On 2012-10-10, Martin Leese wrote:
f.e. "M?l?e" : which Google translates in german to something like
"fray in naval warfare? !?
My English dictionary gives, "mixed fight, or crowd". I was trying to
convey the idea of a disorganised fight.
I seem to remember reading the OED entry on this one at one time. Melee
(no accents in English) means all of them, though very rarely just a
crowd, unless it's rather rowdy to begin with. Basically, it's a brawl
with weapons.
Given the accents (which I omitted because I can never remember how to
do them on my keyboard) the word was probably borrowed from French.
Right now you also get me going. :) As it happens I simply love the
weirdness that is the English vocabulary. My linguist friends tell me
it's the largest of any known language, and one of the most irregular,
thanks to wide ranging and totally unprincipled loaning. Consequently
I've played a game of "who knows the worst/most interesting new concept
in English" starting from my highschool times. With anybody and
everybody who's willing to go there.
It never ends and there's no way to win. It is humanly impossible to
ever gather those 600K or so separate word stems which constitute the
English vocabulary. It's like trying to learn exactly how every plant
and fungus out there smells. I even have a separate FB group for this
stuff nowadays: "Päivän sana", (lit. day's word). It's not too fancy,
but we seem to be hitting some interesting ones at last: my latest one
was "ossuary". Why precisely a language should have to retain such forms
and why somebody should inject a word like that into the vocabulary
escapes me. But once again it's pretty as a flower.
To someone whose native tongue has a base vocabulary of some 3-5K stems,
English literally inspires awe. We don't for example have a native word
for "ossuary", I think, yet I can immediately derive one from "luu",
"bone", and everybody well versed in the language immediately gets the
picture: "luusto".
--
Sampo Syreeni, aka decoy - de...@iki.fi, http://decoy.iki.fi/front
+358-50-5756111, 025E D175 ABE5 027C 9494 EEB0 E090 8BA9 0509 85C2
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