Yesterday, I wrote about why Great Britain is so-called, but if the Great is to distinguish it from Brittany, why not use a word more clearly related to size, like Big or Large? Why use Great when so many people assume it’s meaning in the name is to indicate how wonderful Britain is? Continue reading
I’ve been away for a few days, and found myself unexpectedly without reliable WiFi. I was in Brittany which, if you’ve never been, is a really beautiful part of France with great landscape, food, and drink. As a travel destination it’s great, but it’s also linguistically very interesting. Continue reading
Sibling is an interesting word. It’s quite useful for the lazy among us. If you don’t want to say I have 2 brother and 1 sister, you can simply say I have 3 siblings. Easy! It’s understandable why we have separate words for brothers and sisters, as they’re obviously fairly distinct from each other. But it also makes a lot of sense that we have the word sibling, as it’s a quite distinct concept in its own right, and it’s not hard to see what a brother and sister share in common.
Curiously though, sibling is a difficult word to translate into other languages. Continue reading
I’m probably not alone in having been intensely curious as a child about what I assumed was called gorilla warfare on the news in the 80s. I think I was always sensible enough to know that it wasn’t war waged by great apes, as much I wished that were something that existed. I think at some point I thought it might have involved the massacre of gorillas, possibly around the release of Gorillas in the Mist. But I think it realised pretty soon that it was very human warfare, especially as they always showed human soldiers or jungles on the news (I imagine that gorilla warfare would be quite visible and thus provide some great footage). I still never knew quite what it was though, and never considered that the word I was hearing wasn’t actually gorilla. Continue reading
On the surface, the verbs to leave and to let might seem like quite distinct entities. To leave means to go away, and to let means to give permission. Simple.
But the words are closer than you might think. Continue reading
I’ve been busy the last few days, but I just want to share a quick thought about an interesting Dutch word I learned back at the beginning of my grand Duolingo (my brain always wants to call it Duolinguo) experiment. This word is… Continue reading
Another brief thought about gin and tonic. Yesterday evening, it occurred to me that another factor in the drink being called gin tonic in so many languages might be a knowledge of the English language’s fondness for forming compound nouns. People might hear what sounds like gin tonic or perhaps ginnentonic, and just assume that we’d just pressed the two words together, as we’re wont to do.
As I’ve said before, compound nouns are often tricky for learners of English, particularly speakers of Latin languages, who often use a noun+of (the)+noun construction in their native tongue, when we English speakers form a compound noun. It might seem then that forming a compound noun should be easy to learn: instead of saying something of the something, just put the two words together. Done! Except of course, it’s not quite so simple. Continue reading
English-Language Thoughts 