A Dictionary of the English Language - A Dictionary of the English Language A Dictionary of the English Language, the first comprehensive dictionary of the English language, as compiled by Samuel Johnson, appeared in print in 1755. As of 2002 a first edition might sell for US$25,000 to US$30,000, but many later editions and facsimiles have appeared. In 1995 in the UK, a facsimile of the first edition cost £200 (approximately US$300). The dictionary responded to a large extent to a widely felt need for stability in the language. Work on the dictionary lasted for about eight or nine years. An important innovation was to illustrate the meaningss by literary quotation. Most frequently, Johnson quoted Shakespeare, Milton and Dryden. Unlike most modern lexicographers, Johnson sometimes introduced humour or prejudice into his definitions. Among.
The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language - The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (AHD) is a dictionary of American English published by Boston publisher Houghton-Mifflin. The first edition appeared in 1969. The most recent edition, the fourth, appeared in 2000. The AHD dictionary was a ground-breaking work when it first appeared because it was the first dictionary to be compiled using corpus linguistics for word frequency and other information. The AHD made the innovative step of combining prescriptive elements (how language should be used) descriptive information (how it actually is used), and latter was derived from text corpora. Citations were based on a million word, three-line citation database prepared by Brown University linguist Henry Kucera. The AHD was also highly praised for its Indo-European etymologies.
History of the English Language - History of the English Language History of the English Language Table of contents showTocToggle("show","hide") 1 Old English 2 Period of French Domination 3 Middle and Modern English 4 Historic English text samples 4.1 Old English 4.2 Middle English 4.3 Early modern English 4.4 Modern English 5 See Also Old English The principal invading Germanic tribes were the Angles, Saxons and Jutes. Their Anglo-Saxon dialects developed into Old English. The most commonly used words today derive from those early Anglo-Saxon roots, but English vocabulary has also been greatly influenced over time. First, it was influenced by Scandinavian invaders who spoke Old Norse, which was probably mutually comprehensible with Old English. Later, the language was influenced, to an even greater extent, by the French-speaking Norman invaders. It has been.
English as an additional language - English as an additional language English as an additional language is used to refer to the learning of English by speakers of other languages. The term is commonly abbreviated to EAL and is effectively synonymous with ESL (English as a Second Language) and EFL (English as a Foreign Language). Some people believe that EAL is more politically correct than ESL as it avoids the apparent assumption that English would always be the second language to be taught following one's native language, but defenders of the use of ESL point out that the expansion has always been "English as a second language", so that "second" here simply means secondary or subordinate. See also TOEFL - "Test of English as a Foreign Language", an Educational Testing Service test.
New Oxford Dictionary of English - New Oxford Dictionary of English The New Oxford Dictionary of English (often abbreviated to NODE) is a dictionary published by the Oxford University Press. This dictionary is not based on the Oxford English Dictionary and should not be mistaken for a new or updated version of the OED. It is a completely new dictionary which strives to represent as faithfully as possible the current usage of English words. The editor, Judy Pearsall, claims it is based on modern understanding of language. Some unorthodox choices made by the editors made this dictionary controversial amongst lexicographers. It was first published in 1998. See also: New Oxford American Dictionary.
Kant and the Platypus: Essays on Language and Cognition - Kant and the Platypus: Essays on Language and Cognition Kant and the Platypus : Essays on Language and Cognition is a book by Umberto Eco which was published in Italian in 1997. An English edition, translated by Alastair McEwen, appeared in 1999. The book develops some aspects of Eco's A Theory of Semiotics which came out in 1976. In the first chapter Eco develops Nietzsche's argument that the truth is a poetically elaborated "mobile army of metaphors, metonymies and anthropomorphisms" that subsequently gel into knowledge, "illusions whose illusory nature has been forgotten", as the metaphors are reduced to schemata and concepts. In chapter two, working with ideas derived from Charles Peirce and Immanuel Kant, Eco compares linguistic and perceptual meaning when confronted with the unencountered. Chapter three explores the.
Klingon language - Klingon language The Klingon language (in Klingon, tlhIngan Hol) is a constructed language created by Marc Okrand for Paramount and spoken by Klingons in the fictional Star Trek universe. He designed the language with Object Verb Subject word order to give an alien feel to the language. A description of the Klingon language can be found in Dr. Marc Okrand's book The Klingon Dictionary (Published by Pocket Books, Simon & Schuster, 1985, second edition with new addendum 1992, ISBN 067174559X). Other notable works include The Klingon Way (with Klingon sayings and proverbs), Klingon for the Galactic Traveler and the two audio productions Conversational Klingon and Power Klingon. Three books have also been published in the tongue: Hamlet, ghIlghameS (Gilgamesh) and paghmo' tIn mIS (Much Ado About Nothing)..
