your post is almost enough to distract me from my work Sampo , but no... must resist......
On 12 October 2012 18:49, Sampo Syreeni <de...@iki.fi> wrote: > 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 > ______________________________**_________________ > Sursound mailing list > Sursound@music.vt.edu > https://mail.music.vt.edu/**mailman/listinfo/sursound<https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound> > -- 07580951119 augustine.leudar.com -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/private/sursound/attachments/20121012/b870bf56/attachment.html> _______________________________________________ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
