Showing posts with label foreign words. Show all posts
Showing posts with label foreign words. Show all posts

alumni

Aug 2, 2016
Last month Linguist Laura wrote a blog post congratulating the students who were graduating from her program(me). She discusses graduate, then moves on to alumni, excerpted below. I've highlighting the bit that was news to me. When the graduands morph into graduates, they also become alumni, another...
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shallot

Sep 10, 2014
Typically, as we've discussed before, two-syllable words from French are stressed on their first syllable in BrE and on the second in AmE -- BALlet versus balLET, BAton versus baTON, etc. (Please see and comment on the linked post if that's the issue you're interested in.) photo from: http://www.realseeds.co.uk/onions.html This...
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pronouncing words from Spanish

Jun 19, 2013
American and British pronunciations of Spanish (loan)words: I’ve had notes for this post in my ‘drafts’ folder since 2006 (when I did a similar post on French loanwords). But today Ben at Dialect Blog posted on the subject. Impetus to get (a)round to saying what I have to say about the subject, don’t...
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filet, fillet and the pronunciation of other French borrowings

Aug 29, 2009
Looking through my long list of topic requests, I've found a duplicate--so that surely deserves to be treated first. Mrs Redboots recently emailed to say: I was watching an on-line video, yesterday, of a chef preparing fish, and instead of saying he was filleting it (with a hard "t") as I should...
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the big list of vegetables

Aug 14, 2008
If you're a regular reader, you'll know that I feel shame when I do a post that's mostly just listing "they say this, we say that". There are plenty of sites around that do that kind of straight word-for-word listing. But I get enough requests for vegetable names that I'm just going to try to get...
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form and pro forma

Feb 10, 2007
When I lived in South Africa, I often claimed that the country's major industry was bureaucracy. As a foreigner, I had reason to feel this, since until I was granted permanent residence (not very permanent, it turned out), I had to stand for a few hours on a (BrE) queue/(AmE) line every three to...
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prevarication à la mode

Dec 2, 2006
The theme today is "issues my Italian colleague, La Lettrice, has raised in the past (BrE) fortnight / (AmE) two weeks". While at first glance these are very different topics, they have a nice symmetry about them. Each case involves English doing something strange with an item that comes from a Romance...
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Spiro Agnew

Jul 27, 2006
Better Half was listening to a Radio 4 quiz show earlier in which a question was asked about former US vice president Agnew, whose first name, Spiro is from Greek. "Spy-ro Agnew!" I shouted. "Who calls him Spy-ro Agnew?" "I've only ever heard him called that," replied BH. This isn't the first famous...
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furor(e)

Jul 5, 2006
Better Half and I made it past the protesters to see Jerry Springer: The Opera tonight. While it's about an American institution, the opera was written and first performed in London. So, I have to admit looking out for places where their American English fell through, but it was prettyf-ckinggood....
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Abbr.

AmE = American English
BrE = British English
OED = Oxford English Dictionary (online)