Reasons Why English is Hard to Learn
- Thread starter Akela
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When did the discussion of the English language became a discussion of the Greek language?
Mea maxima culpa! Videant moderatores!Iohannes Aurum dixit:
This is what I clearly understand and even can reply: 8)Cornelia dixit:
Χαῖρε, Κορνέλια
I hope I'll be able to decipher it one day. So far I understand only ἡ ψυχή.Cornelia dixit:
Well, sinse my last post I've learnt "Ό μὲν διδάσκαλος γράφει τά γράμματα, οἱ δὲ παῖδες ἀναγιγνώσκουσι," but I'm afraid still it can't be termed knowledge.Cornelia dixit:
In fact I'm fascinated by some Ancient Greek readers with Latin translations and explanations at Google Books.
If I ever succeed in Greek, I should think of a Greek-like nick (in fact, Quasus is a latinization of Russian "kvas"). I wonder if it could be hellenised as Τάσος...
Well,if you consider that there are Greek people that do not know any ancient greek at all,yeah,it can be termed knowledge... :roll:
I always thought that ''kvas'' is a kind of russian drink,something like a beer...?Tάσος<Αναστάσιος<Ανάσταση(=resurrection<resurrectio),I don't know what kvas means,so I can't tell...But if it has anything to do with resurrection,I guess it fits.Therefore,the christianic greek names are the same or similar to the russian ones,as both are orthodox countries.
I always thought that ''kvas'' is a kind of russian drink,something like a beer...?Tάσος<Αναστάσιος<Ανάσταση(=resurrection<resurrectio),I don't know what kvas means,so I can't tell...But if it has anything to do with resurrection,I guess it fits.Therefore,the christianic greek names are the same or similar to the russian ones,as both are orthodox countries.
I'm not just impressed, I'm really shocked at your knowledge! :shock: Indeed it's a non-alcoholic beverage made of bread. It may be either sour or sweet, and of course it's a cognate of Polish kwas.Cornelia dixit:
I used this word as a nick a few times, and when trying to make it sound Latin I decided just to latinize it rather than translate (cerevīsia would be an approapriate translation). As for Tάσος, I regarded it as an eventual parallel of Quasus (if we take into account the correspondence Lat. qu - Gr. τ as in quis - τίς).
If it were from Greek to Latin, maybe ... But from Latin to Greek, I find it a little weird. My knowledge in Latin, however isn't THAT big, and it's only a feeling & a hint.Quasus dixit:
Quasus from Kvas is a funny thing!
Creative. (Or not, but, with sense.)(Like Erinio (-onis), which I forged from Ereinion, "son of kings" ...
And I thought Isidorius (-ii) from Isildurion. And Gimilzor (-oris) I left as it is. These are the "Gondorians". There's still Ruffindel, which I made thinking of Rufin(us) + edhel, but this is, as the name proposes, supposed to be from the Edhil (or whatever is the plural for for edhel, which, right now, me fugit, slips from me escapes me).)(Er .. these things are here: THREAD: #6821 )
P~
I think that I may be able to contribute something to this conversation. I have not studied the history of the English language formally, but I have read – albeit some time ago – popular books on the subject by Bill Bryson and John McWhorter and seen the television series by Robert McNeil.
English is, of course, a Germanic language, more closely related to the dialects on the north-west coast of Germany than to High German. After the Roman legions were pulled out of Britannia, local Romano-Celtic warlords fell to fighting among themselves, and one of them, whom history knows as “Vortigern” (it may be a title rather than a name) invited Germanic tribesmen led by a man named Hengest to fight for him in exchange for land. Hengest and Vortigern fell out, however, and Hengest attacked and overthrew Vortigern. Hengest then invited his brother, Horsa, to bring more Germanic warriors and their families into the country. For whatever reason, the conquest of the whole country was so complete that not even a dozen Celtic words remained in the English language. The country became known as England after the main Germanic tribe, the Angles, and the Anglo-Saxon population forgot the previous inhabitants to such an extent that the Celtic speakers left in the western part of the island were called the Welsh, from a Germanic word for “foreigner.” “Welsch” is still a German word today, usually used to refer to the Italians.
Scandinavians – “Vikings” – conquered most of England at one point, and might have conquered it all had it not been for Alfred the Great, the only English ruler to be called “the Great.” The Scandinavians settled among the Anglo-Saxons and lived relatively peacefully with them. It is thought that it was because of them that English lost the case endings on its articles and adjectives. (Compare Englsh with modern German: der alte Mann, des alten Mannes, dem alten Mann, den alten Mann.) The theory is that the Anglo-Saxons and the Scandinavians had languages similar enough that they could communicate with one another, but those case endings got in the way, so they were dropped. Scandinavians also contributed some vocabulary – books mention in particular words with the combination “sk” in them, like “skill,” and place names ending in “-by.” Interestingly, there are even some word pairs where both the Germanic word and the Scandinavian word have lived on with slightly different meanings, such as “shirt”/”skirt.”
