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alexey_m_ukolov25 декабря 2016 г.According to John David Morley in Pictures from the Water Trade, when Emperor Hirohito went on the radio to announce the Japanese surrender at the end of World War II, he used such vague and arcane language that most of his audience, although listening attentively, didn’t have the first idea what he was talking about.
279- alexey_m_ukolov25 декабря 2016 г.
Translating is an enormously costly and time-consuming business. An internal survey by the European Community in 1987 found that it was costing it $15 a word, $500 a page, to translate its documents. One in every three employees of the European Community is engaged in translating papers and speeches. A third of all administration costs—$700 million in 1987—was taken up with paying for translators and interpreters.
271 - alexey_m_ukolov25 декабря 2016 г.
To a foreigner it must seem sometimes as if we are being intentionally contrary. Consider that in Britain the Royal Mail delivers the post, not the mail, while in America the Postal Service delivers the mail, not the post.
248 - alexey_m_ukolov25 декабря 2016 г.Читать далее
The word for the American currency, dollar, is a corruption of Joachimsthaler, named for a sixteenth-century silver mine in Joachimsthal, Germany. The first recorded use of the word in English was in 1553, spelled daler, and for the next two centuries it was applied by the English to various continental currencies. Its first use in America was not recorded until 1782, when Thomas Jefferson, in Notes on a Money Unit for the United States, plumped for dollar as the name of the national currency on the ground that “the [Spanish] dollar is a known coin and the most familiar of all to the mind of the people.” That may be its first recorded appearance, but clearly if it was known to the people the term had already been in use for some time.
245 - alexey_m_ukolov25 декабря 2016 г.
In 1923 a lexicographer named G. H. McKnight did a comprehensive study of how words are used and found that just forty-three words account for fully half of all the words in common use, and that just nine account for fully one-quarter of all the words in almost any sample of written English. Those nine are: and, be, have, it, of, the, to, will, and you.
246 - alexey_m_ukolov25 декабря 2016 г.
Perhaps for our last words on the subject of usage we should turn to the last words of the venerable French grammarian Dominique Bonhours, who proved on his deathbed that a grammarian’s work is never done when he turned to those gathered loyally around him and whispered: “I am about to—or I am going to—die; either expression is used.”
248 - alexey_m_ukolov25 декабря 2016 г.Читать далее
Considerations of what makes for good English or bad English are to an uncomfortably large extent matters of prejudice and conditioning. Until the eighteenth century it was correct to say “you was” if you were referring to one person. It sounds odd today, but the logic is impeccable. Was is a singular verb and were a plural one. Why should you take a plural verb when the sense is clearly singular? The answer—surprise, surprise—is that Robert Lowth didn’t like it. “I’m hurrying, are I not?” is hopelessly ungrammatical, but “I’m hurrying, aren’t I?”—merely a contraction of the same words—is perfect English. Many is almost always a plural (as in “Many people were there”), but not when it is followed by a, as in “Many a man was there.” There’s no inherent reason why these things should be so. They are not defensible in terms of grammar. They are because they are.
245 - alexey_m_ukolov26 ноября 2016 г.
Just as a quick test, see if you can tell which of the following words are mispelled:
supercede,
conceed,
procede,
idiosyncracy,
concensus,
accomodate,
impressario,
irresistable,
rhythym,
opthalmologist,
diptheria,
anamoly,
afficianado,
caesarian,
grafitti.
In fact, they all are. So was misspelled at the end of the preceeding paragraph. So was preceding just there. I’m sorry, I’ll stop. But I trust you get the point that English can be a maddeningly difficult language to spell correctly.246 - alexey_m_ukolov22 ноября 2016 г.
No less mysterious is the way the terms twenty-one and one-and-twenty move up the country in alternating bands. In London people say “twenty-one,” but if you move forty miles to the north they say “one-and-twenty.” Forty miles north of that and they say “twenty-one” again. And so it goes right the way up to Scotland, changing from one to the other every forty miles or so.
243 - alexey_m_ukolov22 ноября 2016 г.
It is not too much to say, given all the variables, that dialects vary from house to house, indeed from room to room within each house, that there are as many dialects in a language as there are speakers. As Mario Pei has noted, no two people in any language speak the same sounds in precisely the same way. That is of course what enables us to recognize a person by his voice. In short, we each have our own dialect.
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