The program of the optional course "entertaining linguistics".

Record-breaking words

The longest word listed in the Guinness Book of Records is found in the Hungarian language. It consists of 44 letters: megszentségteleníthetetlenségeskedéseitekért. When trying to accurately translate it, experts disagree, and obviously not everyone will be able to pronounce this “rebus”. According to some versions, the word can be roughly translated as follows: “due to (your) desire to maintain an untarnished reputation.”

Difficulties in pronouncing a foreign word correctly often arise. Thus, in the spring of 2010, the Eyjafjallajökull volcano in Iceland seriously frayed the nerves of airlines and passengers, and for news anchors it became a real test to correctly pronounce its name.

The Guinness Book of Records also mentions the word that has the most meanings in the English language - the word “set”. According to the second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (1989), the word "set" has 430 different meanings.

The rarest sound found in European languages ​​is Czech [rzh]. The most common sound is the vowel [a], there is not a single language in the world that does not have it.

At the same time, in the Serbian and Croatian languages ​​there are words that do not contain vowels, for example, the name of the island of Krk in the Adriatic Sea.

Record-breaking people

Powell Alexander Janulus (74 years old), a former employee of the court of the Canadian province of British Columbia, is considered one of the greatest polyglots - he speaks 41 languages. Another great polyglot of the 18th-19th centuries. Cardinal Giuseppe Mezzofanti was considered, who knew 38 languages ​​and 50 dialects, while he never left his native Italy.

Italian Vanessa Morabito was able to pronounce the most words per minute on February 8, 2012. She managed to say 380 words in the allotted 60 seconds. But Shishir Khatva set another record: on May 12, 2012, he managed to pronounce 50 words backwards in 1 minute 23 seconds.

Amazing facts about languages

The Basque language, spoken in northern Spain, is not part of any language group. There are 800,000 native speakers of this language, and most of them live in the so-called Basque Country - an autonomous region of Spain.

Enantiosemy is known as a linguistic phenomenon where the same word has opposite meanings.

There is also interlingual enantiosemy, which often appears in Slavic languages. Thus, the Polish uroda means “beauty”, zapominać - “to forget”. Czech čerstvý means “fresh”, potraviny - “products”, pozor! - “attention!”, úžasný - “delicious”, and the Serbian “harm” is translated as “value”.

It is interesting to note that “Russia” sounds quite unusual in some European languages. For example, for Estonians it is “Venemaa”, and for Finns it is “Venäjä”.

Christopher Columbus, having stumbled upon a fairly large continent on his way to India, made an absolutely important discovery, otherwise we would be sad without Hollywood and iPhones, but along the way he laid a linguistic mine by calling the Indians Indians. Since I am writing and you are reading truthfully and freely, then perhaps there is some misunderstanding about what exactly the problem is. In Russian, a feathered horseman from America is called an “Indian,” and a resident of a densely populated country located on the other side of the world is called an “Indian.” One letter was enough to avoid confusing such different characters. There is also a “Hindu” in reserve. But in Spanish, both live under the same roof: indio, no one ever bothered to correct the mistake of Columbus, who stuck someone else’s label on the Native Americans.

Further - more. Not missing a single opportunity to optimize the English language, he also decided to make do with one word for two peoples separated by oceans; in his dictionary they are known as Indian. Neither the Americans, nor the Canadians, who received the Indians as a heavy historical inheritance, nor the British, whose empire included India for a long time, lifted a finger to bring more clarity to their language.

Word hindu, which is often used to say “Hindu” in Spanish or English, cannot be given credit to stupid tongues. Firstly, it is of Persian origin, and secondly, it has a clear religious connotation, since it refers to an adherent of the Hindu traditions, which, as we understand, can easily become a representative of any nationality who has stayed in Goa for more than 2 weeks.

Having naturally learned to understand from the context who is being talked about in certain English and Spanish texts, I once fell into a stupor when I read that in the town of Begur, which is in the Costa Brava tiara, in my opinion, the largest diamond , the most significant attractions are the fortress and casas indianas. We are, of course, talking about some houses, but I’ve been to Begur several times before, and there are definitely no wigwams or palaces of rajahs there.

