Word of the Day. Post it Here

Discussion in 'Linguistics' started by Captain Kremmen, Aug 16, 2007.

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  1. Fraggle Rocker

    Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    Yes, I understand that in the Indic languages (and perhaps the Dravidian languages too, I have no information about them) aspiration is phonemic, as it is in Chinese. Theek is not the same as teek (if there is such a word), just as dharma is not the same as darma (if there is such a word).

    In English aspiration is not phonemic. We consider the T in TOP and the T in STOP to be the same sound, even though the first is aspirated and the second is not. (For those of you who don't know what we're talking about, suspend a sheet of toilet paper in front of your mouth and say the two words. An aspirated consonant produces a little puff of air that makes the paper flutter. An unaspirated consonant does not.)

    However, you do also have the sound that we spell TH, a voiceless dental fricative, as in thing, mathematics and bath. When written in Roman letters, both the TH in theek hai (meaning "okay") and the TH in Parvathi (a woman's name) are written the same way. It can be very confusing.

    I don't know if the Dravidian languages also have this phoneme.
     
    Fraggle Rocker, Nov 17, 2011
    #661

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  3. tablariddim

    tablariddim forexU2 Valued Senior Member

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    OK

    The Greeks say it's a Greek word derived from Ola Kala (Everything's Good)
    I like that

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    tablariddim, Nov 17, 2011
    #662

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  5. Fraggle Rocker

    Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    Before we can consider this etymology as plausible, we need to find widespread use of the Greek phrase ola kala in 19th-century American English.

    In the 19th century we had a lot of people from the British Isles, Scandinavia, Germany, the Netherlands, France and Africa in America, as well as our native people. But there weren't very many Greeks. Hardly enough for cliches in their language to come into common usage.
     
    Fraggle Rocker, Nov 19, 2011
    #663

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  7. tablariddim

    tablariddim forexU2 Valued Senior Member

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    Who can say how a word becomes popular? Maybe an eccentric Greek abbreviated his Ola Kala to OK and his American buddies began to emulate him because the guy sounded funny when he was saying it, from there it could easily spread especially through the navy or military. And just as easily, maybe not. Anything's possible.

    Greeks wouldn't have originally said OK because that is from the English alphabet and they certainly weren't going round saying Omikron Kappa, no, shortening and abbreviating words is a British or American aberration, so OK was never a Greek cliché.
     
    tablariddim, Nov 19, 2011
    #664
  8. Fraggle Rocker

    Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    The Wikipedia article on "Okay" keeps accreting more text every time I look at it. It now includes όλα καλά (pronounced O-la ka-LA), but only on the list of foreign languages that have adopted the English word "okay." They seem to be saying that the Greeks got it from us, not vice-versa.
    It's done in other languages, but not always in the same way. Most of the letters in the Cyrillic alphabet (used in Russian and many other languages) have simple one-syllable names ( А = A, Б = be, В = ve, Г = ge, Д = de, Е = ye, еtc.) so they abbreviate the way we do. The Gosudarstvennoye Politicheskoye Upravlenie (State Political Directorate) was referred to as the Geh-Peh-OO or GPU.

    The Germans, on the other hand, used whole syllables when they shorted Geheimlich Staats Polizei to Gestapo. That is as easy to pronounce as GSP, and includes a little more information for interpreting the abbreviation.

    Almost half of the letters in the Hebrew abjad have two syllable names (aleph, gimel, daleth, zayin, etc.) so English-style abbreviations aren't very useful in that language. Instead, they just add a random vowel to the sound of each letter and then stuff them all together to form a new "word." Israel's General Security Service is the Sherut haBitachon haKlali, so they call it the Shabak. Oddly enough, when they speak English (and most Israelis in government service do), they abbreviate it English-style as the Shin Bet, using the names of the letters which, in this case, both happen to be monosyllables.

