Why do some words feel wierd?

Discussion in 'Linguistics' started by aaqucnaona, Dec 21, 2011.

  1. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    24,690
    I write for a living and I also teach and give presentations. (If you work in IT and you can put a sentence together with no errors in spelling, grammar or punctuation, you automatically become the department's official communicator.

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    ) When I'm not doing that I might be singing. I can hardly expect everything that comes out of my mouth or keyboard to be acknowledged!
    Thanks, I appreciate the compliment.
    It's easy. Just wait till you have 68 years' experience in the use of language and it will happen naturally.

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    I don't think she meant any disrespect either. She can't help the occasional profanity, it's just the Tourette's. (Really awful joke--I can't find the right emoticon)
    You don't really expect anyone except a musician to be able to spell that, do you???
    Maybe you need to open a file on that. Or just ask Leif Ericsson.
     
    Last edited: Dec 22, 2011
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  3. aaqucnaona This sentence is a lie Valued Senior Member

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    Ok, so 'Life' was a recognision error.
    'Phiolosophy' was a 'number of characters" error.
    And 'Wierd' was a sequence error.

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    Please do continue the discussion though.

    Btw,
    Why would musicians have better spelling?
    An urban legend I dont know?
     
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  5. chimpkin C'mon, get happy! Registered Senior Member

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    With a bit of a mind flip?

    Actually, would that be deja vu or jamais vu?
    The latter being:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamais_vu
     
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  7. scheherazade Northern Horse Whisperer Valued Senior Member

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    Scheherazade is a rather famous piece of music, a small section of which is skated to here by John Curry.

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    Google's listings for Scheherazade:

    http://www.youtube.com/results?sear...691l0l133278l12l12l0l6l0l0l243l1233l0.3.3l6l0
     
  8. aaqucnaona This sentence is a lie Valued Senior Member

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  9. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    They don't. They just know how to spell "Scheherezade." In addition to being the name of a legendary Persian queen, which few people outside of Persia would know, it's also the name of a very important symphonic suite which sets the legend to music. Every professional musician, a large percentage of amateurs, and most fans of "classical" music are familiar with the work, and many of them can spell the title. I just saw a performance of it this year by a Russian orchestra and I'm going to see another one next year by a different Russian orchestra.
    "Rather famous," aren't you the mistress of understatement today! I bet if you test anyone who has enough interest in "classical" music to recognize the first few bars of ten compositions, "Scheherezade" will be one of them!

    It's one of my four favorites. I've seen two of the other three, "Metamorphoses" by Strauss and "The Lark Ascending" by Vaughan Williams, neither of which I would claim to be among the world's most popular or recognizable. The fourth is "Bolero," which 90% of the people in Western countries would probably recognize within ten seconds, yet for reasons I can't explain I've never seen a live performance.
     
  10. scheherazade Northern Horse Whisperer Valued Senior Member

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    Originally posted by Fraggle Rocker
    "Rather famous," aren't you the mistress of understatement today! I bet if you test anyone who has enough interest in "classical" music to recognize the first few bars of ten compositions, "Scheherezade" will be one of them!

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  11. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    And I spelled it wrong every time!
     
  12. Cifo Day destroys the night, Registered Senior Member

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    I don't know what to call it, but there's a rhythm to speaking, and sometimes speech seems to flow better with a syllable added or removed.

    Examples include: saying "ev'ry" instead of "every" and saying "diff'rent" instead of "different" (almost everyone seems to do these two), Yogi Bear's "pic-a-nic basket", saying "relator" instead of "realtor", etc.

    I've also heard that the word "like" used ad nauseam by young people, fills the need to have a syllable there.
     
  13. wynn ˙ Valued Senior Member

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    "Scheherezade" is a loan name, and can thus be spelled in several ways, even more so when we consider that the language from which we are loaning it originally does not have a Latinic spelling (such as Russian or Turkish).

    In Turkish, the name would be pronounced in roundabout like she- he-raz-at, spelled "Şehrazat."

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZuhFvtavHc
     
  14. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    Hmm. I wonder if the first time I saw it it was spelled that way. I've always had to correct myself and change the third E to an A. Wikipedia lists a number of spellings, including Scheherazadea, Šahrzâd, Shahrzād, Shahrazād, Šīrāzād, Šahrāzād, Shárzád and Shehrzád, but not my way.

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    It was a Persian tale so we would have gotten it from Farsi, Arabic or Turkish, all of which used Arabic script. (Turkish switched to the Roman alphabet in the 20th century.)

    Composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, of course, was Russian. He wrote it Шехерезада, which we transliterate as Shekherezada. But since we already had the legend we standardized on our own version of the name. Just as we call the famous Roman poet "Horace" instead of Quintus Horatius Flaccus.
     

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