posted
Ouster comes from the Anglo-French word ouster, which is a verb infinitive. In French, infinitives are often used where we would use a present participle (like ousting). Apparently, it's an old law term (because French was used for the courts in Middle English times). I have no idea why it would be spreading now, though. It seems so much more common-sensical to say "ousting."
Anyway, words with similar endings include disclaimer, misnomer, user, dinner, and supper.
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quote:The regular ME. descendants of OE. wí¦an, -men, viz. wimman, wimmen (cf. OE. l鯦man, ME. lemman, LEMAN) continued in use until the 15th century. By c 1200 the rounding of wi- to wu- is clearly established, and is at that time characteristic of western ME. texts. The form womman appears in the late 13th century (first in western texts), and the corresponding pl. wommen in the late 14th. The simplification of mm in womman, -[i]en and wimman, -en, and the consequent conversion of the first syllable into an open syllable gave rise to forms with ō and ē, which, continuing to the early modern period, provided the occasion for punning analyses of wōman and wēmen (see 1k below). From c1400 woman and women became regular spellings for sing. and pl., and have been retained as a properly corresponding pair to man and men; but in the standard speech the pronunciation (wu-) was ultimately appropriated to the sing. and (wi-) to the pl., probably through the associative influence of pairs like foot and feet.
[ June 02, 2004, 10:28 PM: Message edited by: Jon Boy ]
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posted
Okay. What's the usage difference between "may" and "might"?
What is "ought"? I think I looked it up once, but I'd be interested to read your answer. What other words are like "ought"?
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posted
So what you're saying is, if someone uses "may" like, "This person may have so-and-so disease" they're really using it incorrectly?
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posted
May and might are modal auxiliary verbs. They come from different forms of the same verb (may being the present and might being the past). They mean essentially the same thing: possibility. It's the same pattern as will/would and can/could. Use might where the past tense is required. So if someone says, "So-and-so may have cancer," it's actually correct, but if someone says, "We thought so-and-so may have cancer [but it turns out he really didn't]," it's incorrect. If you're not sure, try substituting can or could and see which makes the most sense, or try using a different construction like "to be possible" and see which form (is or was) works.
Ought is usually considered a semimodal (though different grammarians sometimes label it as different things like "marginal modal" and call other things like "have to" a semimodal). To be honest, I'm not entirely sure what the difference is, and my grammar books don't say. Ought doesn't have different present and past forms like regular modals, and it requires the to infinitive instead of the bare infinite ("He may go" versus "He ought to go").
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posted
Hmm. As far as I can tell, ought is a bit of an oddball. There doesn't seem to be any definitive categorization of modals, which doesn't help. But it seems that typically, the regular modals don't have infinitive or participial forms, and they are always followed by a bare infinitive, while the semi-modals still have non-finite forms and usually take the to infinitive. Ought requires the to, but doesn't have non-finite forms.
So what is it? An auxiliary verb, I guess. Past that, it just depends on what grammatical school of thought you subscribe to.
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posted
Thanks. I'm really quite fond of "ought," but it's such a different creature. "Ought not" is an acceptable coupling, yes? Like, "I ought not to eat the last piece."?
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I came across something last night that I'd never thought of, but is obvious in retrospect. Check out the etymology of the verb "to insulate"--it basically means "to make an island of", which is exactly what you do when you insulate something. Like I said, fairly obvious--we even have related words like "insular" in common usage--but I hadn't thought of it.
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posted
Cool. I even knew that the Latin word for "island" was insula, but I never put it together. It's funny how the history of a word can be staring you in the face like that.
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Hey, Jon Boy, my parents and I were talking about the etymology of "she" and "her" last weekend. The two words are different enough from each other that we were guessing that they had different origins, and had been kind of fused together into different forms of the same word, the way "go" and "went" were. Looking up both words on dictionary.com, though, I got the following for both of them:
quote:Middle English, from Old English hire. See ko- in Indo-European Roots
So, it looks like our guesses were wrong. I'm still puzzled as to how "she" could have evolved from "hire" though. Any chance you could illustrate it for me?