The website of the Academy of the Spanish Language, without a shadow of embarrassment, explained to me what the word Indiano a character is hiding who has nothing in common with the previous two. It turns out that this is what people in Spain call their compatriots who, during the years of crisis, emigrated to Latin America, got rich there and returned home with a bag of money. In terms of time, this is mainly the 18th and 19th centuries. Indianos were not particularly modest, and the main point of crossing the Atlantic again for them was probably precisely to show their not so easy-going neighbors on what scale they could live (Odnoklassniki.ru zero version). This scope is what guests of Begur are invited to see - the Indian houses, both inside and out, simply shout that their former owners have had a good life.

Why the Spanish language took a root that has been muddled from all sides for a word denoting such a very specific group of people is a big mystery. Well, except that I wanted to make fun of the English language, which, by that time already having a polysemantic Indian, was backed into a corner and refused to include a new concept in the dictionary. The British in Begur are a common phenomenon, they love to go there and are actively buying real estate, guidebooks in English are forced to somehow get out and either leave Indiano without translation, or they talk about something “colonial”.

Christopher the Great Confusion, who started all this confusion, of course, deserves leniency - he had enough problems with financing his own expeditions and blank spots on the maps to find time for extremely precise formulations. But I would like more ingenuity from the guardians of the language. The moment is not far off when streams of Spaniards, hungry from the new crisis, will pour to work in the BRIC countries, including India, return from there in silks and with incense and demand a separate place for themselves in the dictionary.

There is such a historical joke. Somehow, fierce adherents of the “truly Russian” language, insisting that borrowed words are absolutely useless to us Slavs, were asked to voice the phrase in that same “true Russian”: “A dandy is walking along the boulevard from the theater to the circus.” And do you know what they did? "The monstrosity is coming through the park from the disgrace on the lists." As you can see, the experiment failed.

You will find out why this did not happen by reading Nigel P. Brown’s wonderful book “The Oddities of Our Language. Entertaining Linguistics.”

What is the origin of cases?

You will learn about this from the article by Ph.D. V.I. Kovaleva

Source: http://englishworks.ucoz.ru/forum/25-61-1

Once upon a time...

Muscovites live in Moscow, Odessa residents live in Odessa, and Permians live in Perm. Everyone knows this. But Mancunians live in Manchester (UK), Palesians- in the village of Palekh (Ivanovo region), Ivorians- in the state of Cote d'Ivoire, Donetsk residents- in Donetsk (Ukraine), Monegasques- in Monaco, Chelny residents- in the city of Naberezhnye Chelny, Varna residents- in Varna (Bulgaria), Arlesians- in Arles (France), malagasy- on the island of Madagascar in the state of the same name, Bergamaski- in Bergamo (Italy), in the same place where the famous servant of the two masters Truffaldino lived.

Source:O.A. Derkach, V.V. Bykov “1000 tasks for ingenuity”, M: “AST-PRESS SKD”, 2006.

Don't tell people thank you

Few people living in modern cities know that the ordinary and familiar word “thank you” in the outback is perceived worse than a curse...

Valery Rozanov, Doctor of Psychology, talks in his article about what words should be used in order to express gratitude to a person.

When I first picked up this book and opened it, I thought that it was completely unsuitable for translation into Russian. And in fact, how can you translate what is written about another language with examples from another language? After all, this book is not for those who learn English, but for those who speak it without thinking or knowing that in their everyday speech they use words with an extremely ancient history.

But, leafing through the book, on every page I came across words that, it seems to me, are understandable without translation even to someone who does not know a single foreign language. After all, we often use words from ancient Greek and Latin: aqueduct, author, history, carnival, coin, music, physics And lyrics... The list goes on and on.

It is clear that in English and Russian the fate of ancient words developed differently. English has many words from different languages ​​- French, Latin, Greek, Scandinavian and others. Sometimes it even seems like there are an awful lot of them. When faced with some new phenomenon or concept, English speakers preferred to preserve the original sound of the word - to the best of their abilities, of course. To a large extent, this was facilitated by the fact that Great Britain is a Western European country, and its culture is inextricably linked with the culture of other countries of Western Europe, in which Latin remained the international language of communication for many centuries. And the Romans, who spoke Latin, borrowed a lot from their predecessors, the Greeks. Therefore, medical and legal terms, names of constellations and zodiac signs, abstract concepts (like “conscience” or “greed”) - all of this has Latin and Greek roots.

