Word of the Day. Post it Here

DrKrettin said:
That one is a bit inconsistent, because dinosaur derives from deinos + sauros. So your new word should be dinophobia
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If it were up to me, it would be dinophobia but it is not up to me.
Whoever coined the word obviously used the root you mention & it was accepted.

Sorry, I missed the word new. It is not a new word.

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StrangerInAStrangeLa said:
If it were up to me, it would be dinophobia but it is not up to me.
Whoever coined the word obviously used the root you mention & it was accepted.

Sorry, I missed the word new. It is not a new word.

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I call a word new if it is younger than 100 years old. :biggrin: By the way, I googled a bit and discovered that somebody claims that a fear of dinosaurs is Ornithoscelidaphobia.

I also found a nice one - deipnophobia, a fear of dinner parties (Greek, deipnos - dinner party). Then we can move on to deipnosophist, a master of dinner-table conversation, and so on.
 
StrangerInAStrangeLa said:
Philo Celtic - love of the Irish language.
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Irish Gaelic is not the only living Celtic language. The Breton people, who live in Brittany, in the north of Europe, speak Breton, which is also Celtic.

2,000 years ago, most of the British Isles were populated by Celtic tribes. The Brythonic people (our name for them, we don't exactly know what they called themselves) lived on the southern part of Britannia, and spoke the Celtic Brythonic language. The Brythonic population got along just fine with the Roman occupiers, but when the Romans left and southern Britannia was overcome by Germanic tribes (the Angles, Saxons, Jutes, etc.), the Brythonic people saw the future and didn't like it. They pulled their boats out of storage and sailed to northwestern Europe. Their descendants are the modern Breton population in Brittany.

At this point, Britannia became Angle Land, a name which, several centuries later, was condensed into "England," and the population became primarily Germanic, as the Celtic people were left to the hinterlands.

A couple of centuries later, the Norman French invaded England, and imposed the French language on government, scholarship, religion and commerce, while the common folk continued to speak "Anglisc." This is why, to this day, we have two parallel sets of words for naming animals. The farmers spoke Anglisc and, therefore, called their animals sheep, pigs, deer, cows and chickens, while the people who dealt with the business of farming called them by French words: mutton, pork, venison, beef and cocks.

Furthermore, Welsh is also a Celtic language, spoken in Wales. However, most Welsh people speak English, and the majority cannot speak Welsh fluently--if at all.

Two other Celtic languages are still (barely) surviving. Manx is spoken by some of the inhabitants of the Isle of Man, and there is a movement to save the Cornish language, which originated in Cornwall but is now eclipsed by English.
 
Fraggle Rocker said:
Furthermore, Welsh is also a Celtic language, spoken in Wales. However, most Welsh people speak English, and the majority cannot speak Welsh fluently--if at all.
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The Welsh spoken in Wales is a variety of dialects (main difference being between North and South) so standard Welsh is an artificial language created as an attempt at compromise. I made an attempt to learn Welsh in Cardigan, with a teacher from Aberystwyth (30 miles away), using some items of vocabulary which people in Cardigan had never heard before. What a waste of time that was.

I'm surprised you omitted to mention Patagonia!
 
DrKrettin said:
The Welsh spoken in Wales is a variety of dialects (main difference being between North and South) so standard Welsh is an artificial language created as an attempt at compromise. I made an attempt to learn Welsh in Cardigan, with a teacher from Aberystwyth (30 miles away), using some items of vocabulary which people in Cardigan had never heard before. What a waste of time that was.
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It's difficult to rescue or revive an old language. The Israelis have spent decades teaching the country's entire population fluency in Modern Hebrew, but the millions of Jewish people in the rest of the world don't take the exercise seriously. I've seen them struggle to read along with sermons in Hebrew in their Torah, in an alphabet they barely recognize, using phonetic standards that aren't quite standard.
I'm surprised you omitted to mention Patagonia!
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Ten minutes on Wikipedia did not reveal any relationship between Patagonia (which is at the southernmost region of South America, where everyone speaks Spanish) and Brittany (which is in northern France, where the people tend to be more-or-less fluent in both French and Breton).
 