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posted
She and her are almost certainly from different roots, though there's still some conjecture and disagreement about exactly where she came from (though there is a pretty solid argument for one particular source). Dictionary.com has issues, though. When you look up she, it actually brings up the entry for her. That's why it's saying they both come from the Indo-European *ko- via the Old English hire.
So here's the explanation according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the best source I know. In Old English, the feminine singular nominative pronoun was heo (pronounced something like "HAY-uh"). The masculine was he (pronounced "HAY"). The plural pronoun was hie (pronounced "HEE-uh"). Towards late Old English, the plural and feminine forms began to collapse together with the masculine form. Because they sounded so similar, the demonstrative pronoun (roughly equivalent to the modern this and that) was often used.
The same thing had already happened in Old Norse, and they had already replaced the plural personal pronouns with plural forms of the demonstrative pronoun, so when they began settling England, it was that much easier to adopt the demonstrative pronoun (namely the Norse forms) as a substitute for the plural personal pronoun.
But she is a bit more mysterious. The best guess is that it came from the Old English feminine singular nominative form of the demonstrative pronoun, which was seo. (The demonstrative itself was a combination of two different stems: the th- forms [which won out] and the s- forms [which were only used for the masculine and feminine singular nominative forms, and which eventually disappeared].) It was originally pronounced "SAY-uh," but it seems that the diphthong shifted from falling to rising, giving something like "SYAY" or "SYO." The sy combination is not natural in English, so it could have easily palatalized to sh. Though the vowel seems to have varied, it probably regularized to e because of the influence of the pronoun he.
Generally, pronouns are very hard to come by. When they are lost or when a new one is needed, it's quite difficult to add a new one. It took a few hundred years after the loss of grammatical gender before English finally developed a new possessive form of it, replacing his) with its. Luckily, Old English still had a full demonstrative pronoun to borrow from, and the influence from Old Norse helped. Too bad we're not in a similar situation today. It'd be nice to coin a new gender-neutral personal pronoun.
(Yeah, I know that was more than you asked for, but you know me once I get going.)
[ May 19, 2004, 08:05 PM: Message edited by: Jon Boy ]
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posted
For a non-gender-specific singular pronoun, I have long agreed with the suggestion made by others that we should borrow one from another language. Swahili has such a word, "yeye" -- and it sounds just enough like he and she to work, IMO. Posts: 32919 | Registered: Mar 2003
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posted
But the problem is that you can't just say, "Okay, let's all start using this new pronoun," no matter how good it is. People have come up with numerous suggestions, and all of them have failed. Pronouns are some of the most-used words there are, and a new pronoun would have to be comparable to others in terms of frequency of use and meaning. It was easy to borrow demonstratives to fill in the gaps because they were just as common and were used in similar ways. In order to borrow pronouns from another language, English would have to have very intimate contact with that language, with lots of bilingual speakers. English will probably never have such opportunities again, especially considering the very conservative forces of literacy and education. Nowadays, it takes far longer than it used to for changes—especially big ones like a new personal pronoun—to be accepted into the language. I think we'll just have to stick it out until they becomes accepted as a gender-neutral pronoun.
And anyway, yeye sounds silly.
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It became common usage on a forum about this size 10 years back. Sadly, said forum is no more.
Hey, if Hatrack can spread the "It doesn't do anything, that's the beauty of it" meme all over the Net, surely we can manage to add a four-letter word to the English language. Posts: 32919 | Registered: Mar 2003
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posted
It's relatively easy for a small community to adopt a new word. It's incredibly difficult for the rest of the speakers of the language do adopt the same word.
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posted
Maybe you should send around a chain e-mail, like the one I just got yesterday exhorting everyone in the world to stop buying gas for just one day and thus bring OPEC to their knees. If that doesn't work, nothing will.
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quote:Yeah, I know that was more than you asked for, but you know me once I get going
Actually, that was pretty much exactly the level of depth I was hoping for. Once again, Jon Boy demonstrates his incredible coolness!
I've always assumed that eventually "they" would become English's gender neutral 3rd person pronoun, simply because it seems fairly common already in spoken English. You don't think that'll happen?
