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Lexicon
English and the nerves
Deepti
Play a while
For anyone caught
in the tangles of English spelling, this rhyme says it all:
‘Beware of
heard, a dreadful word,
That looks like a
beard and sounds like a bird.
And dead: it’s
said like bed and not like bead,
For goodness sakes
don’t call it deed!’
(Anon)
Or, if you prefer
this one:
‘Though the
rough cough
And hiccough
plough me through,
O’er life’s
dark lough
My course I still
pursue’
(Anon)
Learn a little
Most languages
behave themselves where the relationship between sound and
spelling is concerned. For instance, Spanish has just five pure
vowel sounds that correspond to its five vowels in its alphabet
and German and Italian are also quite regular. Closer home,
Indian learners of English face problems because English has 26
alphabets but 44 sounds! If you look at the ‘a’ alphabet in
English, it represents a range of sounds in different words like
car, all, any, above, late, senate, wasp and compare. The ‘ee’
sound in ‘feet’ is spelled in various ways in words such as
deal, amnesia, niece, receive, people, machine, key, quay,
foetus and Caesar. The best way to achieve proficiency in
pronunciation is to maintain lists of such variations.
Intriguing words
The word ‘blog’
has more than 200 derivatives, with more climbing on daily. An
equally productive root is ‘cyber’ and the latest ‘cyberchondria’
from this base is a really telling comment on today’s man. In
case, you haven’t guessed, ‘cyberchondria’ refers to ‘the
readiness to believe that you have a disease whose symptoms you’ve
read about on a website’! Some similar interesting creations
are data smog, ego surfing and cyber bullying.
Precise usage
In the past, when
people referred to a member of a group containing both male and
female they use the pronouns he/him/his. As, for instance, in
the sentence ‘A good student finishes his work in time’. In
this era of political correctness, all language users have
learnt ways of avoiding gender by writing sentences like ‘good
students finish their work in time’ or ‘if anyone wants to
go now, may do so’.
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