In English, we use concision (many short words or phrases) as well as an economy of language (fewer words), the preference we demonstrate for the impersonal vision of reality (objectivity), our calls to evoke feelings (appeal to the senses, images), the abstract analysis and the lack of naming of the agent of an action (passive [...]
Posts Tagged ‘English language’
Two Different Internal Logics
Friday, June 19th, 2009Adjectives: Differences in English and Spanish
Friday, April 3rd, 2009In English, adjectives are always spelled the same and, syntactically, are almost always placed before the noun. In Spanish, there are a few that are generally unchangeable, but the majoirty aren’t, and nearly all of them denote the number of the subject (singular or plural).
Its expressive value differs depending on if it is placed before [...]
Subject Verb Object
Friday, March 27th, 2009 Both English and Spanish follow the S-V-O (subject – verb – object) order, though each to a different degree.
In contemporary English, this scheme is preferred by the majority of speakers and writers. In Spanish, it is a basic order that the language often moves away from as a result of style guidelines and individual [...]
History of English Lesson
Friday, March 13th, 2009How I love the history and development of languages! It is a never-ending labyrinth of discovery and surprises, all reflecting the wonderful creative nature of human beings.
Recently I found the BBC article on the oldest words in English, which used the study performed by researchers at Reading University as its basis. While I enjoyed learning [...]
Different Types of Calque
Friday, March 13th, 2009Paronymous calque or loan word: is the result of an incorrect correspondence between two words that have similar forms or etymologies but that have evolved differently in their respective languages to the point that they now have different meanings (semantic transfer).
At times it happens because, between two words etymologically related in English, but with a [...]
What is a calque?
Friday, March 6th, 2009 It is a class of loan in which phrase is borrowed from another language, but each of the elements of the phrase are translated.
This type of loan is known as a “calque”. It involves respecting the syntactical structures of the target language (week-end, “fin de semana”). There is also “structure calque” in which the [...]
Sapir-Whorf and Experimentation
Thursday, January 15th, 2009If any of you languagephiles out there are not familiar with the Spair-Whorf hypothesis, it posits that the language a person speaks influences his or her thought patterns perception of the world. I have always found this fascinating for a variety of reasons, but especially when considering something like word order in the construction of [...]
Natural Translators?
Friday, December 26th, 2008What kind of person might naturally be a good translator? Maybe this seems like a silly question but I, having been exposed to linguistic diversity relatively late in my life, sometimes find myself envying those who have been exposed to greater linguistic diversity and have an apparent facility with language learning and, especially, the use [...]
Language Preservation Policies
Friday, December 19th, 2008Public policies aiming to preserve a national language are most commonly associated with small nations, whether they be small nation-states (i.e., Iceland, Ireland, and Estonia) or minority nations within a larger nation-state (i.e., Quebecois French, Basque, Catalan, and countless indigenous languages). Nevertheless, now many larger countries are taking action to preserve their majority languages.
The most [...]
Language Change and Technology
Friday, December 12th, 2008Following up on my last blog, it is worth discussing another important cause of language change: technology. While technological innovation and dissemination have always influenced language change, some speculate that the scale of such influence today may lead to more rapid and significant changes than in the past due to the nature of contemporary technological [...]
English does not make sense
Wednesday, December 10th, 2008I hate to break the news to you, but I am officially declaring the language as beyond any point of hope in terms of understanding its systems, conventions, and rules. Wait…was I supposed to put that comma before the final item of the list? It depends on who you ask!
I was browsing through the updated [...]
The Past Tense – Then and Now
Tuesday, December 2nd, 2008English is evolving in numerous ways on a daily basis, be it through new words put in use (as cited here last week), new expressions, or a change in the way we use words already in use. The past tense is an excellent point of reference for this phenomenon. I was reminded of this when [...]
New Words in English 2008
Tuesday, November 25th, 2008The Oxford English Dictionary, whose corpus of texts now contains over 2 billion words, recently released its list of new words for inclusion in the Eleventh edition in the Revised Edition of its Concise Oxford English Dictionary.
http://www.askoxford.com/worldofwords/newwords/?view=uk
Some of my thoughts:
“Best”, as used in phrases such as “best of breed” is [...]
