English

A look at how our language has changed, as well as some of its idiosyncrasies.

Jump to: Weird pronunciations     Palindromes     Alliteration     Spoonerisms     Monophthongs     Nyms     Pluralisation     Collective nouns     Diacritics     Alphabet     Abbreviations     Schwa     Unique words     Points to ponder     Free Games

The English language has always been fascinating to me. These days, I'm often amused (or not) by the way our younger-generation distorts and changes the meaning of words, and invents new ones. Like gay, and sick, and cool. Not to mention (ok, I will) the "shorthand" that they use when texting, which seems to be slowly becoming more common in "normal" text, IMHO.

But when I look back at the language in "the olden days", I can see that there were probably as many anomalies and rule-bendings then as there are now. Many of these were related to diphthongs and digraphs (see below).
The "rule" for words containing adjacent letters I and E was always stated as "I before E, except after C ". But the rule has many exceptions, for example their, heir, vein, weir, weird, reins, and deign. There are others, but it seems the rule has so many contraventions that it probably should not be considered a rule at all; Should we be allowed to use iether either one?
You may have noticed, too that the ei group has at least three different pronunciations, as in their, vein and weir, and the ie group another three, as in friend, field and tried.
Another multi-purpose diphthong is ui, as in quick, ruin, suit and suite. These are pronounced as i, ooi, oo and wee respectively. Just one more stumbling block for L-platers, I gess guess.
And if English kids in an English school found it hard to learn English, pity the poor immigrant trying to come to grips with it, sometimes from text-books only!

Weird Pronunciations
ough: The ough group of letters can be pronounced in at least six ways, depending on the surrounding letters. Try reading these words allowed aloud:
through, trough, tough, thought, though, bough. The pronunciations are, in order, as pronounced in too, off, cuff, port, low, and cow.
eigh: Similarly, this group has at least two pronunciations: freight and height. If we get these confused the words are pronounced as fright and hate.
qu: The qu group is usually required for use of the letter q (but there are some rare exceptions, eg. qi, umiaq, sheqel). This in itself is rather strange, but to make things worse, it can have two different sounds, which are kw, as in queen and quail, and k as in plaque and unique.
wh: This one is not so much weird as interesting: It begins all of the single-word queries except one: who? what? why? when? where? which? The exception is how?, which has both letters in it but separated. You may also notice that when we use this sound, we pronounce it as if it were "hw" rather than "wh" in every case (except who). Why? Because this sound is easier for us to form.
Would, should, could: These three words are interesting in that they all refer to an event's occurrence (or not), and differ only in the first part of the word. But they also share a strange pronunciation that's at odds with other similar words. For example boulder could be pronounced budder (with a deep u sound) if it followed the same rule.
o: Although all the vowels have at least two sounds (the long and short versions), this letter has five different sounds allocated to it, as in the words log, rogue, woman, women, to, as well as the oo and ou sounds as in boot and out, and the silent rendition as in "Phoenix" and "amoeba".

Palindromes
A Palindrome is a word or phrase that is the same spelled backwards as forwards. Possibly the most famous is "ABLE WAS I ERE I SAW ELBA". Some others are "AMORE ROMA", "A MAN, A PLAN, A CANAL - PANAMA". They ignore punctuation and word-spacing. A joke palindromic word is AIBOHPHOBIA, the fear of palindromes.

Amazing Alliteration
Alliteration means the occurrence of two adjacent words that start with the same sound or letter. These are often, but not always, an adjective and a noun, like "playful puppies", or "shimmering sea".

Spoonerisms and Malapropisms
A spoonerism is a phrase or sentence in which two of the sounds of words are either accidentally or purposely transposed giving it a whole new, often quite amusing meaning. Two examples are "mean as custard" instead of "keen as mustard", and "roaring with pain" instead of "pouring with rain". The term comes from the name of a man called William Spooner who often did this.
A malapropism occurs when a similar-sounding word is used instead of the correct one, changing the meaning of the phrase. For example "we danced the flamingo" (flamenco), and "he faded into Bolivian" (oblivion).

Diphthongs, Monophthongs, and Digraphs
A diphthong is a combination of 2 vowels to produce a different sound, like coin, round or rain. A monophthong is a vowel-sound, usually two vowels, that uses only one mouth-position, like teeth or main. A digraph is a combination of any two letters to produce one sound, like sh and th.

