followed by pictographs representing useful things like sheep and grain. Somehow the markings began to take on other meanings, particularly when used in combination with each other, and then people in the West made the leap from using these pictures to indicate ideas to using them to indicate sounds. The pictures got simplified over thousands of years into the letters we know as the Latin, Hebrew, Greek, Cyrillic, etc. alphabets. Ideographic languages (like Chinese) went a different direction - more connotative information got packed into parts of symbols, which could then be recombined to convey added meaning.
But yeah, last I knew, they were still hoping they could find a protolanguage. I think it'll probably be like the quest for Mitochondrial Eve - they used to think they could trace everyone's mitochondrial DNA (little bits of DNA that aren't combined in your cells' nuclei, but come directly from your mother) back to some first-human-woman, but in fact, they've found seven different original women so far. My bet is that several different groups of humans developed language in different places and times, so there probably isn't one single protolanguage.
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Post by hermoine on Jul 8, 2004 7:46:05 GMT -5
I was looking around and found this article on Yahoo. They've added some new words to the Dictionary, one of them being Va-va-voom. ;D There are some more; I'll post the article here:
"Thanks to a French footballer's television commercials for a popular French car, the English language officially has a new word: Va-va-voom.
"The quality of being exciting, vigorous, or sexually attractive," say the compilers of the 11th edition of the Oxford Concise English Dictionary, which hits bookshops Thursday.
Thierry Henry speaks the word -- or more precisely, asks just what does it mean -- in prime-time plugs for Renault, which hired the suave Arsenal striker to give its humble Clio sedan a more masculine image.
Few anglophones outside Britain may have seen the ad, but July Pearsall from Oxford University Press said va-va-voom now was common enough to merit a place in one of the world's most widely consulted dictionaries.
"We have evidence of it going back to the 1950s from the US as imitating the noise of an engine," she said.
"But it is Thierry Henry's use of the term in the TV adverts that has earned it a place in the dictionary. We have seen it used more widely as a result."
Other new entries owe their introduction to the Iraq (news - web sites) war, she said.
They include "blue-on-blue" ("denoting or relating to an attack made by one's own side that accidentally harms one's own forces) and "bioweapon" ("a harmful biological agent used as a weapon of war)".
Other new terms include "congestion charge" ("a charge made to drive into an area, typically a city centre, that suffers heavy traffic") and "designer baby" ("a baby whose genetic make-up has been selected in order to eradicate a particular defect, or to ensure that a particular gene is present").
"Speed dating" ("an organised social activity in which people have a series of short conversations with potential partners in order to determine whether there is mutual interest") also makes the Oxford dictionary pages.
So too does "flash mob" ("a public gathering of complete strangers, organised via the Internet or mobile phone, who perform a pointless act and then disperse again)".
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Post by En on Jul 8, 2004 14:39:26 GMT -5
Ahahaha! Yeah, I'd been hearing 'va-va-voom' crop up a lot more in the last year, but I assumed it was from a "Saturday Night Live" sketch or something, sort of like the brief period during which it was popular to make a positive statement and then say (usually in a very nasal voice) "Not!" as in:
So 'flash mob' made the dictionary, huh? Are those still going on? I think it's a fabulous idea, but it's hard to find people to mob with in eastern Iowa
I was thrilled when 'Muggle' made it a couple of years ago. Check it out - if you look in the unabridged version, there's even a quote from one of the Harry books ;D
When I grow up, I want to get a word in the dictionary. That's a big goal of mine. Pretty dorky, huh?
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Post by hermoine on Jul 9, 2004 2:22:52 GMT -5
He, I had never realised that Muggle had been added. ;D
Well, I think that's pretty interesting. You had anything in mind as of yet? My aunt made a dictionary, stuff to do with Business Studies and all, and it's just for her Uni. project but hey. She's been wroking ever so hard on it.
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Post by En on Jul 10, 2004 15:44:25 GMT -5
That's awesome. Business terms change so fast anymore - faster than military and even faster than computer, sometimes. So that would be a big job
I make up words all the time, but I can never remember them after I've used them, because I make them up when I'm trying to convey something that doesn't have just one word, and later I never remember what I was talking about. But one word I know is mine might get some academic use, if I write the master's thesis I have in mind - the word is "Alternarratives" and there's a thread in here about them
Do you ever make up words?
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Post by hermoine on Jul 11, 2004 10:34:55 GMT -5
Well she took like the syllabus of say 2 years when you're studying Business Studies, and she and a friend of here did it.
Alternarratives huh? Might I ask what it means? You wanna do your Masters' Thesis? My dad's doing it currently.
Yeah I do. Buut, most of the time, I forget them.
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Post by Will on Jul 27, 2004 23:00:35 GMT -5
Er...Sorry to interrupt this nice little conversation. I just wanted to share this interesting word with all you wonderful Trapdoorians.
Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia - This is apparently the fear of... long words. Wouldn't you have guessed?
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Post by hermoine on Jul 28, 2004 3:01:36 GMT -5
Yeah. I mean who could spell, a word, not wait, a sort of sentence like that in one go? I wonder who comes up with these words.
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Post by d on Jul 28, 2004 16:45:44 GMT -5
I'm just wondering how a person with the fear of long words can tell anyone about their problem when they're afraid of the word itself. You'd think that someone would be nice enough to come up with a shorter term for it.
Here's my favourite long word:
Antidisestablishmentarianism
We used to have contests on who could rattle of the spelling fastest. I was pretty good at it LOL.
En, I'll have to check out the thread on your word. I've made up a few before, usually adding a prefix or suffix to something in oreder to convey the meaning I want to.
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