hi Sampo I know what you mean - native English speakers with a decent vocabulary are nevertheless amazed at their own language. You need a real wordsmith to even wake you up to some of the labyrinthine gothic permutations. It's not just the variety of words, it's the way you can put them together.
as an aside (and without looking it up) ossuary clearly means some official receptacle for bones, I would guess? Dr Peter Lennox School of Technology, Faculty of Arts, Design and Technology University of Derby, UK e: p.len...@derby.ac.uk t: 01332 593155 ________________________________________ From: sursound-boun...@music.vt.edu [sursound-boun...@music.vt.edu] On Behalf Of Sampo Syreeni [de...@iki.fi] Sent: 12 October 2012 18:49 To: Surround Sound discussion group Subject: Re: [Sursound] [ot] new and interesting words 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 _____________________________________________________________________ The University of Derby has a published policy regarding email and reserves the right to monitor email traffic. If you believe this email was sent to you in error, please notify the sender and delete this email. Please direct any concerns to info...@derby.ac.uk. _______________________________________________ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