Idiom dictionary - Idiom dictionary An idiom dictionary explains idiosyncratic stock phrases and metaphors in language. Typical English idiom dictionaries, e.g. that published by Longmans, define about 4000 phrases, e.g. "buy the farm", "hit the road", "canary in a coal mine". Of these, a tiny subset are very basic to the language, and qualify as conceptual metaphors without which English is quite hard to understand, e.g. "time as a substance", "time as a path", "love as war". These metaphors are often assumed in idioms, e.g. "battle of the sexes", "out of time". Idiom dictionaries, as well as dictionaries in general, always rely on a defining vocabulary of terms (Longman's uses 2000) which are used only in their simplest senses, to minimize the number of such basic conceptual metaphors and polymorphic.
Indo-European languages - three billion people, including most of the major language families of Europe and western Asia, which belong to a single superfamily. The hypothesis that this was so was first proposed by Sir William Jones, who noticed similarities between four of the oldest languages known in his time, Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit and Persian. Systematic comparison of these and other old languages conducted by Franz Bopp supported this theory. In the 19th century, scholars used to call the group "Indo-Germanic languages". However when it became apparent that the connection is relevant to most of Europe's languages, the name was expanded to Indo-European. An example of this was the strong similarity discovered between Sanskrit and olden spoken dialects of Lithuanian. The common ancestral (reconstructed) language is called Proto-Indo-European (PIE). There is disagreement as.
Indian English - Indian English Major English dialects: American English Australian English British English Canadian English Caribbean English Hiberno-English Indian English Jamaican English Liberian English Malaysian English New Zealand English Singapore English South African English Indian English is a catch-all phrase for dialects or varieties of English spoken widely in India. The language Indians are taught in schools is essentially British English and in particular spellings follow British conventions. However, the British left India in 1947, and as a result many phrases that the British may consider antique are still popular in India. Official letters continue to include phrases like "please do the needful", "you will be intimated shortly" and "your obedient servant". Older writers who made creative (and comical) use of now obsolete forms of colloquial English, like P..
History of the Hebrew language - History of the Hebrew language Introduction The Hebrew language belongs to Canaanite branch of the so-called Semitic family of Afroasiatic languages. It strongly resembles Aramaic and to a lesser extent the South-Central Arabic, sharing many linguistic features with them. Hebrew is currently spoken by a community of about 10 million people, of whom about 5 million live in the State of Israel, and the rest in the various countries of the Jewish diaspora. Hebrew is one of the three official languages of Israel, alongside English and Arabic. Early history At the end of the 3rd Millenium BCE the ancestral languages of Aramaic, Ugaritic and other various Canaanite languages swirled around in the Levant alongside the influential dialects of Ebla and Akkad. As the Hebrew founders from northern Haran.
Ubykh language - Ubykh language Ubykh is a language of the Northwestern Caucasian group, which was spoken by the people of the same name up until the early 1990s. It is characterised, like most other Northwest Caucasian languages, by the following features: Ubykh is an ergative language, making no distinction between the subject of an intransitive sentence and the direct object of a transitive sentence. It is highly agglutinative, using mainly monosyllabic or bisyllabic roots, but with single morphological words sometimes reaching eight or nine syllables in length. Affixes rarely fuse in any way. It has a simple nominal system, contrasting just four noun cases, and not marking grammatical number in the direct or locative cases. Its system of verbal agreement is frighteningly complex. English verbs must agree only with.
Greek language - Greek language The Greek language (Ελληνικά) is an Indo-European language, born in Greece and once spoken also along the coast of Asia Minor. In classical times there were a variety of spoken dialects, most notably Ionic, Doric, and Attic. Modern Greek is a living tongue, and some scholars have overly stressed similarity to millennia-old Greek languages. Its interintelligibility with ancient Greek is a matter of debate. It is claimed that a "reasonably well educated" speaker of the modern tongue can read the ancient language, but it is not made plain how much of that education consists of exposure to vocabulary and grammar obsolete in normal communication. From 1834 to 1976 there was an attempt to impose Katharevousa ("purified" language--an attempt to "correct" centuries of natural linguistic changes).
Finnish language grammar - Finnish language grammar This article details the grammar of the Finnish language. There are separate articles covering the sound patterns of Finnish, and the ways in which spoken Finnish differs from the formal grammar of the written language. It is probably best to read the introduction to Finnish and Finnish language phonetics articles to make best use of this article. =Pronouns= The pronouns are inflected in the Finnish language much in the same way than their referent nouns are. Table of contents showTocToggle("show","hide") 1 Personal pronouns 2 Demonstrative Pronouns 3 Interrogative Pronouns 4 Relative Pronouns 5 Reciprocal Pronouns 6 Reflexive Pronouns 7 Indefinite Pronouns 8 Cases 8.1 Grammatical Cases 8.2 Locative Cases 8.2.1 Internal Locatives 8.2.2 External Locatives 8.3 Marginal Cases 8.4 Others 8.5 Plurals 8.6 Inflection.
