thoughts or states English doesn’t have a convenient standard-English expression for We can talk about the blahs or the dumps but there’s cultural context here and some history of the idea as a ‘state of being’ that has some cultural importance.
I could add others. Latin: “pietas”—simultaneous right relationship to the three realms of creation: celestial, terrestrial, infernal, and right relationship to your parents. “Paterfamilias” Father of the familia… head of the family with certain rights and powers, and spiritual presence—somewhat like the Godfather. Materfamilias, a tinged with the female rights and privileges; gravitas—seriousness, or weight, or ‘presence’ in the sense of having an impact on people. The -as indicates a ‘state of being’. You also have several words for brown re yellowness or not, several words for black depending on opacity/transparency; a few words for red, again with implications of transparency or not; one green; one white; one blue, really; and then you can shade them with sub- as in ‘sorta’ Subrufus = reddish.
Greek: beaucoup religious symbology, understood not as, eg, literal snakes-for-hair, but the association of snakes with the earth and under-earth, a creature that comes out of the earth. Greek lit is full of this sort of thing. Not to mention the habit of packing particles together to form an idea. The Greek title Anabasis is translated ‘the march to the sea’ but it’s made up of pieces: ana=again, or back the way you came; ba = go; sis =state of being or process…So as they’d come to where they were and decided to fight their way back out of Persia, the work is called the ‘process of going back again’ or the ‘march to the sea.’ You can go crazy learning Greek until it dawns on you at about 3 am in your third semester that it’s all a jigsaw puzzle of pieces, and they’re the same little words dressed up in a lot of suits like hypo (under) hyper (excessive/over) kata (down or flat) and that if you memorize one verb’s crazy parts, everything that rhymes with the thing in the first place behaves like it in its other parts—doesn’t work all the time, but often enough to help.
…and I have heard of one language which has no word for red, but calls it yellow-brown. OTOH, while reading Hanta Yo, I realized that much of the structure, and many of the particles and words of the Sioux language are very similar to Japanese…
The Romans are amazingly Japanesque. A lot of the belief system—if not identical—has a similar resonance.
hmmm… going into surgery at the age of 14, feeling homesick for a place I’d never been… watching your child elated with being in love with a total rotter, and smiling for their benefit… after looking at the charts, I realize that there are even more feelings that I have no words for than I had previously thought!
We do have a colorful language when it comes to states of being — feeling blue, seeing red, being green with jealousy, brown-nosing (being subservient or sycophantic), being yellow (cowardly), feeling in the pink of health. I have all sorts of ideas about how language molds thought, and how it perpetuates cultural beliefs and values through expressions long after the culture has “outgrown” (or tried to) them (like the pronouns that gets chosen to go with the singular “everyone” and “each” are the masculine singular — we’re trying to change that by using “their” but “everyone” and “each” take singular verbs. . . .). Ursula LeGuin touches on some of those same ideas in her novel “The Dispossessed,” the people who set up a new society on the moon found it necessary to invent a new language to cut the perpetuation of the cultural and political system they were trying to get away from. That the politics and culture are so ingrained in the language that in order to change the culture, you have to change the language. That’s part of what fascinates me about the Foreigner series — how language and culture are intertwined, and how Bren becomes “Atevi-ized” by his total emersion in, not just the language, but the culture it reflects. We talk of the “language barrier,” but it goes much deeper than that — the first language you learn as a child structures your brain to suit it, and affects how you think, whether you realize it or not.
See this list of color expressions:
https://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pRXsSKXObs1_fNNJtveoQUw
What on Earth? Paul had posted a reply earlier, overnight, I think. Then in the early morning hours, I had posted that I liked his new avatar. But that looks like it merged his and my post. Er, that should not happen, I don’t understand it. (Paul and I are two different people in different states and posted at different times… just very odd.) — If it matters any, I had posted from an iPad.
In the Spokane thread? Looks fine to me.
Like your new avatar.
Words for color are really interesting. You might think that every culture has the same concept of color, but they don’t.
The normal assumption is that the words ‘red’, ‘blue’, ‘green’, ‘yellow’, etc. must have exact equivalents in every language, but this is far from being the case.
If you ask a Gaelic speaker, “What color is the grass?”, he may reply, “Glas”. “And what color is that old man’s hair?” “Glas.”