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quote:Of course, I'm sure that our media and our possession of a technologically sophisticated society slows down the evolution of our language
I'm reasonably certain that the main technology that retards linguistic evolution is literacy. Actually, literacy as a technology is pretty fascinating. According to Walter Ong, literacy actually restructures consciousness. That is, literate people think in completely different ways from non-literate people. For an interesting comparison of primary oral, secondary oral, and literate cultures, check out his book Orality and Literacy. A warning: Ong loves the parenthetical in-text citation and you will be hard pressed to find a paragraph without at least one. In my opinion this is distracting and makes it hard to read.
quote:The letter f has never been the letter s, though in some older scripts, they often look very similar. The elongated s was used everywhere except at the end of a word. Why, though? That's just how they wrote them. The shapes of letters have changed considerably over the last thousand years. I don't have exact dates for when the elongated s was used (I'll have to check when I get home), but I believe it was mostly an early modern English thing.
According to the professor who taught the various print/book history classes I took, one speculation about the reason for two different letters "S" is that internal and leading S's and ending S's often have different sounds. Internal and leading S's sound like the "S" in "sound." Ending S's often make a sound like the letter "Z." Hence, two different letters.
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posted
Yeah Dagonee, I think it'll lose all sense of number.
You know, Mike, I've been thinking about the way that literacy effects people lately. From what I've read about it (and I haven't read Ong's book, but I'm adding it to my list), people in non-literate cultures typically have better memories than people in literate cultures. I'd be interested in reading a study that looked at memory in illiterate people versus literate people within a literate culture, but you'd have to control for all sorts of things in order to have the results be worthwhile. But that's another topic entirely.
Anyway, the thinking is that in a literate society, people don't need to rely on memory so heavily, since information can be easily stored and accessed through other means. As a result, people don't hone their memory skills to the same edge as do people in non-literate societies.
Remeber the article I posted a link to a few weeks ago about personal head-up displays? Right now they're being used by some surgeons and mechanics, but I'm sure that something like them will become more widespread. In addition, I expect that the devices will be hooked up to the internet, and that it'll be possible to use them to access information virtually anywhere, and eventually to be able to "right click", so to speak, on things in the material world to get more information on them. Even now they have a primitive version of this that is being demoed on the elderly--a pair of glasses that prompts them with peoples' names, helping them to continue functioning in society even with (very) mild dimentia.
If internet connected personal head up display technology were to become ubiquitous, what impact would it have on the way the minds of people who grew up with it? The value of the brain's memory storage capacity would likely be further eroded, wouldn't it? What else?
posted
You can look at it another way. In literate society, our memory is *better*. It's just that we keep much of our memory in the form of books.
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quote:The problem with using "they" is it removes one more connection between grammar and the logical distinctions represented by it.
*shrug*
Innumerable distinctions have already been lost. Compared to the loss of cases, tenses, moods, numbers, and voices, this is pretty darn trivial.
quote:Would you use "they talks" if you intend "they" to be singular? Or, would we lose all sense of number in the pronoun as we did with "you"?
People already use they as a singular, and they conjugate it like a plural, just like the singular you. However, they will probably never lose all sense of number because its use as a singular is very limited. It's never going to supersede he, she, and it as the regular singular personal pronouns. They has been functioning as an indefinite or gender-neutral pronoun since at least Chaucer's time. The only reason it's not accepted today is that eighteenth-century grammarians screwed it up.
Dang. My lunch is over. I'll have to finish later.
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Eighteenth-century grammarians. Yeah. They pretty much screwed lots of stuff up. English had a long history of treating indefinite pronouns as plurals. Historically, it wasn't a violation of English grammar to use a subject of indefinite number with plural pronouns and verbs. The gender- and number-indefinite they was used for centuries by such masters of the language as Chaucer and Shakespeare.
So why can't we bring it back? Because of educators and editors. Everyone's been taught that it's wrong, and because it's so stigmatized now, it's edited out of everything. It's still thriving colloquially, but it'll probably be a long time before it's accepted in educated prose again.
quote:According to the professor who taught the various print/book history classes I took, one speculation about the reason for two different letters "S" is that internal and leading S's and ending S's often have different sounds. Internal and leading S's sound like the "S" in "sound." Ending S's often make a sound like the letter "Z." Hence, two different letters.
