| why do we say houses but not mouses? 09.10.02 |
| First of all, why "storms and christmas dinners" as the title for September? If you didn't know already, the seasons here in Southern Brazil are flipped from those in Cali. It's winter here, and although it hasn't felt like winter up until now, I'm feeling it more now. We had some storms and more rain, the sky is overcast and the air is crisp and cool. The air smells like a Christmas dinner and I feel like people should be putting up Christmas lights on their houses. But it's only September. And now for my little rant about words. I have been reading a book called "The Professor and the Madman" which is about the making of the Oxford English Dictionary. I believe that it is a true story, documenting the process that one professor, James Murray, took to put together the dictionary. He solicited readers to list words, common and uncommon, from books old and new. He also asked them to copy sentences that best expressed the different uses for these words. This was no easy task and took more than 10 years to complete...well that is what the book says so far. The "Madman" in the story is William Chester Minor, a man who was actually very intelligent. He was one of the greatest contributors to this task, all without the people on the other end knowing that he was, in fact, doing all his work from his cell in an insane asylum. Because he was a very low-risk patient and he was still receiving pension from the U.S. Army, he was able to furnish his two-room cell. One actually looked a lot like someone's office, as he had bookshelves lining the walls. The book touches a lot on the subject of philology, which I had never heard about until now. I guess it is one of those things that a small portion of society is fascinated with but greatly bores the rest. The etymological definition states it as the love of learning and literature, but another definition is that it is the study of literature and disciplines relevant to literature or the language as used in literature. The author commented on the era when Shakespeare wrote his plays. He often uses creative phrases and plays with words, but how did he know that he was using them correctly? He had no dictionary or any written source to refer to. This is interesting because it ties in with a lot of what I have been thinking about in my study of Portuguese. There are a lot of grammatical rules that apply to the Portuguese language that make me think about what are the rules in English in the same instances. More often than not, it is hard for me to remember the rules. When you grow up with one language, you forget more of the rules and just KNOW it sounds right. Thus, it is difficult to explain to non-native speakers WHY and WHEN you would say one thing. For example, when you pluralize a word in English, you generally add an S or ES to it, depending on the word. But why with a word like MOUSE or GOOSE, you totally change the spelling to MICE and GEESE? It is not a spelling issue either because HOUSE pluralized is not HICE. Languages are strange like that. Anyway, it is quite interesting thinking, I mean REALLY thinking, about your language. You learn not to ask too many questions when it comes to learning another language, because oftentimes, if you were to get asked the same question back about your own language, you probably wouldn't have an answer. |
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