oflanguage.blogspot.com
Of Language: Writing wrongs
http://oflanguage.blogspot.com/2010/05/writing-wrongs.html
Wednesday, May 12, 2010. Yes, I know, very punny. In the course of the last few weeks I have come across a two random subjects which I thought were quite interesting but don't really warrant an entire blog entry to themselves. Whether or not I am right about that remains to be seen, but this post is sort of a bubble and squeak. Which are derived from his name. The OED defines epicure. Next up, sinister. Section of my various reference books), and it turns out to be kind of right, but only kind of. Skillf...
oflanguage.blogspot.com
Of Language: April 2010
http://oflanguage.blogspot.com/2010_04_01_archive.html
Saturday, April 24, 2010. Time to add the spice rack to my collection of kitchen blog posts on coffee. The OED defines spice. As: an aromatic or pungent vegetable substance used to flavour food. Will pretty much mean whatever it meant to the people involved at the time, so perhaps it's best not to try to define it too specifically. The spice trade at this time was so lucrative that, despite the Arab monopoly the city of Alexandria, in Egypt, grew rich almost exclusively from the trade, levying taxes as a...
oflanguage.blogspot.com
Of Language: ABC...
http://oflanguage.blogspot.com/2010/06/abc.html
Monday, June 14, 2010. Where does the alphabet come from then? I know that's what you've all been wondering. Me too. As with so much that is useful in modern life it comes from the Romans, who got it from the Greeks, who got it from the Egyptians. The Greeks achieved this in the first instance by adapting the symbols which represented consonants that didn't exist in their language, such as the Phoenician letters 'alep. Which represented the glottal stop and the h. Sound in bread is not the sound for e.
oflanguage.blogspot.com
Of Language: February 2010
http://oflanguage.blogspot.com/2010_02_01_archive.html
Saturday, February 27, 2010. Llows is my attempt to condense my understanding of a rule hea. Vy poetic technique which spans the globe and originated in a language which has rules that don't apply to English into a neat blog entry, in other words it is condensed and by no means complete. Disclaimers aside, haiku seem to have. But this isn't quite right. One moras is a syllable with a short vowel sound (for example 'of') however if the syllable contains a long vowel sound. A frog jumps in-. One technique ...
oflanguage.blogspot.com
Of Language: June 2010
http://oflanguage.blogspot.com/2010_06_01_archive.html
Monday, June 14, 2010. Where does the alphabet come from then? I know that's what you've all been wondering. Me too. As with so much that is useful in modern life it comes from the Romans, who got it from the Greeks, who got it from the Egyptians. The Greeks achieved this in the first instance by adapting the symbols which represented consonants that didn't exist in their language, such as the Phoenician letters 'alep. Which represented the glottal stop and the h. Sound in bread is not the sound for e.
oflanguage.blogspot.com
Of Language: Nadders and Juncture Loss
http://oflanguage.blogspot.com/2010/05/nadders-and-juncture-loss.html
Friday, May 21, 2010. Nadders and Juncture Loss. Writing the post on articles. Reminded me of a linguistic phenomenon I came across a while back known as juncture loss, this is a one form of a process known as rebracketing. Rebracketing occurs when a word (or words) in a language alter in emphasis or meaning due to being broken or bracketed into different factors. As an example of what I mean by factors, the word teaching. Can be broken down into two distinct parts teach ing this makes sense teach. The f...
oflanguage.blogspot.com
Of Language: Articles for my Friend
http://oflanguage.blogspot.com/2010/05/articles-for-my-friend.html
Thursday, May 6, 2010. Articles for my Friend. I am feeling blogger guilt as I haven't managed to post for a while, this has nothing to do with will and everything to do with time. Still, I'm here now. So, articles. For native English speakers these little words ( a. As I already mentioned there are three words defined as articles in English. This is the simplest explanation, and I will go into the more complicated one later on, but to start off: a. Is the definite article, while a. As in an hour. All th...
oflanguage.blogspot.com
Of Language: Psychopath or Sociopath?
http://oflanguage.blogspot.com/2010/08/psychopath-or-sociopath.html
Thursday, August 26, 2010. I was having a conversation on philosophy in a park in Birmingham the other day (yes I know, both random and pretentious! And it somehow came to light that neither I nor my friend know the difference between a. If you are wondering what that has to do with philosophy I can't actually remember to be honest, but it's one of those things which I have always wondered and never bothered to find out. So I thought I would make the effort to actually do some research. However there is ...
oflanguage.blogspot.com
Of Language: May 2010
http://oflanguage.blogspot.com/2010_05_01_archive.html
Sunday, May 30, 2010. This is my final installment of my 'jars in the kitchen' series of posts, and this one is, as the title suggests, on bread. It is probably not an exaggeration to say that bread is the main reason why humans were able to form civilisations and that without bread the world today would be a very different place. In Old English the word bread. As well as having the meaning we use today. It may well come from the Proto-Germanic word brautham. Meaning fragments or bits, as in pieces of fo...
