Aug 15 2022 - Shortcomings

 

Is there really an opposite for the word shortcoming, particularly shortcomings.   It seems that the English language has many negative words without a positive counterpart.   If the prefix or suffix is negative, such as 'dis-' or -'less', the word can be called an orphaned negative. There's a long list of them in wikipedia HERE. What about underwhelm and overwhelm - what would it be to be whelmed?   That sounds hilarious, doesn't it?  What a dress she was wearing - I was whelmed by it. On the other hand, there are quite a few "whelmed" headlines on google.   How about nonchalant vs chalant - he carried himself in a most chalant way. Even better are these pairings:  irritate vs ritate and innocuous vs nocuous.  One that I regularly enjoy is inert vs ert.  In Scottish English you might say feckless and feckful.  That's because they both come from the Scottish word 'feck'.  It can mean part, majority or value, worth.  If somebody has feck then they are feckful – efficient, energetic, and powerful.  Equally if they are feckless then they are lacking all those attributes and pretty useless as a result. There are many bloggers who write about the English language.  I quote this one on the topic of words without counterparts: "I could write a story here about a macculate and peccable guy who tried to radiate a sense of ertia and eptitude by being chalant and plussed despite the fact that he was neither kempt nor couth."

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Sep 29 2021 - The Decline and Fall of the English Language

 

These are the introduction sentences on the topic of the decline of English:  "Do you weep for the decline of the English language? Do people’s grammatical aberrations on social media fill you with horror?" I can respond that I don't go so far as to weep, but do get irritated.  "I use to" is normal now. I don't want to  get "used to" this.   What's the answer? Let's find out what the experts have to say. "When we think about the future of language – in this case, the English language – we have a tendency to bemoan its demise. The casual language used daily on social networks and in newspaper comment sections delivers a host of typos and misused words. Even capital letters and full stops are left by the wayside by some of those sharing their opinions, something that I personally find almost painful to witness." The article goes on to tell me the English language is evolving.   I am concerned because there are times when I don't understand what the written sentence means.  I will have to go back to school to learn the "New English". Most of the articles are opinion pieces.  I checked out the Linguistic Society of America's article: "Is English Changing?" Here's what the article says: "What's important to realize is that there's no such thing as a 'sloppy' or 'lazy' dialect. Every dialect of every language has rules - not 'schoolroom' rules, like 'don't split your infinitives', but rather the sorts of rules that tell us that the cat slept is a sentence of English, but slept cat the isn't. These rules tell us what language is like rather than what it should be like." That is excellent theory, but often I experience a failure on the the writer's part to communicate their point.  Alternately, I might be far behind on the New English. What got me thinking is the article's "Karen example".  Here it is: (4) So Karen goes, "Wow - I wish I'd been there!" (5) So Karen is like, "Wow - I wish I'd been there!" (6) So Karen is all, "Wow - I wish I'd been there!" The article explains the different meanings of each of these. There are subtle nuances.   I wavered for a moment, thinking I should start a search to learn the new English.  Instead, I found this 'joke' as a possible alternative to going back to school.   The montage picture seems a good representation of the decline of spoken and written language - a story of deterioration and disintegration rather than evolution.

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Speaking Naturally

"Are you one of the 6,000 people in the world who speaks Chalcatongo Mixtec? Congratulations! You speak the world’s weirdest language. That’s what Tyler Schnoebelen and the researchers at Idibon, a natural language processing company, found when they statistically compared 239 languages to see how like or unlike they were to one another." That's from an article HERE - it describes the findings of the World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS) ... "a large database of structural (phonological, grammatical, lexical) properties of languages gathered from descriptive materials (such as reference grammars) by a team of 55 authors. WALS Online is a publication of the  Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.  Can you imagine ranking all the languages to decide which are the most 'difficult'.  WALS evaluates 2,676 languages in terms of 192 linguistic features. We are fascinated by the most weird.  There are languages that are the "least weird"- these include Cantonese, Hungarian, Chamorro, and Imbabura Quechua. And where does English stand in terms of weird?  It is ranked 33 out of 239 languages, so is determined by WALS to be weird, with more than 80% of its features being uncommon in other languages.  That explains the hundreds and hundreds of great grammar jokes.  But I've chosen just one: An MIT linguistics professor was lecturing his class the other day. "In English," he said, "a double negative forms a positive. However, in some languages, such as Russian, a double negative remains a negative. But there isn't a single language, not one, in which a double positive can express a negative." A voice from the back of the room said, "Yeah, right."  Today we have railroad pictures from the Hickory convention. I like the first picture showing the scale of the Sundance layout.

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June 6 - English vs Language Families

We in the English-speaking group don't think about other language families.  English seems to be dominant in so many areas that we might not even think about other languages. How many language families are there?  There are 141 language families and 7,111 living human languages within the 141 different families.   Membership of languages is established by comparative linguistics.  Just like plants - they are said to have a genetic or genealogical relationship.  We also don't think about which is the most-spoken language.  That's because English is dominant in many communications.  It's 983 million speakers fall behind Mandarin Chinese with 1.1 billion speakers.  Next is Hinustani at 544 million.  Another retrieval says that there are 1.121 billion speakers of English and 1.107 billion speakers of Chinese.  Or perhaps there are as many as 1.5 billion using English to some extent.  The native English speakers number 375 million. What would the scenario be like if Chinese surpassed English in Global speakers?  How would that change things?   When I worked in computers, the universal language for comments and descriptions is English - computer code is required to have English descriptors.  I worked on a project where the software was developed in Morocco and it was written in French, so it would not be allowed in a government department given it failed this mandatory requirement.  I wonder how many fields and professions require English for similar things. I would think that STEM would be the area that requires a common set of standards and practises.  The Oxford-Royale.co.uk side says this is the case - 80% of scientific texts are written in English.  Academia, Online businesses, Tourism, Diplomacy, management consultancy and finally Finance are the top areas that require good English.  So I guess that covers a lot of jobs around the world. Look at the 'trunk' on this bonsai azalea at Longwood.