Old Greebo (imported) wrote: Mon Apr 27, 2009 8:22 am And if the people of Canada are Canadians, why aren't the people of America Americians?

Old Greebo (imported) wrote: Mon Apr 27, 2009 8:22 am And if the people of Canada are Canadians, why aren't the people of America Americians?

Jean Op den Kamp (imported) wrote: Mon Apr 27, 2009 5:13 am No, no novel....

I first need to write a new bible...

Kortpeel (imported) wrote: Tue Apr 28, 2009 4:16 am What on earth for? Now you wanna compete with God?

Try this for an exercise: (Third year assignment for Divinity students)

"Who wrote the bible? Discuss and support your position with suitable quotations ~3500 words."

Apparently in Old Testament times the idea of a writer was not well established. A council of wise and learned men would pontificate on a topic and leave it to the most junior among their number to actually do the donkey work of putting pen to paper. Woe betide him if he didn't write what they said. And there were no tape recorders in those days. It was probably a no-win task.

Kortpeel

Jean Op den Kamp (imported) wrote: Mon Apr 27, 2009 5:13 am I first need to write a new bible, and find a hiding place for it where nobody is ever going to find it...............my god, they might try to explain it again

calmeilles (imported) wrote: Sun May 10, 2009 4:11 pm There's an old joke the punch line of which is about the pronunciation of ghoti.

Victorian philologists inflicted some of our absurdities on the poor unsuspecting Maltese. The Maltese language (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maltese_language) not having a written form was thought to be a poor show for a British colony so some eminent men were sent to create one.

For convenience the language would be in the Roman alphabet. But being Semitic in origin it had words that in Arabic were written with an voiceless character.

So we gifted them with our often silent digraph gh.

Thus it is that the small island of Gozo (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghawdex) in the Maltese language is written:

Ghawdex

But pronounced

Aw-desh

Ah, but for all it's absurdities English revels in subtly. And it is able to do so because of its vast vocabulary gethered over the centuries from those who have conquered us and later those we conquered plus a bit of linguistic plunder whenever we came across a word that seemed useful.

There's a lovely bit in one of Sir Walter Scott's novels explaining that the farm animals had English names such as pig, sheep and cow because it was the Saxon villeins that raised them but on the way to the castle became pork, mutton and beef to that the Norman (French) lords would know what they were eating.

Look in a thesaurus and its entries will suggest many synonyms for a given word. But in truth there are few true synonyms in English, most have connotations and distinctions in use that means they are not really interchangeable. Gulf, bay, inlet, bight, estuary, fiord, firth, mouth, lagoon, cove, creek and loch can all refer to salt water but not the same salt waters.

devi (imported) wrote: Mon May 11, 2009 3:56 pm That was a tough plough in the trough throughout the drought they thought.