A point of English??

[Papyrus]

The one that gets me worked up is the common mispronunciation of Omega, as in Omega-3, especially in adverts, and even by TV presenters who should know better. I have been heard to shout at the TV "It's Oh-mega, not Ameega. Omega is the Greek letter O. Amiga is a Spanish girlfriend." Grrr. 

Chris

[Newportnobby]

Hai, Squiddy-san (bows deeply)

[austinbob]

RAF boy entrant who after over a year of electronics training still mis-spelt magnet as magnat. As for those who mix up their, there and they're ... ... ... ...

One of my pleasures ( simple pleasures !) is to recount how I used to build radios and other bits of electronics in the days of yore with Geranium transistors, and then watch the cogwheels of the brain turn whilst (s)he tried to work out if it would be polite to correct me

MalcolmAl  - I was a valve man. I built communication receivers and hifi amplifiers using loads of those lovely valves. The thing about valves was that you could see if all was well by the colour of the anodes and the screen grids. If something was wrong you had quite a bit of warning and a chance to switch off and put things right.
As for transistors, especially in the early days - if your circuit didn't work then there was a good chance you had stuffed your transistors. Usually no warning, no smoke, just a stuffed transistor - immediately. Plus they weren't cheap in the early days. There was a real temptation to assume the transistor was a bad one and just put in a new replacement to end up with another dead one.... More pocket money gone.... Hey Ho those were the days. - I used to love what transistors could do but hate the way they bit you on the arris.

[Dorsetmike]

Also going back, RAF days, radar with loads of CV1091s, - AKA EF50s, a Hallicrafter SX25 with a pair of 6V6s for output. Much later building my own controllers wit a CMOS chip BC109s, 1N4148s and a 3055 or TIP31 output, (still using one, excellent crawl, minutes to cover 12")

[Adrian]

What a very pleasant thread this has become - thank you everybody.

I think it demonstrates how members of this Forum can interact well.

Great reading - more tomorrow?

Adrian

PS going back to the airplane/aeroplane mention - my two year old grandson sees them regularly over Duxford and calls them "air p planes!

And his Mum who is French, has a PHd and is a research scientist regularly takes him for a walek (walk!)

[Bealman]

Even though I too remember building valve stuff and gerANium transistors, I must Kindle insist we stare on topic 

I have no problem with folk starting a new thread on old electronic techniques and devices, however. I'm sure we have many members who would be interested. 

[Bealman]

That's ok.... put it down to Tasmanian time leg lag 

[GeeBee]

.... maybe  respitory is a  modern  word    for  'spitoon'...


....clang.........

No respitory is the place in the hospital they send you when they have no idea what is wrong you but they admit you are ill

[Komata]

And then there are the local 'dialects'; aka 'English as she might be spoke' - by someone.

When I was doing my TESOL (English as a Second language) training, the class I was part of, was required to do a classroom-style teaching session, with the presenting student to be to be critiqued by their fellow class members.  I was the only European in my particular group, with the others being variously from South Korea, mainland China and Taiwan.  The class supervisor was European (and the Head of the Languages Department).

Grammar formed part of the presentation, with each of us being allocated  a specific word-type (noun, verb, adjective etc.) and being required to give a 30 minute-long  presentation on the allocated topic (I was given 'Nouns', BTW).

I had heard that Asians had problems with the pronunciation of various letters of the English alphabet (especially the letter 'R') but had never really believed it, until we were presented with a very well crafted, well thought-out, and beautifully-presented discourse on English 'Verbs'.  Nothing wrong with the way it was  done, EXCEPT, that the very-well educated Korean lady who was 'teaching' could not pronounce the letter 'V' and the word 'Verb' came across as 'Werb'...

I discovered in the course of the presentation that it is EXTREMELY  difficult to keep a straight face and make 'neutral' comments when presented with such a detail.  No one else (being Asian themselves) saw (or heard) anything wrong with the 'word'  and the supervisor made no comment...  I had definitely learnt a new word (no, not 'verd' - too Germanic) to add to my vocabulary.

It was an 'interesting' session..

BTW (and FWIW): 'Kringlish' (Korean English - the term that the Koran's themselves use) and 'Chinglish'  (Chinese English; again, the term that the Chinese use to define their version of English) are actual 'official' versions of the English language, with 'Chinglish' being spoken with as large a population as that using 'original' English.  (Thought you might like to know).

[railsquid]

Hai, Squiddy-san (bows deeply)

Well if you're going to bow that deeply, at least use the appropriately honourific "Squiddy-sama" 

Does that mean we have to addess you as "Honourable Railsquid" in the future? 

Good heavens no (though my team of crack Ninjas may feel differently  )

[LAandNQFan]

Well if you're going to bow that deeply, at least use the appropriately honourific "Squiddy-sama" 

Tsk, Railsquid. "Honorific" is non-u if you include a "u" as it retains the original English spelling, unlike its root-word, "honor", which was perverted in the eighteenth century by a desire to be fashionably French.  Thanks to the Pilgrim Fathers, Americans preserve the English spellings of such words as "color" and "theater" while we use the French spellings.

Why do we call it "spelling"?  Individual Anglo-Saxon runes represented physical objects and when you combined these ingredients in a word you were making a recipe for magic - a spell!

English spelling is endlessly fascinating: "rhyme" is a spelling mistake for "rime", the A-S word, as the writer of the first English text-book on poetry knew that "rhythm" was Greek and assumed that "rhyme" should be cognate; "reconnoitre" is spelled with an "oi" and "reconnaissance" with an "ai" because we borrowed the former during the War of Spanish Succession and the latter during the Napoleonic Wars - the French had reformed the spelling of "oi" words in the century between.

