LINGUAPHILES & SESQUIPEDALIANS

Comment

Comment by Natalie A Sera on September 18, 2011 at 6:28pm

Carl, yes. Possibly more so in England than in the US, because we tend to be more conservative. But the example I'm thinking of is got/gotten. The British say "It's got cold tonight" and we would say "It's gotten cold." We have retained the archaic "gotten" form. Also, if you ask the question, "Have you done it?", the British would say "Yes, I have done." whereas we would say, "Yes, I have."

Too bad I wasn't smart enough to go on in linguistics when I got my BA degree -- it remains the love of my life, but I was too interested in getting married and having babies at the time!

Comment by Dallas the Phallus on September 18, 2011 at 6:04pm

@ Sean: I was whelmed at your insight.

 

@ Carl: Yes English grammar has changed in the last 100 years.

 

re: The color video. I think I'd need to know more about how they asked those questions, now that I think of it, to make sure that the results are genuine. If they classify blue and green as the same color, and someone asks which is not X, then they could not respond. That doesn't seem to mean they can't see the difference, only that their vocabulary doesn't allow a difference. If I put a bunch of cool colors on a wheel and ask which is the warm one, no one could give an answer. So I think I'd need a bit more info before I'm totally convinced of their assertation.

Comment by Carl Pastor on September 18, 2011 at 5:58pm

has englisg grammar changed in the last 100 years?

 

Comment by Carl Pastor on September 18, 2011 at 5:50pm

of course. ive watched the verb ability conjugation rareru change to reru and my wife tells me many young people sayr for d recently which i cannot seem to hear

 

Comment by Sean Murphy on September 18, 2011 at 5:28pm

All living languages change that fast. The only stable languages are the dead ones.

Comment by Natalie A Sera on September 18, 2011 at 4:03pm

Carl, we're talking about 2 different things. Yes, "midori" is a noun, but easily changed to an adjective by adding "no". And "aoi" can be changed to a noun by saying "aoiro" or just "ao". And, of course, the Japanese create lots of color words by saying "the color of _____" as "_______iro". The words "kiiro", yellow (don't know derivation), "chairo" brown (tea color), and "haiiro" gray (ash color) were all created that way. "Momoiro" (peach color) used to be the word for pink, but by now "pinku" has taken over, although momoiro is still in the dictionary! :-)

But what I am talking about is the way the perception of color has changed. When I was teaching Japanese in high school about 10 years ago, I had Japanese college students helping me, and one day I referred to something that classically would have been aoi (don't remember what), and the student corrected me by saying it was midori. I had been carefully taught 40 years earlier by Japanese native speakers where the border between ao and midori was, and here this young'un was contradicting me! Goes to show that language can change pretty rapidly.

And as a side note, I remember being VERY irritated when people started using "one on one" in English, when there was the perfectly good "one to one" that was already there!

Comment by Carl Pastor on September 18, 2011 at 2:43pm

anyone know "dead head"?  no its not a reference to a tea partyer, it meant a very waterlogged log which was now verticle with its top about equal to the water surface

Comment by Carl Pastor on September 18, 2011 at 1:57pm

the thing is aoi is an adjective. so if i want to desdribe my car with an adjective i use aoii kuruma. if im talking about the color of my car, a noun, i call it sorairo

Comment by Carl Pastor on September 18, 2011 at 1:26pm

natalie, aoi is the japanese word for both blue and green. it is the word used for green traffic lights now as well as for the color of sky, aozora,

japanese also has a word for green, midori, but it's a noun not an adjective.  people also use sorairo sky color for skyblue. my car is sorairo

Comment by Sean Murphy on September 18, 2011 at 12:21pm

@ Dallas Gaytheist:

I recently saw someone make a similar comment on TV.

"You're overwhelmed, Mr Freeze is underwhelmed, why can't anybody just be whelmed anymore?"

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