The word “etymology” comes from the Latin word “etymologĭa” and also the Greek word “ἐτυμολογία,” which is composed of “ἔτυμος étimos” (true sense”), and “λογία” (“the study of”). Therefore, etymology is the study of the meaning of words, or parts thereof. For example, Latin and Greek are two “heavyweights,” as they are the source of […]
Last week we spoke about a curious group of words known as heteronyms: words that are spelled the same as each other, but which are pronounced differently. Aside from being sounded out differently from one another, these words also have different meanings. There is another set of words that are similar to heteronyms but instead […]
Growing up in a bilingual home setting, I was very lucky to learn both Spanish and English from a young age. I never had to think much about what I said in either language, I just said what “made sense”. But, whenever I would speak to non-English speakers and they would ask me the why […]
The other night I was listening to a version of Eleanor Rigby by the talented Uruguayan musician Leo Masliah. This particular version has got so many variations and modulations (changes of key) that at one point I realized that there was no way he could know the whole thing by heart. Of course, he writes […]
A delightful example illustrates well one of the earliest myths about the problems that may arise when trying to translate text using a computer. The biblical sentence “The spirit is willing, the flesh is weak” was translated into Russian by a machine, and then back into English. The result was “The vodka is good, but […]