A while ago, I saw an English insurance policy (I think it was) and was struck by how clear the language seemed to me, compared to what I’m used to in German.

I don’t remember the details, but the language style was along the lines of (if it had been for a mortgage), “If you do not pay your instalments on time, you are at risk of losing your house ( Read more... )

LanguageLog had an interesting entry on situations where both it’s and its are grammatically correct, and result in a sentence with essentially the same meaning.

Occasionally, I comment to Amy that a particular word is a homophone (such as sew and sow or rose “flower” and rose “went up”).

Yesterday, I mentioned hole (in a bucket) and whole (the whole piece of cake), and she said that for her, those weren’t homophones.

I asked her how she pronounced them, and she said that for her, they are (roughly) [ ( Read more... )

An interesting sentence, which I found on an old blog entry of Professor John Wells’s:

Who would know aught of art must act, learn and then take his ease.

If it is read with an RP accent, using strong forms for would of must and the weak form for and, it supposedly not only uses all monophthongs and narrow diphthongs but does so in a regular ( Read more... )

Amy seems to be turning into a rhotic speaker; I’ve often heard her say things such as “car” and “are” rather than “cah” and “ah” as I do.

It’s still a bit unstable; this morning, she said “dinosaur” and “dinosaw” in separate sentences.

And not completely authentic, due to overgeneralisation/hypercorrection: she also said “girarff”.

I wonder why ( Read more... )

Listening to this clip on YouTube, right at the beginning she said aftermath with a BATH vowel in the final syllable.

Huh! I had always used TRAP there, as in maths. (But then, I’m not sure whether I’ve ever heard the word spoken before.)

Looked it up on dictionary.com; its house dictionary only has TRAP for the final vowel, but further down, the ( Read more... )

The other day, I finally got around to taking all the words I had jotted into the margin of my notebook during the week-long Esperanto course in March and look them up the dictionary and make Anki flashcards out of them.

Two of the words I got that way were ebeno and ebenaĵo.

They were defined in my eo-de dictionary as something like “(Geometrie ( Read more... )

In Gregg shorthand (simplified), “thorough” is written th-e-r-o.

I would have used different vowels there, so I tried to see where those came from.

The first was easiest; I was expecting a STRUT vowel there, since I have STRUT in case such as “hurry”, but I have heard NURSE in such words from Americans. Essentially, I have “hu-ry” while they have ( Read more... )

So apparently Russian хлеб khleb “bread” is a loanword from Germanic, from a the ancestor of English loaf and German Laib.

I don’t think I would connected those three words off-hand. (Even though the English and German words at least mean the same thing! Perhaps because the word Laib is fairly rare in my speech; I usually talk about ein Brot ( Read more... )

I had a go at testyourvocab.com and it estimates that I know about 27'200 words.

They say they'd appreciate it if more people under 15 take the test, so that they can get more accurate results, so spread the word!

Makes me wonder what the size of Amy’s vocabulary is in English.