Win - Invent Your Own Language In Minutes. What concepts do not exist in the English language? Carl Honoré (In Praise of Slow) says Canada's Baffin Island Inuit "use the same word—'uvatiarru'—to mean both 'in the distant past' and 'in the distant future.' Time, in such cultures, is always coming as well as going.
" In an essay by Louise Edrich (Two Languages in Mind, but Just One in the Heart), she writes about learning Ojibwemownin and how "nouns are mainly desginated as alive or dead, animate or inanimate...once I began to think of stones as animate, I started to wonder whether I was picking up a stone or it was putting iteslf in my hand. " I'm fascinated by language reflecting culture and vice versa. Any reference you've run across in passing or even know about as a multi-lingual MeFite is welcome. Moreover, if English isn't your primary language, what words/concepts made you take pause? 20 Obsolete English Words that Should Make a Comeback. Photo: Katherine Hodgson If we all start using them, these words can be resurrected.
DURING MY UNDERGRADUATE studies as a Linguistics major, one of the things that struck me most is the amazing fluidity of language. New words are created; older words go out of style. Words can change meaning over time, vowel sounds shift, consonants are lost or added and one word becomes another. Living languages refuse to be static. The following words have sadly disappeared from modern English, but it’s easy to see how they could be incorporated into everyday conversation. Words are from Erin McKean’s two-volume series: Weird and Wonderful Words and Totally Weird and Wonderful Words. 1.
Verb trans. – “To confuse, jumble” – First of all this word is just fun to say in its various forms. 2. 3. Verb trans. – “To scrape together; to gather together from various sources” – I’m sure this wasn’t the original meaning of the word, but when I read the definition I immediately thought of copy-pasting. 4. 5. 6. 7. 20 Awesomely Untranslatable Words from Around the World. Write Your Name in Elvish in Ten Minutes. Write Your Name in Elvish in Ten Minutes You want to write your name in Elvish, but every place you go seems to make it harder than it ought to be.
Elvish writing looks beautiful and mysterious, but does it really have to be impossible to understand? Why doesn't somebody just spell out the alphabet so you can simply substitute the letters and get straight to the result? Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo. The sentence's meaning becomes clearer when it's understood that it uses three meanings of the word buffalo: the city of Buffalo, New York, the somewhat uncommon verb "to buffalo" (meaning "to bully or intimidate"), as well as the animal buffalo.
When the punctuation and grammar are expanded, the sentence could read as follows: "Buffalo buffalo that Buffalo buffalo buffalo, buffalo Buffalo buffalo. " The meaning becomes even clearer when synonyms are used: "Buffalo bison that other Buffalo bison bully, themselves bully Buffalo bison. " Sentence construction Bison engaged in a contest of dominance. This sentence supposes they have a history of such bullying with other buffalo, and they are from upstate New York. A comic explaining the concept The sentence is unpunctuated and uses three different readings of the word "buffalo". Free demo to create avatars using Text-to-Speech (TTS) by SitePal.
Paralanguage. Paralinguistic information, because it is phenomenal, belongs to the external speech signal (Ferdinand de Saussure's parole) but not to the arbitrary conventional code of language (Saussure's langue).
The paralinguistic properties of speech play an important role in human communication. There are no utterances or speech signals that lack paralinguistic properties, since speech requires the presence of a voice that can be modulated. This voice must have some properties, and all the properties of a voice as such are paralinguistic. However, the distinction linguistic vs. paralinguistic applies not only to speech but to writing and sign language as well, and it is not bound to any sensory modality. Even vocal language has some paralinguistic as well as linguistic properties that can be seen (lip reading, McGurk effect), and even felt, e.g. by the Tadoma method.
Aspects of the speech signal[edit] Perspectival aspects. 20+ Ways to Learn a Language Online. Earlier today we mentioned a plugin for AIM that would translate what you type on the fly into another language.
That's an exceptionally useful tool, but the far more fluid and accurate way to speak to people in another language, is to actually learn the language. Thankfully, there are a wide variety of ways to learn languages online, many of them available for free. Learn the phonetic alphabet.
By stretch | Thursday, December 31, 2009 at 3:18 a.m.
UTC How often have you been on one end of a telephone conversation that went like this? A: "Okay, give me the MAC address. " B: "Zero zero, zero two, six bee--" A: "Six what? " B: "Bee. " ...and so on. The phonetic alphabet is a mapping of individual letters and numbers to specially chosen words which are unlikely to be mistaken for one another (for instance, none of the words in the phonetic alphabet rhyme). About the Author Jeremy Stretch is a network engineer living in the Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina area.
Comments Dedan (guest) December 31, 2009 at 3:28 a.m. I find this usually identifies the person I am talking to as a veteran. CiscomonkeyDecember 31, 2009 at 3:45 a.m. I do this by habit (former military here). Haakon (guest) December 31, 2009 at 3:58 a.m. Using the NATO phonetic alphabet saved me so much frustration when doing first level helpdesk.
GabrooksDecember 31, 2009 at 3:58 a.m.