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Это интересно
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| Arnika | Дата: Пятница, 07.04.2017, 20:19 | Сообщение # 16 |
 Марина Александровна Трофимова
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Дорогу осилит идущий...
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| Anita | Дата: Среда, 31.05.2017, 11:12 | Сообщение # 17 |
 Ольга Олеговна Макарова
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| Over the weekend, I happened to go viral. Or rather a single paragraph from a book I wrote called The Elements of Eloquence went viral. The guilty paragraph went like this:
“Adjectives in English absolutely have to be in this order:
opinion-size-age-shape-colour-origin-material-purpose Noun. So you can
have a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling
knife. But if you mess with that word order in the slightest you’ll
sound like a maniac. It’s an odd thing that every English speaker uses
that list, but almost none of us could write it out.”
English speakers love to learn this sort of thing for two reasons. First, it astonishes us that there are rules that we didn’t know that we
knew. That’s rather peculiar, and rather exciting. We’re all quite a
lot cleverer than we think we are. And there’s the shock of realising
that there’s a reason there may be little green men on Mars, but there
certainly aren’t green little men. Second, you can spend the next hour
of your life trying to think of exceptions, which is useful as it keeps
you from doing something foolish like working.
Actually, there are a couple of small exceptions. Little Red Riding Hood may be perfectly
ordered, but the Big Bad Wolf seems to be breaking all the laws of
linguistics. Why does Bad Big Wolf sound so very, very wrong? What
happened to the rules?
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| Anita | Дата: Среда, 31.05.2017, 11:12 | Сообщение # 18 |
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Ольга Олеговна Макарова
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| Ding dong King Kong
Well, in fact, the Big Bad Wolf is just obeying another great linguistic law
that every native English speaker knows, but doesn’t know that they
know. And it’s the same reason that you’ve never listened to hop-hip
music.
You are utterly familiar with the rule of ablaut reduplication. You’ve been
using it all your life. It’s just that you’ve never heard of
it. But if somebody said the words zag-zig, or ‘cross-criss you would
know, deep down in your loins, that they were breaking a sacred rule of
language. You just wouldn’t know which one.
All four of a horse’s feet make exactly the same sound. But we always, always say clip-clop,
never clop-clip. Every second your watch (or the grandfather clock in
the hall makes the same sound) but we say tick-tock, never tock-tick. You will never eat a Kat Kit bar. The bells in Frère Jaques
will forever chime ‘ding dang dong’.
Reduplication in linguistics is when you repeat a word, sometimes with an altered consonant
(lovey-dovey, fuddy-duddy, nitty-gritty), and sometimes with an altered
vowel: bish-bash-bosh, ding-dang-dong. If there are three words then the
order has to go I, A, O. If there are two words then the first is I and
the second is either A or O. Mish-mash, chit-chat, dilly-dally,
shilly-shally, tip top, hip-hop, flip-flop, tic tac, sing song, ding
dong, King Kong, ping pong.
Why this should be is a subject of endless debate among linguists, it might
be to do with the movement of your tongue or an ancient language
of the Caucasus. It doesn’t matter. It’s the law, and, as with the
adjectives, you knew it even if you didn’t know you knew it. And the law
is so important that you just can’t have a Bad Big Wolf.
Tense situations
It’s astonishing quite how expert you are at the English language. There are
so many tenses you can use without even thinking about it, and almost
certainly without being able to name them. It depends how you count
them, but there are about 20 that you deploy faultlessly. The pluperfect
progressive passive for an extended state of action that happened to
you prior to another action in the past is, when you put it like that,
rather daunting. But then you’d happily say “I realised I’d been being
watched” without breaking sweat or blinking. Think how daunting this is
for people learning English. The teacher has to explain to them that the
English don’t usually use the present tense for things that are
happening in the present. “I brush my teeth” doesn’t mean that you’re
doing it right now, it just means that you do it regularly. For things
that are actually happening right now you use the present progressive
“I’m brushing my teeth” (but only if you can speak with your mouth
full).
And having learnt that you then have to learn that there are certain
exceptions, like the verb ‘to think’ used as an auxiliary, as in “I
think you’re right”. This is why, incidentally, lots of non-native
speakers will use phrases like “I am thinking that you are right”. It
sounds faintly comic to us, but we had years and years and years of
immersion learning just to get all these subtleties. And English is
complex and weird. We actually have a tense called the Future Present.
Imagine having to learn that. But for us it’s just “The train leaves
tomorrow.”
Some rules we really should know. It’s surprising and dispiriting how many English people don’t know the rules of stress,
because that’s how all our poetry works. It’s quite easy really, and we
can hear it in other languages. Everyone knows that Italian has rhythm,
it goes MAM-a MI-a BUON-a SER-a. But so does our language. And that’s how verse works. I can illustrate with my favourite limerick (or
at least my favourite clean one). Try reading this aloud:
There was a young man from Dundee
Got stung on the leg by a wasp
When asked does it hurt
He said ‘Yes it does.
‘I’m so glad it wasn’t a hornet.’
That has no rhymes, but it still works as a limerick because rhymes aren’t nearly as important as rhythm. And the rhythm goes:
de-DUM-de, de-DUM-de, de-DUM
de-DUM-de, de-DUM-de, de-DUM
de-DUM-de, de-DUM
de-DUM-de, de-DUM
de-DUM-de, de-DUM-de, de-DUM-de
Which only works because we know to pronounce Dundee as ‘dun-DEE’, and not to
rhyme with Grundy or the Isle of Lundy. It’s the subtle
difference when we record a record or present a present or tell a rebel
to rebel. It’s a difference that is very hard for people to learn, and
is the main reason that, in a strong French accent, there’s no
difference between happiness and a penis.
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| Anita | Дата: Среда, 31.05.2017, 11:13 | Сообщение # 19 |
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Ольга Олеговна Макарова
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| English is an immensely complicated language to get right, and native speakers often have no
idea of its strangeness. We understand the sentence “I can’t put up with
the guy I’m putting up at my house, his put-downs really put me out and
I’m feeling put-upon”. Or “I’m doing up my house and it’s doing me in.”
Literally, that should mean “I’m performing my house skywards and it’s
performing me towards the interior”. These are called phrasal verbs and
they are the nightmare of every would-be English speaker. Somebody once
said of Ian Fleming that he got off with women because he couldn’t get
on with them. To us that’s a simple joke, to a learner who also has to
get through, get by, get down, get with it, get up… it does their head
in.
English is largely made up of the rules we don’t know that we know. And
actually the rules we know we know are a rarity. We can cling
to a few of them at least. At least we all know that we know that
adjectives have comparatives and superlatives. Big, bigger, biggest.
Hot, hotter, hottest. Easy, easier, easiest. It’s comforting. It’s
reliable. It’s something we know that we know.
But can you do it with an adjective that’s three syllables long?
Curiouser and curiouser.
Mark Forsyth is the author of The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase
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