Homer kept mentioning οἶνωψ πόντος. This is usually translated in English as ‘wine-dark sea’ – which is a bad translation.
What did he mean by that? The short answer, after centuries of discussion by experts, is that nobody knows.
See this fascinating page
http://www.starchamber.com/colors/colors-and-language.html
…so how do the Atevi see color? 🙂
LIkely not the same as humans. 😉
Re the wine-dark sea—I don’t think linguists will understand it until they’ve been on the Med in heavy weather. I made one little ferry crossing in a semi-storm morning sky in which the water, ordinarily one of two shades of brilliant blue, turned strangely darker, a difficult color to define, but ominous, especially as the waves were getting up. The Med is not like any other ocean, except maybe the colorful shallows of the south Pacific or the Caribbean, combined with the rocky treacherousness of the north Atlantic coast. So while the wine dark sea is not literal, I would say it’s like that word ‘glas’, which can apply so many places.
I never knew what Whitman meant by calling water ‘leaden’ until I was hammering a fishing weight flat. There were silvery arches on the dark of the oxidized base, and I thought, “Oh! How true!”.
You wouldn’t think the Med could get rough, but I was stationed onboard a heavy cruiser (displacement 18,000 tons) We drafted 36 feet at the bow, and one afternoon, out in the middle of the Ionian Sea, waves were well over the forecastle, winds in excess of 50mph. The sea was definitely dark, and because the Med is pretty much landlocked, it doesn’t get the rollers from the North Atlantic coming in and creating interference with the Med’s waves. I’ve got a picture, but it was taken in 1979, before we had digital cameras and I don’t have a scanner that works right now. 🙁
(For blue) [quote] Greek has γαλάζιο and μπλ. [/quote] (From the article to which GreenWyvern linked.)
MPL ? Surely there’s a vowel missing from that Greek word? Or did they regard the L as syllabic there? Pronounced (not quite) like “(u)mp(u)l” ? — I didn’t think Greek omitted vowels. I’m confused.
Galazio looks related to galaxy, galactic, and a dark blue would make sense for the night sky, a light blue for the daytime sky. If “galazio” is related to “galaxy, galactic,” then that also makes sense. Though I thought “galaxy, galactic” was supposed to be related to (Latin) lactis, milk, for the Milky Way, with the connection being that the ancients imagined the lighter band in the night sky as being milk spilled from the earth goddess or (another) sky goddess.
Google translate gives μπλε
http://translate.google.com/#en/el/blue
ah, now I know why they call the riotous night in October in Paris la nuit blanche! fascinating. .. and I love the picture of the colour of a donkey on the run in Portuguese 😀 Shakespeare uses colour to denote mood – a green and yellow melancholy pops into my head from Twelfth Night
as someone who uses colour in my work – I’m a knitwear designer – I have to christen a lot of quite subtle colours that just have numbers, in order to remember them, more words that describe gradations in colour would be very useful! there are of course technical words, that painters use, for reds there’s carmine, scarlet, vermilion, madder … and the lakes to denote transparency, but mostly one needs a combination of words to get the exact shade ….
mostly I use an evocative word – plough, or hedge, or thuya and that helps me remember the exact colour – no-one else would get it though! 😀
The only “thuya” I know of is as in “Yuya and Thuya,” the parents of Queen Tiye, the wife of Amenhotep III.
Thuya? What’s that? And what language?
The Old English (Anglo-Saxons) somehow didn’t have a word for orange. It was apparently yellow-red or red-yellow or red-gold; the latter still has evocative connotations. I’ve seen somewhere that “tawny” (or Norman tenné) may have been their orange as well as yellow to orange tan.
Gravitas: should I assume it didn’t connote charisma, or the feeling, a little like man’chi, the desire to follow and serve a leader, a magnetic personality, a strong leader or at least the desire to be around a charismatic person? Gravitas, gravity, still carries the gravitas associations in English, though grave (adj./adv. to describe someone’s manner) adds a negative, too-serious, frowning, or fatalist tone.
One of the earliest things students learn when learning a Latin-derived language, is they have two important distinctions that divide “to be” and “to know”. The distinction between them actually permeates the whole language structure. There is one word class for a more permanent and complete state of being or knowing, and for any verb action. There is another for a more temporary, incomplete, continuing state of being, knowing, or verb actions. So you have two types of past tense, one for finite (simple preterite) and one for imperfect (continuing or incomplete). French merged the two “to be” verbs, but otherwise kept the distinction, such as for “to know” and all verbs. Then French adds a bizarre (to me) be versus have divide for compound past verbs.