[railsquid]

Well if you're going to bow that deeply, at least use the appropriately honourific "Squiddy-sama" 

Tsk, Railsquid. "Honorific" is non-u if you include a "u" as it retains the original English spelling, unlike its root-word, "honor", which was perverted in the eighteenth century by a desire to be fashionably French.  Thanks to the Pilgrim Fathers, Americans preserve the English spellings of such words as "color" and "theater" while we use the French spellings.

Why do we call it "spelling"?  Individual Anglo-Saxon runes represented physical objects and when you combined these ingredients in a word you were making a recipe for magic - a spell!

English spelling is endlessly fascinating: "rhyme" is a spelling mistake for "rime", the A-S word, as the writer of the first English text-book on poetry knew that "rhythm" was Greek and assumed that "rhyme" should be cognate; "reconnoitre" is spelled with an "oi" and "reconnaissance" with an "ai" because we borrowed the former during the War of Spanish Succession and the latter during the Napoleonic Wars - the French had reformed the spelling of "oi" words in the century between.

Dayumm... Well at least we can blame the French for the confusion  Mind you for many years I thought "gaol" was an archaic word meaning "jail" but pronounced "gawul" or something. And for even more years (until computers started red-underlining words they thought are incorrect, which is a bit of a double-edged sword in my most humblest of opinions) I had been writing "thankyou" instead of "thank you".

[railsquid]

Hai, Squiddy-san (bows deeply)

Well if you're going to bow that deeply, at least use the appropriately honourific "Squiddy-sama" 

You cant leave it hanging there,
I must  insist you explain the subtlties (to us lesser mortals )

"san" is the standard "neutral" form, "sama" is more formal. As a general rule, people you are aquainted with (but not family or friends) you'd address as "Surname-san", but people you don't know/who are in a "higher" position than you would be "Surname-sama" (and letters are always addressed to Surname-sama"). Then there's a whole confusing variety of honorific levels of grammar which further complicate things which I won't go into now as it's too early in the morning.

[railsquid]

Talking about spelling... and Japanese... here's a rant I posted elsewhere:

Welcome to Japan... they do things... differently here. Like... no road names. Well, many more major roads do have names, but they never form part of an official address, and your average residential street will merely be a strip of tarmac between numbered blocks (which are numbered subblocks of a numbered block of a subdistrict), upon which sit houses numbered in seemingly random, and often duplicate fashion. Such as Chez Railsquid. The way to differentiate between identically numbered houses is by the nameplate, which is usually displayed somewhere visible. On the plus side, identically numbered houses will be contiguous. Oh, and names are a whole other ballgame of fun, to which point I shall return later. First, an example address would look like this:

150-1234
Tokyo-to
Nantoka-ku
Meiromachi 4-15-22
Tananaka-sama

which is:

Postal code
City name (in this case Tokyo)
Borough name
Subdistrict name, block 4, sub-block 15, plot 22 (which may or may not be unique)
Honorifically Mr or Mrs. Tanaka


If the address is a block of flats, the flat number and usually the building name (which will often be some semi-random combination of foreign words, I use to live close to a block of flats called - literally - "Ripe One"), will be appended.

Clear?


Now, about the names... they're usually written in Kanji (Chinese characters), and especially when it comes to names, Japanese is a total fustercluck. I refer you to the famous
Monty Python "Raymond Luxury-Yacht" sketch ("it's pronounced Throatwobbler-Mangrove"). This is Japan. Every. Clucking. Day. Let's zip back to the "subdistrict name", in my example "Meiromachi". The "machi" literally means "town" or "settlement". Logical, you might think. Yes... but for historical reasons it has two pronunciations, "machi" which is etymologically Japanese, and "cho", which originates from Chinese. Aaaaand... there is no earthly way you can tell from the Chinese character for a given location whether it's "machi" or "cho". You just have to know. True story - one place I was living, it took me about 6 weeks before I realised I was pronouncing part of my address incorrectly.



Any questions?

[Komata]

This is fascinating; thanks to all who have contributed so far.

There is however another area of the English language that is so far untouched, and into which I (as being the product of only one generation) can only make a limited foray; the language of the contemporaneous 'Youth Culture'.

Irrespective of when we were born we  have all been part of it as 'our' generation has made its way through the teen and early twenties age bracket, before finally settling down and becoming 'conformists' (even though some of us still aren't - even in our later years).  Who for instance amongst the Baby Boomer generation (of which I am one) remembers such words and phrases as 'Hip', 'Gear', Fab', 'Outasight', Right On, 'Like wow', and 'Man', and  can use them in their correct context; words and phrases that at the time we thought were so terribly 'anti' the establishment we were 'rebelling' against - never, ever, realising that in fact (and with time) WE would become  that self-same establishment?

And who amongst 'Boomers' (for example) can make any sense of any of the language of the generations that have followed ours - the 'in-house' language used by our Children, Grand children and, (in some cases) Great grand children? Or of the way that our supposedly 'proper' English that we  laboured-over with such effort, could have become degraded (contaminated?) by the imports from 'overseas' - whether from Europe or the USA?

Irrespective of our generation (whether 'Depression, Wartime, 'Boomer, Gen' X', Gen 'Y' or Milleniall'), we simply don't 'speak the language; and, should we even attempt to, immediately date ourselves by the inflexions we use and the emphasis we place; displaying our 'ignorance' to 'those in the know'; to often merciless derision and scorn.  The fact that we did exactly the same to our parents and them to theirs, is of course something that, in our confusion and embarrassment we usually forget.   

It has of course always been so, so it is pointless to even try (although that is only something that comes with unfortunate experience).    But one day, they too will be 'Just like us' and face the same situations of total incomprehension.  Their 'Turn' will come!!

They just don't realise it...

A comforting thought isn't it (even if we probably won't be around to savour the moment, and take delight in the irony)?