English

Wherefore Must Thou Misquote Me?

Niall O'Donnell 24 Comments

I could write a number of different posts about William Shakespeare, and I probably will end up doing so. Genius is a word that can be thrown around too easily, but I think we can safely apply it to Shakespeare. The number of words he coined, the beauty of his language, and the thematic richness of his works are incomparable to much else. But I won’t write too much about him now. What I’m interested in for the moment is when people get Shakespeare wrong. There are many of his quotations everyone is familiar with, regardless of how much they know about his work. But quite often, we misquote or misinterpret them. For example: Continue reading →

Muckanaghederdauhaulia

Niall O'Donnell 14 Comments

The above is the longest place name in Ireland, and is obviously quite a mouthful. It’s an Anglicisation of the original Gaelic name Muiceneach idir Dhá Sháile, which, as you all know, means “pig-shaped hill between two seas.” Most modern placenames in Ireland are similar Anglicisations. For example, many Irish towns begin with Bally- or Balli-, coming from the Irish word Baile (town) being part of the original name. A town like Ballycastle would have originally been name Baile an Chaislean (town of the castle).

Such Anglicisation can lead to redundancy. This is often the case with rivers, as many of them begin with Owen-, from the Irish word abhainn, meaning river. So Abhainn Buí, meaning the Yellow River, was translated to the River Owenboy.

Some pretty ordinary sounding placenames have such origins, but some can be a bit of a mouthful due to some clumsy translation: Continue reading →

“Ok?” “Okay!”

Niall O'Donnell 33 Comments

Ok (or okay) is one of those words (like hiccup/hiccough), wherein I always thought the different spellings could be attributed to one being an older, more formal spelling of the word, and the other a modern abbreviation. I assumed that okay was the original spelling, and ok the modern version, after some clever individual realised that the two letters pronounced one after the other sounded the same as okay. But like hiccough and hiccup, I was wrong to assume so. Continue reading →

Unstoppable

Niall O'Donnell Leave a comment

A response to the daily prompt: https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/unstoppable/

As anyone who’s had to learn English knows, it can be a frustrating, illogical language at times. It can be hard to find hard and fast rules, and when there are rules, there are always exceptions.

The word unstoppable though, is a nice example of how sometimes thinking logically about English makes sense. Continue reading →

Motherland or Fatherland?

Niall O'Donnell 7 Comments

Why do the inhabitants of some nations refer to the country as Motherland, and some Fatherland? The answer is a little complicated, unsurprisingly.

The use of both terms became most common in works of propaganda during World War II. This is particularly evident in the cases of The Soviet Union and Germany. Many Soviet propaganda posters of the time feature the phrase za rodinu! (For the Motherland!). Rodina, the Russian word for homeland, is a feminine noun, and many related words with the stem rod are associated with motherhood, fertility and procreation, so it perhaps makes sense that Russians would conceive of Mother Russia. Continue reading →

I Thought I’d Thought you Better than That!

Niall O'Donnell 8 Comments

I think everyone has little things that people say or write that drive them crazy. Things that are strictly incorrect, like I could care less, I should of known better, or I’ve went there a lot. I try not to get annoyed by such things, but there’s one that always bugs me: thought instead of taught. Continue reading →

You are Where you Live

Niall O'Donnell 4 Comments

Acoustic adaptation is a theory in naturalism which suggests that the sounds animals make adapt to their environment: either as a result of their physical environment, or other sounds around them. You can notice that in cities, for examples, were birds will often seem to mimic the man-made sounds they hear every day. Recently though, some linguists have suggested that human languages undergo a similar process of adaptation.

Though this theory have yet to be conclusively proven, there are some intriguing ideas behind it. The main principle believed to affect the sound of a language is the frequency sound waves can travel at in a particular environment. For example, consonants don’t travel well in areas of dense vegetation such as rainforests, and therefore languages which developed in such landscapes are light on consonants and feature long vowel sounds with lots shifts in tone. Continue reading →