So, for example, ser in Spanish means to be permanently, always, unchanging, complete sense; while estar means to be in a temporary, changeable, incomplete, continuing sense.
Then saber in Spanish, savoir in French, mean to know in total, completely, thoroughly, a thing or subject; while conocer or connaître mean to know or to understand or to be familiar with a thing or subject, to be acquainted with it. You always know a person using the conocer or connaître verb, you cannot know someone completely with saber or savoir.
Then when talking about any past action, the verb form says right away what degree of completion or continuance there was. Once you understand the way they divide it, it’s simple.
There is also a clear distinction in action or thought between definite versus indefinite and perhaps contrary to fact, might occur, maybe didn’t. The subjunctive and to an extent, the conditional. English has nearly lost the subjunctive, but kept the conditional.
What is odd to me about most European languages, which got lost and changed halfway in Germanic and then English, is how European languages deal with gender. Every noun and adjective and article (a/an/one/some, the/this(etc.) ) has a grammatical gender and number: masculine, feminine, neuter, singular, sometimes dual, and plural. Except the third person pronouns follow a different class system. Depending on which descendant European language it is, they may have he, she, it, and matching plural they forms, or they may go by what is essentially the demonstrative this, that, these, those, that over there, those over there, sometimes with the gender distinctions. But oddly, the pronouns, including third person, did not have much distinction between gender (he, she, it) it was more indefinite, like one or they.
English really needs a gender-neutral he-or-she-unspecified singular third person pronoun. Instead we tend to use they, them, their, or else the too-formal one or too-long someone for this sense. In the plural, we just use they. We don’t use “it” for people, because it would be insultingly rude.
But the worst problem for English is lack of a plural you form. “Y’all” from the American South, has been gaining ground throughout America, and Australian friends tell me it is appearing there some. The other forms are youse (yez) or you guys. I’m Texan, so I’m in the y’all, to y’all, of y’all’s camp. But because I’m a city-boy raised with standard textbook formal English, I say you for proper English or you guys informally, but most often in everyday speech, even educated people slip into using y’all. The possessive, y’all’s, is regarded as less acceptable than your…but you hear it more now. — it is not proper use of the y’all form to refer to one person as y’all, except in the very Deep South or when layin’ it on thick for the tourists. However, when you need to make a distinction between y’all in the immediate group and y’all in the whole group, everyone, then you say, all y’all. There is a companion form, we-all, but it is not as commonly accepted.
In other words, language is always changing.
I proof and edit. I’m trained for proper English. — I would swear we are losing the -ly forms, the singular versus plural verb endings, dropping the -s, and there’s no understanding of -‘s for possessives or contractions. Common usage seems to be using -s with no apostrophe or -‘s with the apostrophe when that’s not right by the textbook, and popular use is picking up -z for -s or -‘s. — But that apostrophe before or after the s only started around the 1600’s and 1700’s. I “get it” when people use the -z for slang, it even makes some phonetic sense.
I’m not sure anymore it’s worth bothering about “whom.” That one is nearly gone.
I’d also bet that get/got is going to become the verb for to have, whirl have will become strictly auxiliary, a helper verb. But I’ve rambled on enough; I gotta go. 😉
Gotta, hafta, woulda, coulda, shoulda, wanna, lemme, whatcha, wouldja, coulda, shouldja, and so on…. To and -have and -you may become fixed forms.
I would be fine with thru, tho, altho, thruout, if those became standard. Maybe even a few more.
I just wonder how we’ll re-merge US/UK spelling.
Anyone for thorn or theta, or aesc (ae), or schwa e ? Macrons over vowels? Heheheh.
thuya is an evergreen hedge shrub, it smells of oranges when you crush the leaves. i have quite a lot in my hedges.
@BCS, di’ja ever see the multi-part PBS documentary Robert MacNeil, of the MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour, did about the various versions of English?
Re: “thuya” – Thuja (pron.: /ˈθjuːdʒə/ THEW-jə)[2] is a genus of coniferous trees in the Cupressaceae (cypress family). There are five species in the genus, two native to North America and three native to eastern Asia. The genus is monophyletic and sister to Thujopsis.
