Discussion Groups / English Usage / November 2011

tony cooper wrote (15-11-2011 20:03):

I see nothing wrong with her.

I found "timelessly glamorous supermodel Wilhelmina" in a Washington
Post story 1971/17/01. Nothing earlier in ProQuest, though you have to
be careful. "Supermodel" seems to have been used much earlier in the
sense of "top/highest priced model in a particular line", e.g.
"supermodel house in English style" (same paper, 1938).

Curiously, in the debates they're calling Huntsman "Governor" rather
than "Ambassador." That seems to be a violation of protocol (or
etiquette).

(He was an ambassador for other presidents than Obama, in case some
consider his last job an embarrassment.)

Joachim Pense <snob@pense-mainz.eu> schreef/wrote:

Similar case: English-origin computer terms are often conjugated as
Dutch words: deleten, past tense deletete (weird spelling, the
pronunciation is simply [dilit@]); retweeten, retweette, geretweet
(meaing to retweet, retweeted, retweeted).

We also have diminutives for what in proper Dutch is called 'bestand'
(so a small file is a 'bestandje'): file -> filetje. (pr. [failtj@].

A simple and supershort text message is an 'sms'je' [EsEmEsj@].

Etc. etc.

On 10-Nov-2011, Joachim Pense <snob@pense-mainz.eu>
wrote in message <9i2mepFabbU1@mid.individual.net>:

Does "aoi" (blue/green) count?

* Joachim Pense:

As others have pointed out, there is -oi, and then there's -ii
too, notably with the suffix -shii. But I am not aware of any
ending in -ei.

Interesting question. Before I answer, I'd like to take a step
backwards and look at what we are talking about.

I think we all agree that native speakers learn their language,
including many quirky details, correctly (in the sense of "closely
resembling the language of the relevant speakers in their
environment"[1]), without having to understand anything similar to
the analyses made in "grammar" or "linguistics".

Now I do think that some grammatical features are obvious enough
that most people notice and understand them, e.g. the plural of
nouns. This is probably easy because the semantics is obvious (one
house, two houses, one tooth - two teeth).[2] Gender may be a grey
area already - while pretty much everybody notices there is three
of them (my standard German example: der Löffel, die Gabel, das
Messer), and everybody understands their semantics with many of
the words referring to people, most of the grammatical
implications of it are too murky to sort out for the average
speaker. And I am confident that very few French speakers would
have a clear concept of the different /conjugaisons/ without
learning about them at school.

The distinction between the classes of nouns that take different
plurals in German is definitely of the murky kind: there are many
classes, they are not sharply separated, and there is no semantics
coupled to it.

Therefore, I assume that without systematic study, a native
speaker of German would not be aware that -s plurals are (mostly?)
limited to:

 - personal names, whether native or foreign
 - abbreviations, whether native and foreign
 - and some other words, but in that case only foreign ones

Or even perceive the last group as a separate class. No more than
most English speakers are aware (without schooling) of the
distinction between words of Germanic and Romance origin, even if
they are perfectly able to follow the existing rules or patterns
where they distinguish between the two.

Back to "kirei": I have heard "kirekatta" from my wife. Now she is
not a native speaker, but she has a habit of taking on expressions
wholesale (and then not changing them even if almost everyone
around her has a different usage), so I find it much more likely
that she is copying someone when she says that. Especially since
she almost never does it with any other word of the class.
Probably it's more frequent in Kansai, where she learned her
Japanese originally, than in Kanto, the region where I have
stayed.

Now there is one prominent example where the borderline between
the classes is blurred: you will find "ookii" in both
interpretations in all dictionaries ("ookii ie", "ooki-na ie"),
they are both accepted (ooki-na seems to be the older form, maybe
in turn derived from oo-i, but I know very little about etymology
or even classical Japanese). However, it is unclear to me why,
when it's generally rare, it happens with "kirei" of all examples,
since, as you pointed out, -ei does not fit the phonetics.

____
[1] Aside: this is discussed here repeatedly, and we often read
that "children speak like their (age) peers and not like their
parents". I chose the above wording because I think this is not
always the case. Many small children, and even some, if few
teenagers, decide that their parents, or, more likely, a community
their parents are part of, is what they identify with rather than
their peers at school. I guess that most often, when this happens,
it is an ethnic or religious community. And then there's the case
that the peer group is split, e.g. on ethnic or race differences,
and you can only adapt to one of them.

[2] Aside: that's why I find it reasonable not to make a
connection between "gyp" and "gypsy": the two are not semantically
related unless you already have or know about the relevant
prejudice. However, the semantic relation of "tooth", "teeth" and
"teethe" is more than obvious, so I'm sure many people will make
the connection (it's never all of them, by the way - I'm sure you
could find someone believing that "tooth" and "teeth" are no more
related than "person" and "people").

Am 10.11.2011 20:19, schrieb Joachim Pense:

 But then, there are no

yoi 'good' comes to my mind, so there is also -oi.

Joachim

Am 10.11.2011 20:19, schrieb Joachim Pense:

An other "naturalized" word that comes to my mind is "saboru" - to
commit sabotage.

Joachim

Am 12.11.2011 03:06, schrieb benlizro@ihug.co.nz:

I, a German speaker hear the final stress of Freanch words as well.
Perhaps it helps not to be able to speak French.

Joachim