Linguistics Yet Again

This blog is the continuation of my first. There is just so much to elucidate on linguistics.

As I mentioned earlier, many words have come to mean differently from their original ones. Another word that immediately comes to my mind is "apocryphal" which meant secret or hidden at first but has now come to mean " often told but probably false".

We have also taken the word "angst" to mean teenage anxieties. However this word means just that on its own - anxieties ,sometimes ill-defined ones, and thus not necessarily adolescent worries only.

"Man" (excuse the sexism here, but you can always take it to mean the feminine or even neutered - some of you may at this point think that this word is "neutral" but herein lies the subtlety - gender if you wish), being that paragon of intelligence at the top of the primates' pyramid, has creatively learnt language to communicate. So much so, he has invented a slew of new words to suit his purposes.

The two most distinguishing traits, in my opinion, that singles Man out to be so different from all the other chordates in his phylum, must surely be his language and thinking facilities.

Add a third of being able to feel, love and be compassionate (visceral) and I think we just about have a well-rounded and justifiable right to say that we are humans.

And let not the sometimes ruthlessness of the dog-eat-dog Animal kingdom be a parallel we draw in justifying our own doings to our homo-sapien species. We have that extra rationalityand restraint in us, I suppose.

Man also has that singular ability to monopolise the entire Animal and Plant Kingdom for his own use.

Communication in verbal and artistic form must surely have preceded writing (earliest evidence of this is the Sumerian writing of a few millenia Before Christ ) and you can understand how important words must be from our progenitive Stone Age "grunts and puffs" to our present day language.

StoneMan 1 : Grunt (5th tone) grunt (4th tone), aiyo (1st tone) wakau (3rd tone) - translated "How are you today?"

StoneMan 2: Puff (6th tone) Hoot (2nd tone) Kun (2nd tone) Duh (4th tone) - translated "I am feeling fine."

Man first started with words imitating sounds he hears from the surroundings. He hears "moo moo" and hey presto, a cow moos. He hears a duck "quack" and a sheep "baa" (which somehow I think our Singaporean version of "meh" sounds closer) and a rooster "cock-a-doodle-doo" (not sure how this sound came about though, for me it should sound more like "kor-kor-ku-ku" -a hem , no reference to our dialectical male anatomical structure). If you must know, these are examples of onomatopoeia.

I can even add to that list with Man's flatulating "put put" instead of farted or power drills going "tut tut tut".

Man even invented portmanteau words like "motel", "brunch" , "chortle", "exmosion" (explosion of emotions) and "ludin"(lunch and dinner).

He decided that some words must collocate like spick and span, hoity toity, jiggery pokery or "fucking fucker". So it is like ying-yang or action-reaction physical and metaphysical forces. Like if you have emission spectra so too you must have absorption spectra. They come in pairs, so to speak, sometimes opposable, sometimes complementary.

Speaking which we must not forget oxymoronic phrases like "pretty ugly" or "Old New World" and even "euphonic cacophony".

And tautology. School of learning? So what else do you do in a school? Defecate? Pairing off in twos? Duh, please. Intimate intimacy. Humongously large. Snivelling snivelard. The list goes on and I am sure you get the idea.

When you examine the English words of old especially from Anglo-Saxon "Beowulf" to Medieval "Canterbury Tales" by Geoffrey Chaucer (the Father of Modern Literature) , you will notice many words spelt incorrectly in today's context. So educators of the world cringe!

Our "your" is "yer" and "forth" is "foorth. Who are we then to decide what correct orthography is? Fer all yer know, wat I write here may juz be the nex New Age orthography?