They are commonly known as arborvitaes (from Latin for tree of life) or thujas; several species are widely known as cedar but because they are not true cedars (Cedrus) it has been recommended to call them redcedars or whitecedars. (Wikipedia)
Thanks, both. — No, I haven’t seen that series. I’d really like to.
If’n you’ve got high-speed internet you might be able to watch it online at pbs.org. They keep a lot of that stuff online.
Interesting. Here in WA we have red cedar, which is a huge tree.
We have arbor vitae quite prevalent, but I don’t remember it having an orangey smell. It’s a common small ‘builders’ special’ type shrub the builders put in to prove they did landscaping. They have a finite lifespan, however, and Jane swore mightily when we had to pull 2-3 monsters from our house frontage. They’d died in the center, which was all brown and brittle, and absolutely bound to catch fire and go up like a VW-sized torch right under our eaves if some fool flipped a cigarette butt. So one of the first things we did was pull them, which entailed Jane sitting in the flowerbed, digging around the roots until we could find them and saw them and haul those stickery-pokey monsters out. Ours were about 8 foot or more tall and very wide, but almost all dead. The only thing harder to remove would be juniper, which she also has had to take out, half-dead and really, really stickery; or the grey lilacs that had totally filled the beds around the weeping cherry. I think you could get Jane to run screaming if you mention arbor vitae, juniper, or ‘let’s plant a lilac.’ Although…she has been talking about a proper red-purple bright lilac for near the garage. There, it would be safe.
Ummm… they’re meant to have the brown bits cut out and the fallen needles scraped away, then they put out new branches from the stems. you can also topiary them, if you have the patience…
Western red cedar is Thuja plicata. (I pulled out the Garden Book: couldn’t remember which of the many cedars it was.)
McNeil did a book, “The Story of English” that goes with the documentary, BTW. Have it in my stacks.
The neuter gender in German should not be forgotten. As recently as the 1920s, ‘it’ was used to refer to ‘the child’. And, not to forget, when a man is called a genius, a woman of the same qualities is called a juno…
Grammatical gender does really odd things when it comes to “animate” nouns, people, animals, living things. Or inanimate objects and ideas. — My high school French teacher used to cite “le vase” (the vase, masculine) and “la vase” (the mud or slip or clay, feminine) as a prime example. If anything, one might expect mud to be more “masculine” somehow, and a vase to be more “feminine.” Not that either is particularly anything, gender-wise.
English dropped nearly all that, with a few exceptions, such as “she” for ships and other vehicles. The other Germanic languages have kept it.
With French, you have to remember ending consonants or irregular forms, and the spelling, which is *almost* as odd as English spelling.
I think we have the Vikings to thank for the dropping out of all that Anglo-Saxon declension business in English — and also for some interesting word pairs –e.g., skirt and shirt (Norse and AS respectively for a tunic like garment worn by both sexes — and really interesting how the two words diverged and became names for different, gender associated garments in later English) The Norse speaking Vikings never really got a handle on all the “little fiddly bits” of Anglo-Saxon grammar, thankfully.
I figured it was because English got run over so many times by other languages. Between the Vikings and the Normans and the Celts around the edges and the influx of Latin words in the Renaissance, the conjugations and declensions got flattened.
BlueCatShip wrote: “I’ve seen somewhere that “tawny” (or Norman tenné) may have been their orange as well as yellow to orange tan.”
In heraldry, which is mostly derived from Norman French, tenné can mean either orange or brown. ‘Or’ means either gold or yellow. ‘Argent’ is either silver or white.
I seem to remember a line (although not the source) from the Glenda Jackson miniseries Elizabeth R (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_R) “Behold, the lion’s cub in all her tawny glory.” — A portmanteau reference to ER as Henry VIII’s daughter in terms of temperament and having red hair like her father’s. Maybe it was because I saw it first, but I’ve always considered Jackson’s version the definitive ER, and as much as I love Helen Mirren as an actress, her version didn’t have the “juice” that Jackson’s did. (Mirren’s EII is better than her EI.) I’ve yet to see an actress’s portrayal of ER that can hold a candle to Jackson’s.