Fowler's Modern English Usage - Fowler's Modern English Usage Fowler's Modern English Usage, often referred to simply as Fowler, is the definitive style guide to British English usage. Fowler covers in detail many vexed issues of usage, from proper plurals and literary techniques to distinctions between similar words and the use of foreign terms. Henry W. Fowler concentrated on British usage, and set the standard for all usage books to follow. Fowler's first edition of 1926 remained in print for many years, but more recent editions have updated the book. Fowler's remark on the split infinitive is well-known: "The English-speaking world may be divided into those who neither know nor care what a split infinitive is, those who don't know, but care very much, those who know and approve, those who know and.
Dictionary - Dictionary A dictionary is a list of words with their definitions, a list of characters with its glyph or a list of words with corresponding words in other languages. Many dictionaries also provide pronunciation information, word derivations, histories, or etymologies, illustrations, usage guidance, and examples in sentences. Table of contents showTocToggle("show","hide") 1 Word order 2 Special-purpose dictionaries 2.1 Bilingual dictionaries 2.2 Character dictionaries 2.3 Glossaries 3 Variations between dictionaries 3.4 Prescription and Description 3.5 Other variations 4 History 5 Miscellanea 6 List of major dictionaries 6.6 English 6.7 Japanese 6.8 Publishers 7 List of online dictionaries 8 List of collaborative dictionaries 9 Further reading 10 Related articles Word order Dictionaries of alphabetic languages list words in alphabetical order. With non-alphabetic languages, it may be different. The.
Aleut language - Aleut language Aleut is a language of the Eskimo-Aleut language phylum. It is the tongue of the Aleut people living in the Aleutian, Pribilof and Commander Islands. Aleut is alone with Eskimo in the Eskimo-Aleut group. The two main dialect groupings are Eastern Aleut and Atkan. Within the Eastern group are the dialects of Unalaska, Belkofski, Akutan, the Pribilof Islands, Kashega and Nikolski. Within the Atkan grouping are the dialects of Attu, Bering Island and Copper Island (or Mednyy). The first contact of people from the Eastern Hemisphere with the Aleut language occurred in 1741, as Vitus Bering's expedition picked up place names and the names of the Aleut people they met. The first recording of the Aleut language in lexicon form appeared in a word list.
Apache language - Apache language Apache is an Athabaskan language closely related to Navajo. It is spoken in the United States, unusual because most Athabaskan languages are spoken in the northwest of Canada and Alaska. Like most Athabaskan languages, Apache shows various levels of animacy in its grammar, with certain nouns taking different verb forms from others according to their rank in this animacy hierarchy. Apache's phonology is very similar to that of Navajo. It has four vowels a, e, i and o, and these may all be nasalised, long, high in tone or combinations of the three. The consonants of the western dialect of Apache are as follows: Stop Fricative Affricate Approximant Nasal Bilabial b w m Alveolar d t t' z s dz ts ts' n Alv. lateral.
Assamese language - Assamese language Assamese or Asamiya is the language spoken by the natives of the state of Assam in northeast India. It is also the official language of Assam. It is also spoken in parts of Arunachal Pradesh and other norteast Indian states. Immigrants from Assam have carried the language with them to other parts of the world. It is spoken by over 20 million people. History Introduction The language descends from classical Sanskrit via the eastern branch of Prakrit. Assamese, along with Oriya and Bengali, is believed to have developed from Magahi apabhramsa . Written records relating to Assamese language can be traced to 6th/7th century AD when Kamrupa (the ancient name of Assam) was ruled by the Varman dynasty. Since then over the passage of the.
Thai language - Thai language Thai (th. ภาษาไทย (paasaa thai), lit. the language of Thai) is the official language of Thailand, and of no other country. It is part of the Tai/Daic language family, whose origin is uncertain but which is sometimes linked to the Austroasiatic, the Austronesian or Sino-Tibetan language families. Thai is a tonal language, with both lexical and grammatical uses of tones. Table of contents showTocToggle("show","hide") 1 Dialects 2 Thai alphabet 3 Grammar 3.1 Tones 3.2 Word-Order 3.3 Adjectives 3.4 Verbs 3.5 Nouns 3.6 Pronouns 3.6.1 For conversational use 3.6.2 For sacred and royal use 3.7 Adjectives 3.8 Adverbs 3.9 Polite Particles 3.10 Classes of Thai 4 Six-hour clock 5 Reference 5.11 Learn Thai Dialects The status of many of these dialects is debated. Standard or Central.
