Why do some words feel wierd?

[Fraggle Rocker]

I didn't have anything to say! I didn't ignore him.

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. ) 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!

Thank you for your amazing posts. You really enrich sciforums.

Thanks, I appreciate the compliment.

Fraggle reminds me of those guys on wordpress with their amazing, long, well reasoned and articulated posts - I aspire to be like that.

It's easy. Just wait till you have 68 years' experience in the use of language and it will happen naturally.

And I meant him no disrespect by 'ignoring him', much less warrant asshole.

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 might want to take another look at how my name is spelled.

You don't really expect anyone except a musician to be able to spell that, do you???

But I wonder, why did the word 'life' feel that way?

Maybe you need to open a file on that. Or just ask Leif Ericsson.

 

[aaqucnaona]

Maybe you need to open a file on that. Or just ask Leif Ericsson.

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

Please do continue the discussion though.

Btw,

You don't really expect anyone except a musician to be able to spell that, do you???

Why would musicians have better spelling?
An urban legend I dont know?

 

[chimpkin]

No it was like deja vu.

With a bit of a mind flip?

Actually, would that be deja vu or jamais vu?
The latter being:

Often described as the opposite of déjà vu, jamais vu involves a sense of eeriness and the observer's impression of seeing the situation for the first time, despite rationally knowing that he or she has been in the situation before.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamais_vu

 

[scheherazade]

Originally posted by aaqucnaona

“You don't really expect anyone except a musician to be able to spell that, do you??? ”

Why would musicians have better spelling?
An urban legend I dont know?

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



Google's listings for Scheherazade:

http://www.youtube.com/results?sear...691l0l133278l12l12l0l6l0l0l243l1233l0.3.3l6l0

 

[aaqucnaona]

Actually, would that be deja vu or jamais vu?
The latter being:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamais_vu

Ok, so they have an antonym for deja vu.
Yes it was jamais vu.

I wonder if this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_satiation
has any bearing in this discussion.

 

[Fraggle Rocker]

Why would musicians have better spelling?

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.

Scheherazade is a rather famous piece of music . . . .

"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.

 

[scheherazade]

Originally posted by Fraggle Rocker

“
Originally Posted by scheherazade
Scheherazade is a rather famous piece of music . . . .
”

"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!

 

[Fraggle Rocker]

And I spelled it wrong every time!

 

[Cifo]

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.

 

[wynn]

And I spelled it wrong every time!

"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

 

[Fraggle Rocker]

"Scheherezade" is a loan name, and can thus be spelled in several ways . . . .

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.

. . . . even more so when we consider that the language from which we are borrowing it originally does not have a Latinic spelling (such as Russian or Turkish).

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.