Wednesday, April 7, 2010

"Origin"


Bill Bryson in "Where Words Come From" talks about the while concept of words, where they come from, how they come, and how they stay. He is concerned with the etymology of words being their origin and history that comes with words. Bryson talks about what Yule stated, in chapter 6 of "The Study of Language”. The both discuss the same fact; that words go through various stages to officially become a word. Each one describes the way this happens; what the process is. Bryson claims, how different people throughout history have had different views to the word formation. Bryson shows the breakdown of the whole concept. In Bryson’s text he claims there is a five specific ways; 1) Words are created by error 2) Words are adopted 3) Words are created 4) Words change by doing nothing 5) Words are created by adding or substituting something and lastly “fusing compounds” (83).
Accordingly, I think that one of Bryson’s claims about English being one, of the most languages that has numerous words for just one word. However, maybe most people don’t know this but Arabic is one of the most rich vocabularies in the world. I always heard this when living, in Egypt that English, is sort of narrow when it comes to explaining terms from other languages. It could be that this opinion is our narrow opinion of course thinking that your language is the best.

2 comments:

  1. English is narrow when it comes to explaining terms. I think that why there are so many synonyms in the English language. To explain the meaning of one word in English is hard but to list synonyms is easy. Listing synonyms can help a person understand a new word if they have not heard it before but sometime the synonyms can be confusing because a synonym for one word can also have its own synonym and the two synonyms can mean completely different things. Maybe more confusing than my last sentence.

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  2. It's interesting because if you look at the society, you can see the same philosophies practiced in its language. I would not be suprised to hear other cultures criticizing the imperfections of English, and I'm sure English speakers criticize other languages just the same.

    In the end, all languages can be limited in paradigms of common held beliefs.

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