Proofreading Service - Pain in the English
Proofreading Service - Pain in the English

Your Pain Is Our Pleasure

24-Hour Proofreading Service—We proofread your Google Docs or Microsoft Word files. We hate grammatical errors with a passion. Learn More

Proofreading Service - Pain in the English
Proofreading Service - Pain in the English

Your Pain Is Our Pleasure

24-Hour Proofreading Service—We proofread your Google Docs or Microsoft Word files. We hate grammatical errors with a passion. Learn More

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jayles

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August 12, 2010

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748

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Latest Comments

“Anglish”

  • April 12, 2011, 1:31pm

I WAS going to suggest "do-er" "do-ee" but realized that with a passive verb the subject is the "do-ee" so the whole concept falls apart. Forgot to mention that!
"Carry" apparently comes from "car" which comes from a Gaulish word - Welsh "carr". Now here is an opportunity to include our real heritage!. Carry is fully anglicized ie it operates as a phrasal verb and in compounds using English prefixes. So we have "carry out" (an order); a carryout bag; a carryover {from a previous period), carrier bag; carrier etc.
We could then substitute "carry" for "--fer" so transfer becomes carry over, or carry across. etc. Now this may indeed not suit the purists, but it WOULD be more intelligible.
Believe me there is nothing worse (mildly overblown!) than teaching non-native non-romance speakers words like transfer, confer, refer, infer, offer, relate, translate, maintain, retain, maintenance, contain, contents, retention, contention, extension, intent, intension, attention, attend, pretend, sustain, subtend, invert, pervert, revert, convert, extravert, avert, concede, succeed, proceeds, precedent, recede, recession, concession, accession, accede, decide, recipient, participant, perceive, receive, deceive, reception, deception perception, gaudeamus igitur.... endless endless latin
Who killed English?

“Anglish”

  • April 11, 2011, 9:33pm

Ængelfolc: "Trustee" is a good illustration of how fraught tinkering with language can be.
I refer you to the relevant page in wikipedia which contains beautiful norman expressions such as "cestui qui trust" , and "feoffor to uses".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trust_(law)
Quite what equals what in hungarian depends on which legal system is under discussion, common law or roman law. But definitely no "one size fits all" solution here.
As to "subject" in its grammatical meaning I was going to suggest "do-er" for subject, "do-ee" for object and "doing-word" for verb, which might be clearer. One of the claims of Anglish is that it would be clearer, and the meaning could be deduced from the constituent parts. If this is NOT the case there is no good reason to change. So for example "underwarp" "undercast" "underthrown" are no more intelligible than "subject" so why changel? However "wordstock" is readily deduced than "vocabulary" or "lexis", so a change has some merit. In short one could never convince "academia" unless there is some definite long-term benefit.
Adjective and adverb are sometimes described as "noun modifier" and "verb modifier" respecitively in textbooks. Not that this helps the studen much!

“Anglish”

  • April 10, 2011, 9:32pm

Ængelfolc: Yes indeed I misunderstood you. Trustee: actually my dictionary suggests ce'lvagyonkezeköje but I've never used it. Megbizhatatlan vagy! is useful when your partner is sleeping around.
Legal terms for property are quite specific in their meaning: real property (estate), chose-in-possession, chose-in-action, goods, chattels etc. Onc should not confuse or muddy the waters here. I think "handover" might be a good starting point for conveyancing.

However "bank transfer" ie internet banking is now a common usage, as is "transferor" transferee". The issue here is the latinate words have acquired specific collocations and usages, which would be hard to mimic.

“Anglish”

  • April 10, 2011, 4:07pm

Ængelfolc: Trust and transfer have two VERY different meanings when dealing with property. Trustee in hungarian is er, er, er, gondnok I think....

“Anglish”

  • April 10, 2011, 4:04pm

yes indeed these nine modal verbs are all Germanic. There are other structures that are modal in meaning like "have to" but these modal verbs do not have "s" on the 3rd person singular present. Maybe because originally they were past in form much like must was originally past subjunctive "muesste". Grammar terms like noun, verb, subject object would be really difficult to change given their widespread use, Some bright spark tried to introduce "present progressive" instead of "present continuous" and some textbooks use it to the confusion of student and teacher alike. Changing labels leads to confusion just like wrong labels on your suitcase lose your baggage at the airport.