    In the 20th century we've begun forming acronyms in a similar way. We either use the vowels that fortuitously appear in the abbreviation itself to form a pronounceable "word," such as LASER for "Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation," or we grab groups of letters to make the extended abbreviation pronounceable, such as COBOL for "COmmon Business Oriented Language."
     
    Fraggle Rocker, Nov 19, 2011
    #665
  9. arfa brane

    arfa brane call me arf Valued Senior Member

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    Today's word is: "forumula".

    This is something that looks vaguely mathematical posted on a science forum, often in the Physics&Math section (but not usually for very long).
     
    arfa brane, Dec 19, 2011
    #666
  10. tablariddim

    tablariddim forexU2 Valued Senior Member

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    Arf,
    No such word exists, unless you meant formula.
     
    tablariddim, Dec 19, 2011
    #667
  11. Fraggle Rocker

    Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    He was being humorous. Forum + formula = "forumula."
     
    Fraggle Rocker, Dec 19, 2011
    #668
  12. tablariddim

    tablariddim forexU2 Valued Senior Member

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    Humour is not allowed.
     
    tablariddim, Dec 19, 2011
    #669
  13. Fraggle Rocker

    Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    Yes it is, and here's why! A linguists' joke.

    Today's "Frank and Ernest" comic strip.

    If today is not Wednesday, 2011-12-28, then reset the date spinner to that date. If you can't see the strip, it's one of the most popular in America so it's probably in a dozen other online newspapers. GoComics.com also has it.

    If all else fails, here's the joke.

    A lady with a briefcase walks out of the courthouse looking a little irritated. She runs into Frank and Ernest and says, "The other lawyers make fun of me because my name is 'Sue'."

    Ernest is very sympathetic and says, "That's an 'ad homonym' attack!"

    People who love language enjoy this strip because it's often about words.
     
    Fraggle Rocker, Dec 28, 2011
    #670
  14. tablariddim

    tablariddim forexU2 Valued Senior Member

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    Fraggle, you're not supposed to take that seriously. As far as the other 'jokes' go, I just don't find them funny.
     
    tablariddim, Dec 28, 2011
    #671
  15. Fraggle Rocker

    Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    I didn't.

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    That's ok. A lot of people don't appreciate puns.
     
    Fraggle Rocker, Dec 29, 2011
    #672
  16. Captain Kremmen

    Captain Kremmen All aboard, me Hearties! Valued Senior Member

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    Voxel
    3d version of a pixel.

    Etymology
    Contraction of Volumetric Pixel.

    When it is used.
    When representing data, each voxel shows the character of some fixed size cube of space. So images are built out of fixed size "lego bricks"
    The smaller the voxel, the better the resolution.
    The advantage of voxels is that it is easy for a computer program to analyse data stored in this kind of image, and to show the results in another image.

    Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!


    Example: In the above image:
    Typical processing steps in an analysis of MRI brain scans
    (a) Atypical coronal section from a T1-weighted MRI scan of the brain. (b) The result of applying a tissue-classification approach to classify image voxels as gray matter (green), white matter (blue) or cerebrospinal fluid (CSF; red). Non-brain tissues such as scalp and meninges surrounding the brain have been digitally edited from the image. (c) Parcellation of the brain into the frontal lobe (blue), parietal lobe (green), occipital lobe (red) and temporal lobe (yellow).

    Illustration from http://psychiatryonline.org/article.aspx?articleid=50697
     
    Captain Kremmen, Jan 9, 2012
    #673
  17. Spud Emperor

    Spud Emperor solanaceous common tater Registered Senior Member

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    yer talkin' shit again Kremmen,

    it's a freakin' car.

    And it's spelled Vauxhaul.

    /goose
     
    Spud Emperor, Jan 9, 2012
    #674
  18. Captain Kremmen

    Captain Kremmen All aboard, me Hearties! Valued Senior Member

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    Vauxhall Vectra. Different kind of image entirely.
    Also known as a rattle box.