What's all the "nyms" about?
There are several words that end with the suffix "nym", and these can confuse even the most seasoned English-speaking person. The more common ones are synonyms (words that have the same or similar meaning, like "big" and "large"), antonyms (words with opposite meanings, like "big" and "small"), and acronyms (words made up of the initials of something, like "UNESCO)". But there are others.
Words that are spelled the same but pronounced differently, or pronounced the same but spelled differently, are called homonyms. Some examples are rain, rein, reign; weight, wait; herd, heard; and saw (viewed) and saw (cutting tool), sore, soar.
Choosing the wrong one can change the meaning of a sentence quite dramatically. Here's an example:
A group of hunters were walking together in the woods, when one of them felt the "call of nature". He handed his rifle to a friend and went a short distance away to relieve himself. As he was squatting, a large bear came from the trees and charged at him. The hunter jumped up and ran for his life back to his group of friends. Picture it: there he was, running through the woods with a bare behind!
Homonyms are separated into three sub-groups: homophones (same sound, but either the same or different spelling), homographs (same spelling but the same or different sound), and heteronyms (another "nym"), which have the same spelling but different sound. Heteronyms are also homographs, which are also homonyms. But the reverse is not necessarily true.
So, Synonym: same meaning; Antonym: opposite meaning; Acronym: initial letters; Homonym: same spelling, different sound, or same sound, different spelling; Homophone: same sound, same or different spelling; Homograph: same spelling, same or different sound; Heteronym: same spelling, different sound. Is that clearer?

Pluralization
At first glance, pluralization - refering to more than one of an object - seems fairly straightforward. But when we look more closely we see that this is not always the case. One common point of confusion is whether to add an s or es to the word. This has been discussed in some depth by the experts, and a consensus seems to have been reached: If the word ends in ch, sh, s, x or z, add an s; otherwise, add es.
OK, that solves that bit. But then there's another problem: collective nouns (discussed next) that allow the addition of s (as in places), es (as in boxes); no change (as in sheep); or a completely new word (as in goose,geese). All of these lie outside the scope of that rule. A bit confusing!
And another problem, which I've tried without much success to research, is which words can be pluralized. Every reference I found indicates that only nouns and pronouns can be pluralised. But suppose I want to say "There are too many "closely"s on this page". Is the word "closely" here a noun, upholding this rule? If so, it seems any word can be a noun! I believe that the word is the subject of the sentence, and can be pluralised in this way. I'd like to hear what others think about this.

Collective nouns
On a related theme, there are dozens, if not hundreds of collective nouns (names for groups) of various things that have been presented for our use. I don't know what the authority of the person/s creating them is, but many border on the ridiculous! Others conjure up realistic images of their subject. Some of the better-known ones are:
herd (cows, sheep), flock (sheep - again), gaggle (geese), colony (ants, bats), troop (monkeys), swarm (bees), school (fish), murder (crows), drove (cattle), pod (whales), cackle (hyenas), shoal (fish), plague (locusts), pack (wolves), cry (hounds), pride (lions), cloud (flies). I'd like to coin one for a group of people like me( if there is such a group): a library of lexophiles. Some less well-known ones are: tower (giraffes), flamboyance (flamingoes), pandamonium (parrots), kettle (hawks), and mischief (rats).
Some of these terms, and many more, apply to several different objects, and some objects have several collective nouns that can be applied to them. Personally, I think we should have one word for the whole bunch of them! What do you think?

Diacritics
Over the years, the alphabet has also been simplified by removing diacritics, the small marks that are added to letters to distinguish them from "normal" letters. These are still available, but need special codes to allow them to be printed.
They include tilde (Ã), acute (Á), grave (À), circumflex (Â), umlaut or diaecresis (Ä)) and several more.
The Ellipsis (...) is not a diacritic, as it doesn't affect any letters. It's a punctuation mark.

The alphabet
Currently, there are 26 letters in our alphabet of which 5 (A, E, I, O and U), are vowels, although some consider the letter Y to be a vowel as well. But there are more than 20 vowel-sounds in our language.
Years ago, there were some strange letters in the alphabet. One was called "thorn" which was pronounced "th" as in "think" (as distinct from "th" as in "that") and written as þ. This was later changed to the "Y" sound, and that's why old English refers to things like "ye olde booke".
The "th" sound, as in "that", was sounded by a letter called "eth", but this is now replaced with the digraph "th".
Another letter was called "wynn". It was pronounced like two "u"s and written as ƿ. This later became the letter double-u (w).
A fourth one, which was right at the end of the alphabet, was & (the ampersand), pronounced "and". This got its rather strange name from the way in which it was listed when reciting the alphabet: "A, B, C ..., X, Y, Z, and AND". To make it clearer, it was given an introduction by saying, "X,Y,Z, and, in itself, AND". The words "in itself" in Latin were "per se", so it was changed into "X, Y, Z, and, per se, AND". This was later contracted, to become "ampersand".
Around 1200AD this was removed from the alphabet, although it's still in common use.

