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Breathing life new into old posts. This blog started in 2005. As readership has grown since then I am reposting some of the older posts in batches of four at 06.00 CET every Monday.
The client doesn't know best! By definition, the translator always knows more than the client.
Group nouns Are they singular or plural?
Piling up nouns Adjectival nouns can lead to linguistic indigestion.
BBC English Why not use a spell-checker?
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On a Wordreference forum this question:
if you enter “acoming” in Google, it seems that this word exists. But my dictionaries don’t know it. How come? I guess what it means in my mother tongue but it is probably a locally used word. (?) Just like Bob Dylan’s “times they are a-changing”. Does anybody know? Thanks in advance.
gets this answer:
Putting the a in front of words is a colloquialism that is not often used these days. We see it in songs and poems, perhaps because it fits the meter of the lyrics or poem. It does have a nice sound, but we don't use it in speaking.
This video clip is titled
Padstow May day 2010
The whole town of Padstow celebrates the pagan festival of Beltane and welcomes in the summer. The Obby Oss dances through the streets as the people sing the Padstow song Summer is acoming in today
May Day is the first day of May, which seems a bit early for summer to be acoming in. In Spain at least it is the summer solstice that marks the beginning of summer. But anyway, what has happened is that Summer Is Acoming In is a variation on Sumer Is Icumen In, which is the title of a medieval English song; it has apparently been adapted to the form of modern English songs.
However, it is not the same; is acoming is a variant form of the present continuous is coming but is icumen is the present perfect. The auxiliary verb is be, as is still the case in German and French, and the i is a prefix that was added to the past participle. It still has a vestigial existence in modern English in the word yclept, which the COED defines as
· adj. archaic or humorous by the name of.
(So many people, it seems, find it humorous that I had to go to the 11th page of a Google search to find this example of the word actually being used rather than talked about.)
So, sumer is icumen in means summer has come in. We now use have as the auxiliary verb for the perfect tenses and the prefix for the past participle has disappeared. Nevertheless, it is clear that Middle English was similar to modern German, which would be Sommer ist eingekommen. German attaches the adverb ein (English in) to the beginning of the verb but ein-ge-kommen is clearly the same as i-cumen in.
Wikipedia has an article about the song itself.
(Music image: Wikipedia)
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I have written about semicolons before on this blog. Expert Edge has an interesting article about the use of this punctuation mark. It starts with this fine comment from Ben Yagoda:
A lot of good writers use the semicolon well; a lot of bad writers abuse it. There’s one very common semicolon error; this one.
In A Guide to English Language Usage I say (click image to enlarge):
(Image of semicolon: Wikimedia Commons)
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StatCounter tells me that this is how someone found my post on the Cambridge comma.
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Bridging the Unbridgeable has a poll of favourite language blogs. Please visit the site (here) and vote for my blog by pasting the URL under Other. Thanks.
http://lavengro.typepad.com/peter_harvey_linguist/
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Last October the Language Log had a post by Victor Mair featuring a discussion between himself and Geoff Wade on the times faster/lower than problem. There is a dialogue that begins:
VHM: If a tortoise “runs” ten feet in one minute and a rabbit runs a thousand feet in one minute, the rabbit has run hundreds of times faster / farther than the tortoise; the tortoise has “run” hundreds of times slower than the rabbit.
GW: I obviously agree with the “times faster”, but am not convinced of the “times slower” use. Would not one-hundreth [sic] times as fast be more accurate? A multiple (times) and a divisor (one-hundreth) seem to have different functions.
I am firmly with GW. If a train is travelling at 50 kph, then one that is travelling three times faster is travelling at 200 kph (50 + 150) while one that is travelling three times as fast would be travelling at 150 kph. And one that is travelling three times slower would be going backwards at 100 kph (50 – 150).
However, I accept that this is a point that is not worth getting excited about. People have different views and the ‘times slower than’ expression is perfectly understandable however illogical it may seem to me.
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In his latest Language Log post Geoff Pullum has mentioned my recent post on split infinitives. I have added the following footnote to my post:
Geoff Pullum has mentioned this post here. He says:
What [Harvey] shouldn't do is tell students or clients that "split infinitives" should be avoided for reasons having to do with respecting English grammar, because that's simply false.
Pullum will no doubt be pleased to have my categorical assurance that I don’t do that; my position is after all only implicit in my above comment:
nobody who has studied the English language professionally … can see anything wrong with split infinitives.
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Breathing life new into old posts. This blog started in 2005. As readership has grown since then I am reposting some of the older posts in batches of four at 06.00 CET every Monday.
How not to market your services The importance of presentation and accuracy.
Their, there & they're An addition to A Guide to English Language Usage.
Semicolons A useful punctuation mark.
The world's oldest question mark? Found in the Syriac language.
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At lunch today a friend started a sentence by saying ‘My father’s French …’ One person expressed interest in this fact but the rest of us were surprised because we knew that he came from an old Scottish family and had in fact mentioned his father on previous occasions. It turned out that he was intending to comment on his father’s knowledge of the French language: ‘My father’s French was rather good.’
Curiously, amid all the silly invented examples of apostrophe confusion to be found on the internet, a real-life example caused only a moment’s confusion and was a bit of a joke.
What’s more, the apostrophe serves no useful purpose here in removing the ambiguity, which is often claimed to be its chief advantage..
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I have always been under the impression that toreador was an erroneous word invented by Bizet. Certainly I don’t remember ever having heard or read it in Spanish, where torero is the standard form, so I was surprised to see it defined in the COED as
a bullfighter, especially one on horseback.
– ORIGIN Sp., from torear ‘fight bulls’, from toro ‘bull’.
I went to the Spanish Royal Academy’s Dictionary (DRAE) and found it defined as
Hombre que torea. (Man who fights bulls)
and indeed it is well-formed word from the Spanish verb torear.
The OED has it as
Mod[ern] Sp[anish] ‘a bull-fighter on horseback’
while the Gran Diccionario Oxford (GDO) has
(anticuado [obsolete]) toreador, bullfighter
Both the OED and COED contrast the mounted toreador with the torero who fights on foot.
The DRAE defines torero as
Persona que por profesión ejerce el arte del toreo. (Person who fights bulls as a profession)
And the GDO says
bullfighter, matador
I am not an aficionado of the bullring but the bullfights that I occasionally see on TV all show the torero on foot rather than on horseback. I wonder if the Oxford idea that the toreador is mounted (English language dictionaries) and that the word is obsolete (GDO) may in effect be saying the same thing. A search in the Spanish newspaper El País shows 133,159 hits for torero and 76 for toreador, many (though not quite all) of which refer to Carmen. It may also be significant that the DRAE defines obsolete (GDO) toreador as a man while a torero is a person, the noun being masculine or feminine without changing.
English Wikipedia sends toreador to a disambiguation page that offers torero. Spanish Wikipedia redirects it immediately to torero.
This blog is about language. Comments about the use of these words in Spanish and other languages are welcome. Comments about the rights and wrongs of bullfighting will be deleted.
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