Fraggle Rocker said:
Ten minutes on Wikipedia did not reveal any relationship between Patagonia (which is at the southernmost region of South America, where everyone speaks Spanish) and Brittany (which is in northern France, where the people tend to be more-or-less fluent in both French and Breton).
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Thanks, I know where Patagonia is, but I was referring to the Welsh connection. I'm not sure that everybody speaks Spanish in Argentina (probably yes) because there are quite a few indigenous languages. But some also speak Patagonian Welsh.
 
Fraggle Rocker said:
Irish Gaelic is not the only living Celtic language. The Breton people, who live in Brittany, in the north of Europe, speak Breton, which is also Celtic.

2,000 years ago, most of the British Isles were populated by Celtic tribes. The Brythonic people (our name for them, we don't exactly know what they called themselves) lived on the southern part of Britannia, and spoke the Celtic Brythonic language. The Brythonic population got along just fine with the Roman occupiers, but when the Romans left and southern Britannia was overcome by Germanic tribes (the Angles, Saxons, Jutes, etc.), the Brythonic people saw the future and didn't like it. They pulled their boats out of storage and sailed to northwestern Europe. Their descendants are the modern Breton population in Brittany.

At this point, Britannia became Angle Land, a name which, several centuries later, was condensed into "England," and the population became primarily Germanic, as the Celtic people were left to the hinterlands.

A couple of centuries later, the Norman French invaded England, and imposed the French language on government, scholarship, religion and commerce, while the common folk continued to speak "Anglisc." This is why, to this day, we have two parallel sets of words for naming animals. The farmers spoke Anglisc and, therefore, called their animals sheep, pigs, deer, cows and chickens, while the people who dealt with the business of farming called them by French words: mutton, pork, venison, beef and cocks.

Furthermore, Welsh is also a Celtic language, spoken in Wales. However, most Welsh people speak English, and the majority cannot speak Welsh fluently--if at all.

Two other Celtic languages are still (barely) surviving. Manx is spoken by some of the inhabitants of the Isle of Man, and there is a movement to save the Cornish language, which originated in Cornwall but is now eclipsed by English.
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I know that but that is how the Philo Celtic Society uses it & I found no other reference to it.
Good exposition tho.

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DrKrettin said:
Thanks, I know where Patagonia is, but I was referring to the Welsh connection. I'm not sure that everybody speaks Spanish in Argentina (probably yes) because there are quite a few indigenous languages. But some also speak Patagonian Welsh.
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Virtually all of the people in Argentina whose ancestors came from Europe speak fluent Spanish. The major exception is a rather large Italian community in Buenos Aires. They have developed a hybrid mixture of Spanish and Italian. The two languages are so closely related that this isn't as difficult as you'd think.

There are also more than 10,000 Japanese people in Bolivia, and about the same number of African people. The Africans, of course, are simply the descendants of freed slaves. I'm not quite sure why the Japanese emigrated.

And of course, all of the countries in the Western Hemisphere have indigenous populations--people who speak the ancient native languages. Here in the USA, I daresay that there are almost NO people who use their native language as their primary language--at least outside of Alaska, anyway. In fact, most of our native languages are in danger of dying out, and scholars are working furiously to get them all catalogued before that happens.

The same is happening in Central and South America, just not so quickly. Fortunately, the Aztecs maintained the written language of the Olmecs, so we have quite a written history of the region.

Thanks for the info about Patagonian Welsh, which I had never heard of. It is rather amusing to discover that Welsh-speaking people had to cross both the Atlantic Ocean and the Equator in order to find a place where they could maintain their nation's own language!
 
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Endogamy - the law, practice or custom of marrying only within the limits of a local community, clan, or tribe, ethnic, class or social group, rejecting others on such a basis as being unsuitable for marriage or for other close personal relationships.

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