A couple of months ago, a radio presenter was talking about the then imminent stock market flotation of Elon Musk’s company Space X. The presenter said that the estimated valuation of SpaceX was [amount X], and that [amount Y] of this amount ‘is owed to’ the valuation of SpaceX’s artificial intelligence (AI) business Grok and…… Continue reading Due, owing, owed
Tag: Odds and ends
Odds and ends: German
This post covers some small details of German. Rare suffix for males It’s quite common for languages to form the word for a female person or female animal by adding a suffix to the word for the corresponding male. Well-known suffixes of this kind include English -ess and German -in. (adding the German suffix -in…… Continue reading Odds and ends: German
Some French false friends
The French language has many faux amis (French for ‘false friends’)—words looking like English words but having different meanings. Here are a few of many false words listed in Thody & Evans (1985) or Worth-Stylianou (1992). All are words I have come across in France or when I lived in Luxembourg. French wordMeaningCommentsActionshare (in a…… Continue reading Some French false friends
Odds and ends: English
This post deals with some small aspects of English, grouped under the following headings: Spelling pronunciation meanings mass noun or count noun? word or phrase word histories 1. Spelling 1a. Bookkeeper Bookkeeper (and related bookkeeping) is one of the few English words with 3 double letters in a row: oo-kk-ee. https://whenyouwrite.com/ points out: an English…… Continue reading Odds and ends: English
Albanian verbs that can be transitive or intransitive
Many languages have pairs of verbs (one transitive and one transitive) that are related to each other morphologically. One such pair is Japanese ak-u ‘to open (intransitive)’ and ak-e-ru ‘to open (transitive)’. I’ve written before about a database of such pairs: the World Atlas of Transitivity Pairs (WATP). Some World Atlases about languages – Language…… Continue reading Albanian verbs that can be transitive or intransitive
Enver Hoxha in Russian in the Old Bazaar
Looking around the Old Bazaar in the Albanian town of Kruja, we came across this book by the dictator Enver Hoxha who ruled Albanian from 1944 until 1985. Photo: Kate Clark The book is volume 2 of a Russian translation of his Selected Works. (A few doors down the road, we saw half a dozen…… Continue reading Enver Hoxha in Russian in the Old Bazaar
Oversight over an oversight
On the radio this morning, I heard an interview with the Chair of the UK’s Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR). The interviewer asked about yesterday’s faux pas (mis-step) in which the OBR inadvertently and mistakenly released a report early. The report was part of the material intended to be released shortly after the Chancellor of…… Continue reading Oversight over an oversight
German in Europe
Today saw the publication of a book on the state of German in Europe. The book is Deutsch in Europa: Vielfalt, Sprachnormen und Sprachgebrauch, Vierter Bericht zur Lage der deutschen Sprache [‘German in Europe: Diversity, Language Standards and Language Use, 4th Report on the situation of the German Language’]. It is available in open access…… Continue reading German in Europe
Surprising noun plurals in Russian
Two common Russian nouns have a plural form bearing no resemblance to their singular form. When different inflected forms of a word (for example, a noun) do not from the same root, the relationship between those roots is called suppletion. A well-known English example of suppletion is the verb go, which borrows its past tense…… Continue reading Surprising noun plurals in Russian
18 dragons
I recently discovered a second place with a Chinese name that means 9 dragons. I already knew about the Kowloon (九龍) peninsula in Hong. Apparently, the name refers to eight mountains and a Chinese emperor. Kowloon – Wikipedia I’ve now discovered that the Mekong Delta is known in Vietnamese as Nine Dragons (Cửu Long) River.…… Continue reading 18 dragons