Proofreading Service - Pain in the English
Proofreading Service - Pain in the English

Your Pain Is Our Pleasure

24-Hour Proofreading Service—We proofread your Google Docs or Microsoft Word files. We hate grammatical errors with a passion. Learn More

Proofreading Service - Pain in the English
Proofreading Service - Pain in the English

Your Pain Is Our Pleasure

24-Hour Proofreading Service—We proofread your Google Docs or Microsoft Word files. We hate grammatical errors with a passion. Learn More

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jayles

Member Since

August 12, 2010

Total number of comments

748

Total number of votes received

228

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Latest Comments

“Anglish”

  • June 22, 2011, 5:13pm

On the other hand reviving 'wont' as in I was wont to.... might be nice, instead of used to

“Anglish”

  • June 22, 2011, 1:31pm

Ængelfolc: sorry I was actually wondering how you would deal with 'in case'; 'falls' seems to mean the same as 'if'; phrases like "fuer den Fall, dass.." or 'gegen die Moeglichkeit, dass... ' seem to convey the meaning but I have never seen or heard them used.
Of course one could say in German 'I take my brolly with me whether it is raining or not"
but I was wondering if there really is an idiomatic equivalent of 'in case".
Perhaps it is like 'whereas", which is okay in English, but "wohindagegen" decided uncommon in German; comments appreciated

“Anglish”

  • June 21, 2011, 1:19pm

there is an existing term "ready reckoner"; so something based on "reckon" might be feasible (or do-able).

“Anglish”

  • June 20, 2011, 10:16pm

Anwulf: in Hungarian "szamitogep" is use for computer; it means calculating machine.
Not suggesting something similar would work in English; it's too late now anyway.

“Anglish”

  • June 8, 2011, 1:22pm

Ængelfolc: could possibly find an idiomatic way to say in German:
"I always take my brolly with me in case it rains".

“Anglish”

  • June 8, 2011, 1:21pm

Ængelfolc: Good: and what about the yoga-speak; the names of the poses in yoga; are we to use sanskrit or translate; eg veravadrasana = "warrior" pose ??? "aana" means pose; and we now get "plankasana" as their is no sanskrit for the plank position. (Plank here is not quite the same as the current planking craze).

“Anglish”

  • June 5, 2011, 8:24pm

Part II Of course this doesn't mean that as Europeans we have to share everything; we can still retain our regional identities and regional culture. Indeed some things like english warm beer, hungarian "langos" (deep fried dough) should definitely not be spread or borrowed at all!

“Anglish”

  • June 5, 2011, 8:14pm

PS lifted the hood on my made-in-Australia car and discovered "OPEL " on the engine and german everywhere. Those damn Anglishers at it again!

“Anglish”

  • June 5, 2011, 8:05pm

Well if you could get past the cyrillic script you would find russian quite similar to polish; as one travels west from russia, the language slopes off into ukrainian, by Lviv it's sloping off again into polish, or further south slovak. Psza krev would be "pcov krovj" in Russian.
Much the same happens with german and surrounding tongues, and with what they speak in Barcelona (Catalan?).
This points up that the entire concept of a "pure" language is misplaced. Yes we don't want to be flooded with unnecessary borrowings, but words like "banana" and "potato" would be sensible. (Anglish: "chimpfood" "earthapples" I suppose).
As you may know in the 19th century hungarian, like most Eurolanguages borrowed the word "pianoforte" for the new instrument. However the "Hunglishers" of the day decided they wanted a "pure" hungarian word and created the current word "zongora".
Nice but IMHO unnecessarily separatist. They went on to hungarianise many words several thousand of which survive today, many calques of German eg Fallschirm (oh no that must have been later!) Anyway
"Kálmán Szily presented approx. 10,000 words in his book A magyar nyelvújítás szótára ("Dictionary of Hungarian language reform", vol. 1–2: 1902 and 1908), without aiming to be comprehensive"
I am not at all convinced it was a good idea. Just makes the language so oddball.
I see nothing wrong in Europeans sharing and borrowing words from each other where necessary esp technical words. We do in fact share a common European culture and history and ancestry.
Time for a cuppa!

“Anglish”

  • June 5, 2011, 4:37pm

The question of what foreign language people should learn is interesting. Clearly for career purposes, the major languages, English, Spanish, Arabic, Mandarin are the most useful. However there is so much romance borrowing over a germanic foundation in english that few non-slav European languages are really foreign. The wordstock is so similar. French and Dutch people rarely have difficulty in writing quite english-sounding english, whereas people from Asia (excluding India) almost always write unidiomatic English in a distinctly non-European style; really foreign. Russian and other slav languages stand midway; although there are noticeable borrowings from french in particular, and the structure is latinate, most of the wordstock seems as alien as hungarian, or mandarin, and thus a great hurdle. Lastly in Russian syllable stress is variable, often changing with wordending. Once one gets beyond the textbooks where stress is marked, knowing where to put the stress becomes an ongoing nightmare. Eg okNO window; okNA of a window; OKna windows etc
However it will light up your chances with slav women!