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10 Real-Life Places That Inspired Literary Classics. Пополняйте словарный запас иностранных слов и выражений. 20 Obsolete English Words that Should Make a Comeback. Photo: Katherine Hodgson If we all start using them, these words can be resurrected.

20 Obsolete English Words that Should Make a Comeback

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.

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Bambara Bulgarian Cambodian Catalan Chinese Czech Danish Dutch Lao. Geoffrey Sampson: Birth of English - StumbleUpon. Geoffrey Sampson The quick answer A brief but accurate answer to this would be “very roughly 1500 years ago, give or take a century or so, on the Eastern side of the island of Great Britain — in what we now call the East and South-East of England (but nobody called it ‘England’ then)”.

Perhaps this is too vague for you — you would like a date? As a respectable academic, I ought to say this is as precise as we can be. But if you press me — all right, then: in a symbolic sense, at any rate, perhaps we might say that English began in A.D. 449, at a place called Ebbsfleet on Pegwell Bay, near Ramsgate in Kent. Language change and language splits The vague answer was really the right answer. Even after a language has changed virtually out of recognition, people will not usually give different names to the old and new languages unless there is some strong reason to do so.

Proto-Germanic into English Britain before English Actually, that is not quite a word-by-word translation. Cives Romani Sumus.