More about language:
It's a myth that Eskimos have a huge number of words for snow (i.e., many more than we have). However, Eskimologists (not the same as eschatologists) confirm that, at least among the West Greenland Inuit, there's a single word for "They were wandering about gathering up lots of stuff that smelled like dead fish."
Related Posts (on one page):
- More about language:
- Zipf's law:
Polysynthetic languages dictionaries are mostly word stems and contain relatively few words such as you'd find in an English dictionary.
(Reference: The Atoms of Language by Mark Baker.)
Maybe I can find it in some archive ... [googles]
Well, here's one I posted on sorrow back when I had a computer program to link through a thesaurus. You can do it with almost any such word.
So imagine the eskimos commenting on this fact about the West. ``They have thousand words for sorrow.''
Some eskimo snopes will then debunk it.
Yes but I'm sure that the moderators won't let us print them.
English does seem to have a bunch of redundant words for physical violence. Behead, decapitate guillotine ... how many words do we need for removing someones head.
The standard way for an anthropologist to learn a non written language is to point or touch a part of an interview subject’s body and ask what that was called.
It seems that an anthropologist, using a previously researched dictionary, thought that a particular work meant “arm” only to learn that what it really meant was
“quit poking me”
(Of course, the Germans have a lot more words for 'subtle' than that--als alle so feine, raffinierte Sprachen sollen.)
Likegatheringlotsofstuffandall-
Thatyouknowsmelledlikedeadfish?'")
(Amusingly, the comment heuristic disallows "single words" longer than 60 characters. (Hence the dashes.) Kind of tough for a thread about Inuit words.)
ANd you can assume that when a news report uses that word preceded by "literally", you will know that the statement is literally untrue
Speakers of synthetic languages often have difficulty identifying certain morphemes as having an individual meaning. For instance, if you asked a Turkish speaker who has had no linguistics training what the mi in 'Aybars dün arabasıyla geldi mi?' means, you often get an answer like "it doesn't mean anything, but it has to be there". (Mi is used to ask question.)
Gleichgewichtzustandwiederherstellungsmoeglichkeit.
Is stepping into the shower with your socks on a frequent problem?
Not only are words not combined in any way, they also don't change due to grammar. There is no verb conjugation or I/me business to deal with. Everything is determined by the relative positions of the words in the sentence.
This is not to say that Chinese has no morphemes that don't really mean anything. The word "ma" in "Zhe ben shu shi ni de ma?" doesn't really mean anything either, but its presence turns what would otherwise be a declarative sentence into a question.
several standard deviations more so than for the average person, i suspect.
Though as the vernacular language became increasingly distinct from the written "classical" language, many words that were once represented by a single character/sound were conbined into binomes.
Among the Australians there's "fossicking," which means something similar. Less the smell, of course.
I would like to know what the word is, as it applies to a lot of what is done in politics.
English also has the word for "killing one in ten": Decimate
Techster1
"The" as an article in quite common in many languages, and relatively easy to explain. It identifies an object as being a specific one (or specific set) out of a class of similar objects (i.e. Spanish: el (m), la (f); French le (m), la (f); Italian il (m), la (f)), as opposed to an indeterminared object, anyone, of that class ("a", "an"). The only oddity of "the" compared to those languages is that the same word is used in singular and plural, male and female.
On the other hand, you do not need to go too far to find a word whose meaning is very difficult to explain to foreigners: the auxiliary verb "do" in the negative ("I do not run" instead of "I not run") or as a question, ("do you run?" instead of "you run?"), or, ever weirder, the particles will or shall to create the future tense.
This is a variation on a fairly famous urban legend. The more common variants are:
1) European explorers in America learned the names of Amerindian tribes by asking neighboring tribes, "Who lives on the other side of that river/hill/forest?" The commonly used names for these tribes translate to "dirty stinking foreigners."
2) Many names of geographic features translate to "What the hell are you pointing at?"
That last one is similar to another myth that is actually true -- that there are places with names that are just the word for "hill" or "river" in different languages strung together. There are numerous places in New York called [Foo]kill Creek, where "-kill" is Dutch for "creek". And there's supposedly a place in England known as Torpenhow Hill. Those are, IMS, the Old English, Cornish, Saxon, and modern English words for "hill" respectively.
German is truly a wonderful and often surprising language. My favorite aggreagation is "Schlimmbesserung" - "An improvement that makes things worse." Not only it is readily understandable if you know basic german vocabulary, but it is useful in describing situations that I encounter daily in my life, particularly in business and politics. It also hints at a sense of humor that Germans are unfairly accused of lacking.
English is perhaps the most bastardized language in common use. It has been invaded (at the same time as England) so many times that a significant part of it is actually composed of "foreign" words. "Guillotine" is an obvious example.
This is, however, an advantage for the language. Through these many seemingly redundant words, we can choose a specific on which perhaps possesses just the right shade of meaning to convey our thought most accurately. It provides English with a flexibility not generally found in other languages.
English is perhaps the most bastardized language in common use. It has been invaded (at the same time as England) so many times that a significant part of it is actually composed of "foreign" words. "Guillotine" is an obvious example.
This is, however, an advantage for the language. Through these many seemingly redundant words, we can choose a specific on which perhaps possesses just the right shade of meaning to convey our thought most accurately. It provides English with a flexibility not generally found in other languages.
Don't tell Bertrand Russell, though...he spilled a lot of ink on the question of what "the" means.
As his books are generally meticulously researched, I would figure that there is a word like that. I've googled it and in at least one dialect "yeca" means "understand" so I would guess that story is a plausible way to explain the name of the Yucatan.
Is this true?
Sorry, but claims like this are just nonsense. Languages are basically all the same in terms of what you can express with them, and all languages have redundant words; redundancy is an important feature of languages.
English also has a fair amount of duplicate vocabulary because it will have both a native word ("behead" for example ) and a Latin/French one ("decapitate").
Re: when the Spaniards landed in Mexico and asked the name of the place the locals said, "Yectetan" or "I don't understand you."
And "Istanbul" is supposed to derive from "Eis ten polin" (literally, To the City) which a Greek speaker answered when a Turk tried to ask the name of the city (Constantinople) and the Greek thought he was asking "where are you going?"