    My nightmare car was one of these:

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    Dadaaan! The Citroen CX. Designed to break down.

    Even when it's new it looks like it has been in a car crash.
    What was in my head when I looked at that hulk of a car, looking for all the world like it had been designed as a cardboard egg box,
    and thought , Mmmmmh, nice and stylish, I want it.

    Owning one was like standing over a drain emptying money into it.
    Everything about it was non-standard. If you needed a new exhaust it cost about £400, almost as much as the car cost me.

    There were things in it called Spiders, horribly complicated, hard to repair things, and the suspension ran on Nitrogen.
    This Nitrogen was contained in Spheres, which leaked.
    There were four of them. When they leaked, you had no suspension.
    Some robbing Citroen Garage owner would then charge you about fifty quid each to refill them. They sold you new spheres, and the old spheres went off to France to be filled with French Nitrogen.
    Nitrogen is basically air, isn't it?
    So that's like charging £200 to pump up your tyres.

    For some reason, you could lift the whole body of the car higher or lower.
    For driving in rocky deserts or something.

    In heavy rain there were pockets under the bonnet which filled with water. As you went round corners after a rainstorm, you could hear them sloshing around. I did consider buying goldfish.

    It's all true.
    If you don't believe me look it up on google.
    Put in "Piece of French Crap" in the search box..

    The person who sold it to me made me sign a form saying that I couldn't return it. That should really have given me a clue as to what I was in for.

    I brought it to one garage, and it took four of them 8 hours to mend the Spider, which is a mess of tubes somehow combined with the brake system.
    Mon Dieu! I was lucky there. They had quoted me £100.
    They told me that if I ever wanted it repaired again, to bring it somewhere else.
    They wouldn't touch it again for under £500.

    On cold mornings, if it didn't start first time, you had to recharge the battery.

    When I traded it in, the garage would only give me £50 for it.
    They were robbed.
     
    Last edited: Jan 10, 2012
    Captain Kremmen, Jan 9, 2012
    #675
  19. Spud Emperor

    Spud Emperor solanaceous common tater Registered Senior Member

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    Why don't they just make the white matter white, the grey matter grey and avoid the confusion.

    I had a '68 Kombi that was a money pit.
    I blame Hitler!
    Mind you I did try to drive across the Western Australian desert in 45 degree C temps. at 135 kMH (top speed).
     
    Spud Emperor, Jan 9, 2012
    #676
  20. Fraggle Rocker

    Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    A 1957 250cc Zündapp motorcycle. You wouldn't think very much could go wrong with a one-cylinder two-stroke engine because it only has about three moving parts, right?
     
    Fraggle Rocker, Jan 9, 2012
    #677
  21. Spud Emperor

    Spud Emperor solanaceous common tater Registered Senior Member

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    Ex wife was a bit of a money pit too.

    Low mileage, great chassis, built for speed (and comfort).

    Just a lemon I suppose.

    /Who'd 'a' thought?
     
    Spud Emperor, Jan 10, 2012
    #678
  22. Captain Kremmen

    Captain Kremmen All aboard, me Hearties! Valued Senior Member

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    Good name for a car that costs a lot of money to run.
    The Vauxhall XWife. Or
    The Citroen Devos. Or
    The Lada Robinco.

    Just looking at a picture of that damn Citroen.
    Oh, and before I finally traded it in, it would only do 20 MPH uphill.
    Oh, and it needed a pint of oil every day. The horrors of it are coming back to me.
    I can appreciate how you must feel when you see a picture of your Bride that was.
    I was so proud of that car when I got it.
    But she done me wrong, the Bitch!
     
    Captain Kremmen, Jan 10, 2012
    #679
  23. Spud Emperor

    Spud Emperor solanaceous common tater Registered Senior Member

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    Opel already came up with a car named after the hex...Ascona (Spanish for the aforementioned)
     
    Last edited: Jan 10, 2012
    Spud Emperor, Jan 10, 2012
    #680
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