Professor Predicts Human Time Travel This Century (1 Viewer)

[Yee-Ming]

There's a relatively recent Arthur C Clarke novel (collaboration with someone, Stephen Baxter I think but the name escapes me), where someone builds a gadget that allows, at first, the ability to see across distances instantly, using micro wormholes (I think), then they realise that distance and time are related, so a simple tweak allows them to look into the past (and past only, I think, don't think it was looking into the future -- or was it the other way around???), but movement through time was not possible. Then again, the information gleaned through such spying was already screwing things up for all.

For some reason or other, when I read the professor's quote above, I immediately thoguht of Hilary in Top Secret (IIRC she says something similar)...

 

[ChristopherDAC]

Yeah, I admit it, that's a verb ending, but I was tired, and anyway, I thought people had enough of my deriving things from Latin [my preferred tongue]. :b Since the myth referenced by the Latin term was adopted from the Greeks and is the same one which gave rise to the Greek term [or perhaps the other way around, considering the confused relation of myth and language], the problems with the etymology make only null difference.

Anyway, to say "Milky Way Galaxy" is only to say "Milky way milky way" or at best "milky way milk" ; even if the term has been adopted as one of art, it's still foolish to a polyglot [at least one such as myself with an ear for absurd redundancies, as Mr. Bachmann appears not to find it such].

 

[Rex Bachmann]

ChristopherDAC wrote (post #62):


But, then that's the problem, isn't it? Most speakers on the planet aren't "polyglot". Very few speakers---maybe a tiny portion of even the educated populace---knows, much less cares, about the etymology of their words. To the native speaker of any language, a borrowed word---even whole phrases at times---are "monomorphemic". This goes as much for scientists as for anyone else (or for Latin translators calquing or borrowing Greek words, for that matter, even when they knew what the original Greek was supposed to mean), all of which is to say the speakers have no linguistic means of telling what the components of any given source lexical item may have meant in its original language.

Calling this particular language development "foolish" is sort of like saying the phrase "the hoi polloi" in English is redundant because Greek hoi already means 'the'. To a native speaker of English---even a learned one who knows the etymology and the original source language---"hoi polloi" is "monomorphemic" (i.e., one big clump of a word, rather than two separate meaningful units hoi 'the' and polloi 'many', both plural in form in the source language). Imagine trying to use "hoi polloi" in a well-formed English sentence without the 'the' (and not as a "citation lexeme"). One could do it, of course, but that, to my mind, would be pedanticism in extremis analibus.

 

[ChristopherDAC]

Call me a pedant upon the borders of Anar if you must :wink: but I find it necessary in a language such as English, which relies upon adopted words for the bulk of its vocabulary, to distinguish between words or phrases which are taken up en bloc, as it were, to serve some purpose and without much regard to their meaning, and those which are "naturalised", that is, have come in definitively. In the latter case the etymology is important, because it is a major determinant of the meaning and proper usage, having been taken in to fill a rôle it already occupied in its former place.

Thus, for instance, "travail" means hard work, rather than torture, because it was borrowed from the French. This may be seen more clearly in the case of words which have been borrowed twice, or at least one-and-a-half times. One would not measure "local colour" or "colourful language" with a colorimeter, any more than one would measure the heat of a discussion with a calorimeter. A clerk is distinct from a cleric, only because the word was taken into the language twice : the term in its original setting retained its primary signification, and so was available to be taken in again when shifting historical circumstances had torn the common acceptation of the first borrowing, from an intermediate language, away from its root meaning.

On the other hand, a la mode is used in American English almost exclusively to refer to pie served with ice cream ; it is only in Britain or in the pages of the New Yorker that one meets with it as a posh synonym for "according to the fashion". If I shall occasionally speak of "the polloi", or of "hoi polloi" using the first word of the phrase as the article [thank you for a fascinating idea!], it can only be from the same scrupulosity which drives me to the vicious wish that the composers of restaurant menus advertising "a la mode style" and "with au jus sauce" occasionally get caught and maimed in their Xerox machines. Also I am bothered by people's blithely misspelling names [e.g. "Michael"] which have a definite signification in their original context. "Mykall" does not serve to convey the signification of "He is like God", and one may be forgiven for not recognising it as Semitic at all.

Am I opposed to the practice of the common run of English speakers? It may well be. Such a consideration does not particularly disturb me, only because in a society in which the printed word has once taken hold, the colloquial speech of one generation is less influenced by that of the last [or, anyway, last but one] than it is by the classical literary style. Think of the Monty Python skit with the RAF men who can't understand each other's jargon!

 

[Cees Alons]

Fascinating. And does this also cover the use in American English sentences of the function title Maitre d' without ever proceeding to explain us of what?


Cees

 

[ChristopherDAC]

Yep. :wink:
Also "chef" for a head cook, and possibly "mayor" for a burgomaster.

 

[Joseph DeMartino]

The only places that ever used the term maitre d' over here were hotels, restaurants, and catering houses, all of which tend to use (and misuse) French terms in the mistaken belief that this lends them class. And it was always just maitre d' because at a hotel the rest was understood and at a restaurant it was just confusing. In effect this is now an American-English word meaning "guy who oversees the serving staff", and not an incomplete title in another language.

Regards,

Joe

(Whose dad had a second job as a waiter for many years, and then worked his way up to maitre d'. If we had a time machine, we could go back and witness this. Sorry, lame attempt to remind everybody what the original subject of this thread was before it became an episode of "Linguistics Today" )

 

[Holadem]

Jesus Christ Rex, do you ever just, you know... um... speak english ?

--
H

 

[Joseph DeMartino]

Oh, great! Now he'll reply in either Latin, Aramaic or Hebrew and hardly any of us will know what he's saying.

Regards,

Joe