inflectional viri
little sister: We have to make some orange juliuses.
tristan: *ahem* It's "orange julii".
little sister: Haha you'd be the one who'd know that.
tristan: I just made that up actually.
little sister: Wait, so what is it?
We all like to pick on Google Buzz, but c’mon reshare? The obvious criticism to make is that the re- prefix is superfluous because share functions just as well in this context. Once we make this criticism, however, it’s not much of jump to see that retweet and reblog are similarly redundant. But this doesn’t feel right, does it? A “blog” or “tweet” button would seem weird, right? This might seem handwavy, but what this intuition tells me is that the prefix re-, at least in this context, is shifting in meaning from simply repeat or redo to reproduce.
This strikes me as more of an insult than a badge of honor. (via molodoichelovek)
Ugh.
Please don’t use the feeble defence of sloppy usage - “Oh it’s a living language”.
Yes, it is a living language. So kindly refrain from killing it.
Words are the way we define our interactions with one another and with the past. If we allow words that have specific meanings to acquire other meanings then we introduce confusion and decrease the utility of the language.
For example, if you were to read an account of the recapture of Villers-Bretonneaux which said that advancing forces were decimated, then how would you know what was actually meant? How many died? 10%? 70%?
Decimated and devastated sound similar. They don’t mean the same thing.
Emphasis mine. “If we allow…”: But we do allow words to take on new meanings. We’ve always allowed words to do this. Logically then, the true antecedent implies that we have “introduced confusion and decreased the utility of the language”. I don’t know about you but as an English speaker I don’t wander around confused by my language and I never feel like my language has lost its utility. If anything, semantic language change adds more utility to the language as the new meanings adapt the word for new times.
Let me put that another way: You claim that “Words are the way we define our interactions with one another and with the past.” Well then, a word’s change of meaning reflects our relationship with the past. The “sloppy usage” of using decimate to mean to kick ass instead of the etymological meaning of “kill one in every ten” reflects a change: Namely, we don’t go around barbarically* executing one in every ten. I’m glad we don’t need that meaning to talk about the here and now.
*To be clear, this is a “sloppy usage” of barbaric, since the original and sacrosanct meaning of the word is an outsider who doesn’t understand a tribe’s language and can only imitate it by going “bar bar”. (This is why in linguistics a barbarism refers to an error in morphology.)
This morning in a nutshell.
More You Know Edit: We have these vowels in English. Counterclockwise from /i/: beat, bit, bait, bet, (bat), bot, bought, boat, book, boot.
Entropy of English →
Examples of simulated English:
Zeroth-order approximation: the symbols are independent and equiprobable. XFOML RXKHRJFFJUJ ZLPWCFWKCYJ FFJEYVKCQSGXYD QPAAMKBZAACIBZLHJQD
First-order approximation: the symbols are independent, but frequency of letters matches English text. OCRO HLI RGWR NMIELWIS EU LL NBNESBEYA TH EEI ALHENHTTPA OOBTTVA NAH BRL
Second-order approximation: the frequency of pairs of letters matches English text. ON IE ANTSOUTINYS ARE T INCTORE ST BE S DEAMY ACHIN D ILONASIVE TUCOOWE AT TEASONARE FUSO TIZIN ANDY TOBE SEACE CTISBE
Third-order approximation: the frequency of triplets of letters matches English text. IN NO IST LAT WHEY CRATICT FROURE BERS GROCID PONDENOME OF DEMONSTURES OF THE REPTAGIN IS REGOACTIONA OF CRE
Fourth-order approximation: the frequency of quadruplets of letters matches English text. THE GENERATED JOB PROVIDUAL BETTER TRAND THE DISPLAYED CODE ABOVERY UPONDULTS WELL THE CODERST IN THESTICAL IT DO HOCK BOTHE MERG INSTATES CONS ERATION NEVER ANY OF PUBLE AND TO THEORY EVENTIAL CALLEGAND TO ELAST BENERATED IN WITH PIES AS IS WITH THE
It’s fascinating to see how this grows increasingly realistic. I wonder how high-order you need to go before the result would be exclusively actual English words.
!!!
