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alexey_m_ukolov22 ноября 2016 г.When we make an everyday observation like “I have some homework to do,” we pronounce the word “hav.” But when we become emphatic about it—“I have to go now”—we pronounce it “haff.”
215- alexey_m_ukolov22 ноября 2016 г.
All Chinese dialects are monosyllabic—which can itself be almost absurdly limiting—but the Pekingese dialect goes a step further and demands that all words end in an “n” or “ng” sound. As a result, there are so few phonetic possibilities in Pekingese that each sound must represent on average seventy words. Just one sound, “yi,” can stand for 215 separate words.
214 - alexey_m_ukolov22 ноября 2016 г.
But perhaps nothing speaks more clearly for the absurdities of English pronunciation than that the word for the study of pronunciation in English, orthoepy, can itself be pronounced two ways.
215 - alexey_m_ukolov22 ноября 2016 г.Читать далее
But in English, pronunciation is so various—one might almost say random—that not one of our twenty-six letters can be relied on for constancy. Either they clasp to themselves a variety of pronunciations, as with the c in race, rack, and rich, or they sulk in silence, like the b in debt, the a in bread, the second t in thistle. In combinations they become even more unruly and unpredictable, most famously in the letter cluster ough, which can be pronounced in any of eight ways—as in through, though, thought, tough, plough, thorough, hiccough, and lough (an Irish-English word for lake or loch, pronounced roughly as the latter).
217 - alexey_m_ukolov22 ноября 2016 г.
This inclination to use affixes and infixes provides gratifying flexibility in creating or modifying words to fit new uses, as strikingly demonstrated in the word incomprehensibility, which consists of the root -hen- and eight affixes and infixes: in, -com-, -pre-, -s-, -ib-, -il-, -it-, and -y.
217 - alexey_m_ukolov22 ноября 2016 г.
Sometimes words change by becoming more specific. Starve originally meant to die before it took on the more particular sense of to die by hunger. A deer was once any animal (it still is in the German tier) and meat was any food
217 - alexey_m_ukolov22 ноября 2016 г.
Consider the oft-quoted statement “the exception proves the rule.” Most people take this to mean that the exception confirms the rule, though when you ask them to explain the logic in that statement, they usually cannot. After all, how can an exception prove a rule? It can’t. The answer is that an earlier meaning of prove was to test (a meaning preserved in proving ground) and with that meaning the statement suddenly becomes sensible—the exception tests the rule.
216 - alexey_m_ukolov22 ноября 2016 г.Читать далее
An American going into a London department store with a shopping list consisting of vest, knickers, suspenders, jumper, and pants would in each instance be given something dramatically different from what he expected. (To wit, a British vest is an American undershirt. Our vest is their waistcoat. Their knickers are our panties. To them a jumper is a sweater, while what we call a jumper is to them a pinafore dress. Our suspenders are their braces. They don’t need suspenders to hold up their pants because to them pants are underwear and clearly you don’t need suspenders for that, so instead they employ suspenders to hold up their stockings. Is that clear?)
218 - alexey_m_ukolov22 ноября 2016 г.
Simeon Potter notes that when James II first saw St. Paul’s Cathedral he called it amusing, awful, and artificial, and meant that it was pleasing to look at, deserving of awe, and full of skillful artifice.
214 - alexey_m_ukolov22 ноября 2016 г.
According to Mary Helen Dohan, in her absorbing book "Our Own Words", the military vehicle the tank got its name because during its secretive experimental phase people were encouraged to think it was a storage receptacle—hence a tank. The curiously nautical terminology for its various features—hatch, turret, hull, deck—arises from the fact that it was developed by the British Admiralty rather than the army.
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