@BCS: aren’t Thuya (Leylandii) hedges ubiquitous in the (southern) USA? They’re very much used and much maligned in Holland! They grow fast and stay green in winter, but if not regularly trimmed can grow enormous, and won’t grow green again if cut back into the brown.
Searching for pictures gives a good idea…
@GreenWyvern, see my remark on the Ongoing Projects page (last link at the top).
CJ, the links to the database and wiki in the right-hand column don’t work, and might as well be removed as the links on the Ongoing Projects page will stay easily available. If you like, you could consolidate the info and links from my comments there and remove the excess coments, as it looks a bit too much like my pet project now. I’ll leave it to the others for a while, when I finish Foreigner: MMBerry has already said she’d do book 5, and I hope others will volunteer for some of the other books.
Heheh, I know so little about plants, it could be right around here and I might not know the name of it. Though I hadn’t heard “thuya” before. It’s possible it goes by a scientific name or by a different local name. Knowing it’s a hedge is helpful, though, thanks!
According to Wikipedia’s IPA, seems to me it should be “thu-ja”, j as in our “just”, not the “German J”.
There was some madman in GB who owned a house in one of those structured communities. He had allowed a yew (or some sort of evergreen) hedge to grow to the point of almost uprooting the house proper, and intruding out into surrounding neighbors’ yards, the sidewalk, the street… The community board was at their wits’ end, because every time they tried to fine or sanction him to get him to control his shrubbery, he would come back with various nuisance lawsuits or simply ignore them. I don’t know if they ever reached an accommodation.
For some reason, the taxonomy of that thuja or thuya plant makes me think of the yew that produced the breast cancer drug…
Naaa, the plant that they developed taxol from was the Taxus brevifolia, or Pacific Yew Tree. Thuja plicata (Pacific Redcedar) has a very similar range, but isn’t closely related.
Blame it on the bonsai habit! One of these days when I’m rich I’m going to get some of each for bonsai, but they’re fairly hard to get. Oh well!
orange comes from the spanish – naranja translates into an orange 😀
oh hanneke thuya is not the same as leylandii. it is similar, but it doesn’t overgrow in the same way!
Re wine-dark sea again:
The word literally means ‘wine-like’ or ‘wine-color’. Homer applies the word to two things:
1) the sea, without seeming to refer to any particular state of it
2) oxen
Make of that what you will! 🙂
My feeling is that it means white wine (i.e greenish-yellow color), greenish-bluish-grayish sea, and blue-gray oxen. But not many people seem to agree.
That, greenish, bluish, or greyish sounds reasonable, compared to white wine, if you aren’t too picky about the exact color.
If it were red wine, then that can vary from a deep red to a deep red-violet, or sometimes a brownish red cast.
I suppose it might depend on silt or algae content, time of year, how much stirring there is in the water, as to how blue-green or purplish-red / reddish-purple or brownish a given stretch of seawater might be.
Then again, it’s a nice phrase regardless, and I suppose we say some odd things with old poetical / lyrical connotations, old idioms and phrases and the like.
Both seas and oxen, eh? — Could there be some additional color association or metaphorical association that would connect them, say a third notion? — I suppose there’s no way to know without other examples of usage of the phrase.
Somehow, “wine-dark sea” sounds evocative, even though the color doesn’t seem to fit.
I’d be fine with thinking it refers to a greenish-bluish-greyish color close to white wine.
… Has anyone ever suggested there was an additive, such as spices or other fruits, that might give another color to the wine? … Or, “wine,” is it strictly (etymologically, derivation) referring to wine or alcohol from *grapes*? In other words, would the Greek word ever have encompassed other fruits, alcohol from grains (beer or mead or similar), and so on? If so, it might be an alternative.
:shrugs:
Who am I to quibble over Homer’s poetic license? Hah! (Or generations of Greek oral tradition, either.) 🙂
Homer also uses the word ιοδνεφής, which is usually translated as violet, to describe sheep.
Violet sheep? 😕
But when I looked at this photo, I immediately thought ‘Yes! This is what he meant by violet sheep!’.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/16/Hebridean_ram.jpg
It’s not really violet, it’s a kind of dark purplish-brownish color. We would say a ‘black’ sheep, but you can see that it could be considered as part of the purple-violet-brown range of color.
One of my friends used to do spinning and weaving, and that color is very desirable in wool.