“Anglish”

  • April 10, 2011, 1:32pm

Stanmund: Most homeborn English speaker have little need to learn this terminology.
However they are useful when teaching English to other people. Sometimes we can use the term "helping" verb but if teaching romance language speakers "auxiliary" is more intelligible. They are in the end just labels. I teach "nine" modal verbs in English - can, could, shall. should, will, would, may, might, and must. Once students have learnt the label "modal" it is easier to use than enumerating the list every time. So they are just technical terms for a particular purpose. "linking words" is often used instead of conjunctions. However the essence of the problem for students is to distinguish between a conjunction and a "linking" adverb like "however" and which starts a new sentence. Since students have often learnt "conjunction" in their own country and it is used in all the dictionaries, it would be a hard word to change. I don't teach the word pronoun, don't seem to need it

“Anglish”

  • April 9, 2011, 6:44pm

Ængelfolc: A) When arriving from outer space, the most striking thing about this blue planet is the way in which homo sapiens (?!) has overrun it. As one of the few predators at the top of the pyramid, biologists reckon there should be only half a million of us to keep the prey/predator ratio in balance. With Medaeval agriculture the population of England hovered below the three million mark, unable to produce food for more. Now with oil-based fertilisers etc we support billions. So for me the number one problem is overpopulation. (shades of Lebensraum!) Watch world food prices! etc.
And on a personal level either be rich or live somewhere where there's enough to eat.
Now how does "Anglish" or plain-speaking fit into all this??? Not that relevant IMHO.
B) Sometimes I think we would be better off with NO history and NO etymology. Culturally poorer perhaps, but with no hangover excuses to fight wars and destroy each other. If we didn't know that "offer" came from latin it wouldn't bother us.
Okay enough preaching...

“Anglish”

  • April 9, 2011, 6:26pm

Ængelfolc: re szabni (as in szabo a tailor) .. muss aber gestehen dass... actually I know very little Romanian as such, always been more interested in Csango - the kaval, moldvai furulyas, tilinka stb. and the dances themselves, which are markedly different from magyar nepzene.
I myself have long been interested in etymology but found little use for it in real life, even when teaching English. Obviously you too are interested; I have been wondering (as English do) whether this is just a hobby, or there is some "real" or "career-related" purpose in your quest?

“Anglish”

  • April 9, 2011, 12:57am

There was a map prepared for the Treaty of Trianon which showed the distribution of languages in "Greater Hungary" at the time. The remarkable feature was how mixed the distributions was,,, and still is. As one travels in this area, one village is Hungarian, the next Romani, another historically schwab, the next Slovak and so on. E.g Komarno/ Komarom, Acs etc... (Although I understand it was not clever to speak schwab in public under the Russian occupation). Hungarian itself has many borrowings from inter alia slav, and turkic. eg csutortok (thursday) and szerda are slav, vasar is our word bazaar from turkic. The core finno-ulgric words are few indeed. But it doesn't seem to bother them! English has a more open-door attitude to borrowings, particularly from French, although there are a few words from Hungarian like hussar, saber, coach. I like to think "bimbo" is too - it means bud or nipple. ;=))
For me the difficulty with English now is the plethora (Gk) of prefixes.
We have English, Latin and Greek, down, de-, cata-, and so on.
If we attempt to transfer the word transfer to English we get "crossbear" (or a cross bear) or overbearing which already has a meaning, Refer becomes backbear, or bareback or someting confusing. I have no argument with wishing to get rid of many latinate words, the problem is twofold: 1) finding an intelligible substitute and I submit that many "anglishisms" are just not easily understood by hoi polloi (gk), although I like "wordstock" just the vogue word is now lexis. 2) how in reality would one persuade people to make the change and if one succeeded wouldn't that render twentieth century english unintelligable to our greatgreatgrandchildren
Finally of course the answer is for schoolchildren everywhere to go back to learning Greek and latin as they used to in the good old days!
And finally finally what's the difference between a diphthong and a monothong?
The latter is worn by Brazilians girls on the beach.

“Anglish”

  • April 4, 2011, 9:27pm

Ængelfolc: besides featuring in the Milosevich, Karadich, Mladic, UN "safe-haven" saga, Sarajevo was also where the European war of 1914 started. It would be nice to think that the EU would forestall another one.