Um, no. There's no speculation. It simply entered the printing world from a handwriting style that began in Italy in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. And it definitely wasn't used to represent the z sound. S's were typically only voiced (that is, pronounced like z's) between vowels or when joined with a voiced consonant. Double s's were always unvoiced, though they were usually written Å¿s (which, coincidentaly, is the origin of the German eszet character). In some southern British dialects (and in German), initial s's were voiced, but the spelling didn't change.
posted
Jon Boy, I need a grammar question answered for my wedding site. (See this thread.)
Kayla posted this suggestion for change:
quote:quote: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Eve went to Knoxville for Random's and John's wedding. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Did Random and John have two separate weddings, or did they marry each other? If they married each other, and y'all only attended one wedding, I think I'd change that to "Eve went to Knoxville for Random and John's wedding." But that's just me and I could be wrong. (Where's Jon Boy when you need him?)
I don't know what's correct, and I couldn't find anything (my style guides are down at school).
posted
If one thing belongs to multiple people, just add the 's on the last name. If multiple things belong to multiple people, respectively, then make each name into a possessive. Thus, if Random and John married each other, it should be "Random and John's," not "Random's and John's."
Hmm. Now I'm curious about when that became the convention. I'm sure that in Old English, each name would decline to the genitive case. Maybe I'll look into that (for my own sake if for no one else's).
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quote: Also, starting with a conjunction is perfectly grammatical, and anyone who says otherwise has fallen prey to linguistic superstition.
Would you elaborate, please? I have always thought that it was incorrecto to do so. But that hasn't stopped me from doing it when I am writing informally, like on hatrack. But I do avoid it whenever I am writing a report or the like.
So, where does this superstition come from? Have the rules changed? When?
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quote:Everybody agrees that it's all right to begin a sentence with and, and nearly everybody admits to having been taught at some past time that hte practice was wrong. Most of us think the prohibition goes back to our early school days. Bailey 1984 points out that the prohibition is probably meant to correct the tendency of children to string together independent declarative clauses or simple declarative sentences with ands: "We got in the car and we went to the movie and I bought some popcorn and. . . ." As children grow older and master the more sophisticated technique of subordinating clauses, the prohibition of and becomes unnecessary. But apparently our teachers fail to tell us when we may forget about the prohibition. Consequently, many of us go through life thinking it wrong to begin a sentence with and. (Webster's Dictionary of English Usage, [Springfield, MA: 1989] s.v. "and")
In formal writing, you don't need to completely avoid sentence-starting conjunctions, but you should probably use them sparingly. Otherwise, they become annoying and lose their effect. The rules haven't changed. People just grew up and realized that there was never a real rule to begin with.
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posted
The formal, traditional rule in American English is that which is used for non-restrictive clauses and that is used for restrictive clauses. If you need to set off the clause with a comma, it's non-restrictive. Compare the following:
Children who have active imaginations like to draw.
Children, who have active imaginations, like to draw.
The first example excludes children who don't have active imaginations. The second example says that all children have active imaginations. Since your sentence says that this particular weedlike substance tested positive (but not every weedlike substance does), it's restrictive and should use that. The truth is that which is sometimes used for restrictive clauses, but not very often, and it sometimes leads to ambiguity or misreading. Safer to stick with that in this case.
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posted
Does the English word "gift" have germanic roots or does it come from some other source? If it is germanic in origin, how did it come to have such a different meaning from the german "Gift" which means "poison".
What about the history of the word "become"?
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posted
Ooh! He was just telling me the other day that the German and English versions of "Gift" are in fact related, but I don't remember the details as well as he will, so you'll just have to wait.
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posted
All I know is that the modern English word gift is ultimately of Scandinavian origin, but that it is in fact related to the modern German Gift. Apparently, the German word used to mean "gift," but now it just means "poison." I suspect it may have been a euphemism that superseded the original meaning of the word. I emailed one of my professors about it, and I hope he can shed some more light on it.
But lunch break's over now, so I'll have to do become later.
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