That’s a neat sheep. Great color. You could even say it’s a baah-baah-rian. (Yes, I know that’s where barbarian comes from, that and beards.) 🙂
Odd. The spellchecker just tried to replace that with bash-bash-roan. Which means (1) it’s taking word components between the hyphens as tokens, and (2) it apparently has never heard a sheep go “bash!” and (3) it doesn’t like my bad puns. Everybody’s a critic!
I can’t see an allusion to white wine, but I can see one to red wine. Red grapes producing a wine that was trending toward “oxblood red” or maroon. White wine wouldn’t be dark. “Wine dark seas” to me always suggested a quality of opaqueness which red wine has, that white wine doesn’t, and as deep water would have, versus shallow water, where you could see the bottom.
MAK just shared this with me:
http://www.collegehumor.com/article/6872071/8-new-and-necessary-punctuation-marks
LOL! These are hysterical and I completely approve and see wide applicability for a lot of them!
Such fun — this has been making my brain dredge up elements of a semester of linguistics and multiple years of high school French long, long ago.
BCS, I’ve also wondered just how fast the language is evolving. Having grown up in California and living in Arizona for over 35 years I now find myself using ‘you all’ in emails for the you plural. Using a simple you which should encompass both singular and plural looks and feels woefully inadequate. I will admit to using thru in informal situations but always through in reports.
One thing that I find very funny at the same time as very intriguing, it the rabid defense of proper grammer by an old friend’s 25 year old son when so many of his age group seem intent on using only techno shorthand. Makes me think I need to get him a t-shirt I’ve recently seen:
Let’s eat Grandma.
Let’s eat, Grandma.
PUNCTUATION
SAVES LIVES
I can also remember heated arguments as a kid in high school over some spelling forms I used that my English teacher didn’t approve: judgement, honour and behaviour come to mind. I still find myself using the British form today and am honestly mystified where/how I decided that’s the correct spelling. I was a voracious reader even as a kid, so that could be behind it.
With regard to the Z, I’ve often wondered what was the trigger to US English substituting a Z for an S in words like civilization when the British keep with civilisation? Or the US substitution of S for C, i. e., defense and defence.
And Paul, it’s a great new avatar!
…and why grey, when it sounds like gray? I protest the ‘correct’ spelling every time I write it! Spell checker be accursed!
Why, thank’e, sir. No prizes for guessing next month’s. Not that I have anything against cats.
Heheh, get him the t-shirt, he’ll love it. I’m one of those who was brought up with proper English, so it flummoxes me to see some things. But I play along and have fun with others.
On the spelling issue, it probably goes back to the 1700’s in the American Colonial period, when there wasn’t any “standard” spelling anywhere. People spelled things how they sounded or how they remembered the spelling. So it might be S or C or Z, O or U or OU or sometimes E or EU, whichever suited them. Two of the Founding Fathers argued whether the word should be “inalienable” or “unalienable” rights. 😉 Daniel and Noah Webster and others on the US side, and others on the UK side, started compiling dictionaries and pushing for standard spelling and grammar. The Americans wanted to differentiate their language and culture, and thought an entirely separate language would arise. Even into the 1800’s, spelling wasn’t really standardized. That became a concept of 1800’s education, to create a consistent standard spelling.
Of course, what none of them really foresaw was that the very increases in speed and ease of sailing ships for transportation, and later industrialization and automation, would make transportation and communication so much quicker that, despite distance and regional differences, English would remain in contact worldwide and begin coalescing back toward one standard form. And no one anticipated the effect of mass media and then the internet on that.
“Judgment” is a very strange exception. The International and UK spelling is “judgement,” but the US spelling is “judgment,” oddly without the E. The rationalization is that the dg forms the J sound, going back to Old English cg or c + yogh, and so it’s a J sound. Never mind that in “Edgar” it’s not, or that the usual is that ge, with the E often silent, gives the J sound in ge and dge. It’s things like that in both American and British English that really make one want to throw up one’s hands and yell in aggravation at all the little “except in this case and that one!” rules.
French is only slightly better. It has more consistent rules for pronunciation, but some of the vowel and consonant combinations to provide for French sounds, then the traditions around those, are…problematic. “Queue” and “Eau,” and several others, for instance. Eau could be just an O and no one would mind except etymologists. Queue could as easily be kö or koe, or something like that, and it would be simpler. But at least French isn’t so bad about multiple ways to say “-ough,” for instance.