Abbreviations
Some abbreviations have been around so long that many people don't even remember what they are abreviations of. Sure, we can use e.g. and i.e. correctly (although some people get these two confused), but what do the letters stand for? Here are some that we all use but may not know the full version of:
e.g. (exempli gratia - Latin for free example), i.e. (id est - Latin for that is), OK (or o.k.) (Oll Korrect- old English from about 1830), Mrs. (mistress - a married woman), a.k.a. (also known as), a.s.a.p. (as soon as possible), q.e.d. (quod erat demonstrandum - which was to be demonstrated. Not "Quite Easily Done"), PIN (Personal Identification Number).
AM and PM are familiar to most people, as referring to pre-noon and post-noon. They stand for Ante-Meridiem and Post Meridiem respectively.
BC and AD refer to the years before and after the birth of Christ. But some mistakenly think that AD means After Death. If this was the case, there would be (approximately) 33 "unassigned" years between them. AD actually stands for Anno Domini, meaning "in the year of our Lord", and is associated with the same year. There are no unassigned years, and there is no "year zero", so 1AD follows immediately after 1BC.
Since the World was "Wide-Webbed" we've had a real explosion of abbreviations, mainly for the purpose of speeding up typing. I have trouble keeping up with these, but here are some examples I've come across: LOL (laughing out loud), ROL (roll over laughing), ROFL (roll on floor laughing), LMAO (laughing my (armpit?) off), AFAIK (as far as I know), FAIK (for all I know), LOVLI (Laughing Out Very Loud Indeed - this one coined by my wife), CUL8R (see you later), 4EVA (for ever), B4 (before) and LYTTMAB (love you to the moon and back).

What's a "schwa"?
When a word has a vowel-sound that's suppressed (like the "a" in woman) it's called a "schwa" and can be any of the vowels or vowel-combinations, or "y". Its symbol is ə, and its IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) code number is 601. Some examples: woman (the "a"), weeded (the third "e"), minus (the "u"), doctor (the second "o"), and digit (the second "i"). It's all a bit ridiculous (the "ou"), really.

Unique words
This section is here for interest's sake only - it has no real bearing on the page topic, but you're invited to send other words that are special in some way, to be included in it.
The most commonly-used English word that has all five vowels, once only, in alphabetical order, is facetious (jocular or amusing). If we consider Y to be a vowel (as some do), then facetiously still qualifies. There are several more, including abstemiously (to use sparingly) affectiously (with affection), and tragediously (tragically).
The longest word in any of the major dictionaries is Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis, with 45 letters. It's a lung complaint, and if you have it, you probably should carry a card with you with it written down to show anyone enquiring, as you probably won't be able to say it without taking a breath!.
The word dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) was considered the champion for a time but now is well down the list. The longest English word with only one vowel is strengths.
Another long word is hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia, the fear of long words. I think a few people suffer from have hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophilia the love of long words!
The only base word starting with chth is chthonic (sometimes chthonian), meaning related to the underworld.
And the longest words with no vowels (a dead heat) are tsktsks (clickings of the tongue) and rhythms.
There are many words that describe the fear of something-or-other, and the list seems to get longer by the day. Two such words are friggatriskaidekephobia and paraskevidekatriaphobia, which both mean the fear of Friday the thirteenth. The first comes from Frigg, the Nordic name for the goddess of Friday; the second from Paraskevi, Greek for Friday.
Did you know that the word "gullible" has now been removed from all dictionaries?

Points to ponder

• Are terms like not impossible, and not unlike incorrect because they use a double negative?
• If forget is the opposite to remember, and something can be unforgetable can something else be unrememberable?
• When did Google become a verb?
• Better and Bettor:
  At a racecourse, anyone wishing to place a bet may visit a "Betting Booth" and they are called "Bettors". Some are casuals, placing small bets based on their best guess, a hunch, or the name of their mother's cat etc.
  Others delve deeply into the horse, jockey and trainer history before placing what are sometimes very large bets. We could refer to them as "Better Bettors".
  If the racecourse management decided to provide a special booth for the Better Bettors, with all information they needed displayed on charts and lists, this booth could be referred to as the "Better Bettor's Betting Booth".
  If normal, casual bettors were permitted to use this booth, their bets would be "Better Bettor's Betting Booth Bets", while those placed by Better Bettors would be"Better Bettor's Better Bettor's Betting Booth Bets".
• Was the sadist responsible for coining the word "rhotacism" to describe difficulty pronouncing the letter "r", the same one who invented "lisp" for someone unable to pronounce the "s" sound ?

Free Games
If you have got this far in the page, there's a chance you may be a lexophile (or worse!) and if so, you may like to visit the Free Games page, where you can download some free games.
These are my own take on some paper-based word games like Word Search and Crosswords, as well as a couple of logic games. Being computerised, they allowed some extra features not possible in paper-based games to be added.
They can all be played on your computer, without any internet link, and do not require registration.

Go In Piece!