At the dawn of its history, the Russian language gave preference to its own means, and if it adopted anything, it was most often directly from the Greek language (from medieval Byzantium), without the mediation of Latin. Many words were not just borrowed, but were, as it were, “translated” from ancient languages: conscience= with+ news(Greek syn + eidos and lat. con + scientia = “c + knowledge, knowledge”; compare with English conscience) or insect= on+ insect(Greek en + tomon and lat. in + sectum = “in/on + cut”, compare English insect). In a sense, these are also borrowings (philologists call them tracings), only not so obvious, and therefore have long been perceived as native.

In subsequent times, especially after Peter I “opened a window to Europe,” a whole stream of foreign words poured into Russia - the so-called international vocabulary, thanks to which scientists, politicians and specialists in various fields of knowledge from different countries can easily understand each other. The Russian language has already undergone several similar foreign-language waves, and these days you won’t confuse anyone accreditation or innovation instead of trust or innovations, no matter how the guardians of linguistic purity complain about this.

There are much more words with a common origin in English and Russian than it seems at first glance. Therefore, it turned out to be generally possible to translate this rather fascinating and informative book, maintaining the general tone of the narrative and without even subjecting it to excessive editing. I hope you will learn a lot of new and useful things from it.

Perfilyev Oleg

To my support team: family Martin, Victoria, Nicholas and Thea, assistants Duncan and Ollie, agent Sheila Ableman, editors Daniel Banyard and Clive Hebard.

And also to David Stevens, without whom this book would not have been conceived at all. One day at the Austrian ski resort of Lech, while we were sitting in the ski lift, David pointed out to me the places on the slope where bumps, or moguls, began to form. He turned to me and asked if I knew the name of these small moguls that had just appeared. I thought for a moment and said, “Well, personally, I would call them protomoguls.” ( Protos in Greek means "first".)

This incident made me think about how many Greek and Latin words still live in our speech. The book you hold in your hands is the fruit of such thoughts.

This book is intended for a wide range of readers, including those who have never studied Greek or Latin. So you don't have to worry that you won't understand something. However, it's good to know some basics first.

The Greek language has its own alphabet, different from Latin (and Russian), but for convenience, all Greek words in this book are written in Latin letters. This practice is quite widespread and is not unusual. For the most part, the correspondence is unambiguous, so Greek letters can be reconstructed from Latin ones without difficulty. So, for example, alpha is denoted by the letter A, beta - b, gamma – g etc. But there are a few exceptions, and this primarily concerns letters e And O.

Greek letter ε (epsilon) is pronounced like a short "e" (for example, in the word forest). e.

Greek letter η (eta) is pronounced as a long “e” (much like in the word mayors). In this book it is denoted by the Latin letter é (with accent mark).

Greek letter O (omicron) is pronounced as a short "o" (as in duty). In this book it is denoted by the Latin letter O.

Greek letter ω (omega) is pronounced as a long “o” (much like the first syllable of the word for a long time). In this book it is denoted by the Latin letter ó (with accent mark).

Latin transliteration of letters of the Greek alphabet

It is believed that the Latin alphabet originated from the Western variety of the ancient Greek alphabet. The word itself alphabet derived from the names of the first two letters of the Greek alphabet - alpha and beta (in later pronunciation - vita).

It is interesting to note that the uppercase and lowercase letters of the Greek alphabet, like the Latin alphabet, differ significantly in their style. This is largely due to the fact that it is easier to draw and carve letters on stone using large straight lines. Capital letters arose when people began to write on wax tablets and papyrus. In a word papyros designated a type of reed from which writing material was made.

Examples of the use of letters of the Greek alphabet are varied.

“I am Alpha and Omega, the First and the Last,” says the Lord (Revelation of St. John the Theologian 1:10).

Biologists call an alpha male the main male in a group of animals of the same species. The International Phonetic Alphabet uses two symbols in the form of the letters alpha and delta. In a word iota we denote something small in size or quantity. In addition, all letters of the Greek alphabet are widely used in mathematics and physics.

Aldous Huxley's novel Brave New World describes a fictional social system in which people are classified into classes designated by the first five letters: alpha, beta, gamma, delta and epsilon. Huxley borrowed the phrase for the title of his novel from Shakespeare's play The Tempest. Prospero's daughter Miranda leads a solitary life, therefore, when she first meets strangers, she admiringly says: “Oh, brave new world, where such people live!” In the same play, Ferdinand, having learned the girl’s name, exclaims: “Miranda! Miranda means 'wonderful'! Indeed, the name Miranda is a gerund (nominal form of a verb) from the Latin verb mirror(“to marvel”) and means “she who is to be admired.”