— I loved that link with the punctuation marks!
Screw ’em. The goal of the exercise is communication, rules be damned.
Much of the difference between British and American spellings (-or versus -our, and z versus s, particularly) is a direct result of the Revolutionary war, and was done deliberately by the Americans to emphasize their separateness from England by getting rid of the “fancy aristocratic British” spelling in favor of a simpler, more “democratic” spelling. A little bit of teenage rebellion mixed in with the political rebellion?
One cause of the problem with spelling that English has was the invention of the printing press right in the middle of the Great Vowel Shift, when pronunciation was changing rapidly. The printing press had the effect of “freezing” the orthography in a transitional state, before it could catch up to the pronunciation (through, night, etc.,), and now it’s gotten to the point where the pronunciation is so out of whack with the orthography that to update it would be so much of an undertaking that you’d never get it off the ground. That’s also the problem with French spelling. The orthography didn’t keep up with the shifts in pronunciation. Although the French have L’Académie française which makes rulings on what is and isn’t French, how new words will be spelled, and what their grammatical gender is, they’ve never kept the orthography concurrent with the pronunciation. The Spanish, on the other hand, have diligently kept the orthography updated to reflect the changes in pronunciation. If you know how Spanish pronounces the letters of the alphabet (and double “L” versus only one “L”), and the rules of Spanish pronunciation (if a word ends in any consonant except “n” or “s”, the accent is on the last syllable; if it ends in a vowel, or “n” or “s,” the accent is on the next to the last syllable; if neither of these rules fits the pronunciation, then the accent is written in), you can pick up something in Spanish and read it aloud, whether you know what it means or not. And BTW, that South American guy’s name is “See-MOHN Boh-LEE-var,” not “SY-mon Boh-lee-VAR” because the pronunciation of both names doesn’t follow the rules, and (in Spanish, at least), the accents are written in to reflect their atypical pronunciation.
As to Gaelic orthography, I think the Gaels deliberately made the orthography tricky to thumb their noses at the English and make it as difficult as possible for an English reader to figure out how to pronounce it from the written word.
Know a jewel-like little town right on the Southern California coast called “La Jolla”? It doesn’t help when Anglos who know less than they think they do try to figure out the spelling of a Spanish word.
That one’s not hard. You can get a lot more people with ‘Hueneme’.
OH, for those who don’t speak Spanish, the word for Jewel in Spanish is “La Joya”! 😉 Yes, the “ll” is, depending on dialect, pronounced quite like “y”, but that doesn’t mean the Spaniards don’t have a “y” when they want one.
That’s just pronounciation–pretty much like: “Why need me?” I like La Jolla because it shows the misplaced arrogance of the dominant culture. They could have asked a Spanish speaker–it’s not as though there weren’t plenty around San Diego.
I am wondering if the Navajo/Dineh word which gas been translated into English as ‘beauty’ isn’t much more like pietas…
@Tommie…..hmmm. Can you be more specific on what you are seeing as ‘pietas’? To me, that brings up imagines of michaelangelo’s sculpture of the Virgin hold Christ as He was brought down from the Cross. I have a friend who is Navaho and I can sure ask, but I’d like you’re take on pietas first.
Tommie, sigh. My brain hurts. I just went way back to the top and saw CJ’s definition. I bet that’s the one you were referring to. Odd how my question to you just goes to show the whole thread of what CJ was pointing out in one fell swoop.
Aha! Ask my friend Noni that had gotten a question wondering if the Navajo word which has been translated into English as ‘beauty’ has more wide reaching connotations. The question evolved out of a multi-day discussion involving linguistics and how some cultures have a single word to express an entire concept. Any thoughts on that one??
And here’s her response: The Navajo word for beauty is ‘nizhoni’ and it does have a much larger meaning.
It can be applied to something that is aesthetically attractive but it has much more to do with something that is in a positive state of well-being. There is a prayer that asks, ‘may beauty to be all around you’, and it is referring to a holistic sense of well-being, positive thoughts, positive energy, etc.
The word ‘nizhoni’ may also be used as a congratulation.
So it apprears to have some correspondence to pietas as CJ expressed as Tommie thought.