The Normans added vocabulary to the language, but did not change the basic structure. For me, one of the most interesting aspects of the Norman contribution is the element of the feudal class distinction that it preserves. What the Anglo-Saxon peasant raised was a sheep, but when it got to the table of his Norman lord, it became “mutton.” What the Anglo-Saxon peasant raised was a swine, but it became “pork” as the Norman lord’s dinner.
The spelling of the English language was pretty much fixed when William Caxton introduced the printing press in the 1400’s. The spelling of words at that time was very much an individual matter, so, as his standard, Caxton used the spelling of Chaucer, who had lived in the previous century. In Chaucer’s time, the words actually sounded the way they were spelled: “daughter” was pronounced much like the modern German “Tochter,” “knight” sounded much like “Knecht.”
In the early United States, the lexicographer Noah Webster did much to reform the spelling. For example, he got rid of the “u” in “honour,” “flavour,” etc. The British seem to look down on the American spelling as low-class. In one of his adventures, Sherlock Holmes remarks with some distain on a business card printed up by an American who spelled “plough” as “plow.” In a TV episode of the British detective serial “Morse,” the educational level of a suspect is gauged by whether he spells a verb with “-ise” or “-ize.”
Modern English has two characteristics which seem to contradict one another. One is a huge number of words, drawn from many sources. Pick up any foreign language dictionary, and you will likely find that the “English to ……” side is considerably larger than the “….. to English” side. I was working as an English teacher in Germany when I had to take a standardized test to apply for graduate schools in the United States. When I told my fellow teachers that I would be taking an intelligence test, they were curious as to what would be in an intelligence test. I told them that a large part of it was on vocabulary, and they were very surprised. A vocabulary test for general intelligence was not conceivable for German speakers.
The opposite characteristic of English is that a person can get along with an unusually small number of core words. This is because there are so many meanings that are made up from those few words. Consider that phrase “made up,” for example. The child made up a story. A woman made up her face. A man made up his mind. A couple made up after an argument. A trucker made up time on the highway after passing through a city. And so on. Of course, “make” and “up” as separate words have little or no relationship to all of these meanings. Thus, if you can learn the pronunciation of a small core of words – and a lot of different meanings – you can express a lot of things in English.
I am impressed by the number of you who have studied such things as Old Norse and Icelandic, and what I have written may well be rather elementary to such people. I hope that there are others for whom this information is new and interesting.
English is, of course, a Germanic language, more closely related to the dialects on the north-west coast of Germany than to High German. After the Roman legions were pulled out of Britannia, local Romano-Celtic warlords fell to fighting among themselves, and one of them, whom history knows as “Vortigern” (it may be a title rather than a name) invited Germanic tribesmen led by a man named Hengest to fight for him in exchange for land. Hengest and Vortigern fell out, however, and Hengest attacked and overthrew Vortigern. Hengest then invited his brother, Horsa, to bring more Germanic warriors and their families into the country. For whatever reason, the conquest of the whole country was so complete that not even a dozen Celtic words remained in the English language. The country became known as England after the main Germanic tribe, the Angles, and the Anglo-Saxon population forgot the previous inhabitants to such an extent that the Celtic speakers left in the western part of the island were called the Welsh, from a Germanic word for “foreigner.” “Welsch” is still a German word today, usually used to refer to the Italians.
Scandinavians – “Vikings” – conquered most of England at one point, and might have conquered it all had it not been for Alfred the Great, the only English ruler to be called “the Great.” The Scandinavians settled among the Anglo-Saxons and lived relatively peacefully with them. It is thought that it was because of them that English lost the case endings on its articles and adjectives. (Compare Englsh with modern German: der alte Mann, des alten Mannes, dem alten Mann, den alten Mann.) The theory is that the Anglo-Saxons and the Scandinavians had languages similar enough that they could communicate with one another, but those case endings got in the way, so they were dropped. Scandinavians also contributed some vocabulary – books mention in particular words with the combination “sk” in them, like “skill,” and place names ending in “-by.” Interestingly, there are even some word pairs where both the Germanic word and the Scandinavian word have lived on with slightly different meanings, such as “shirt”/”skirt.”
The Normans added vocabulary to the language, but did not change the basic structure. For me, one of the most interesting aspects of the Norman contribution is the element of the feudal class distinction that it preserves. What the Anglo-Saxon peasant raised was a sheep, but when it got to the table of his Norman lord, it became “mutton.” What the Anglo-Saxon peasant raised was a swine, but it became “pork” as the Norman lord’s dinner.
The spelling of the English language was pretty much fixed when William Caxton introduced the printing press in the 1400’s. The spelling of words at that time was very much an individual matter, so, as his standard, Caxton used the spelling of Chaucer, who had lived in the previous century. In Chaucer’s time, the words actually sounded the way they were spelled: “daughter” was pronounced much like the modern German “Tochter,” “knight” sounded much like “Knecht.”
In the early United States, the lexicographer Noah Webster did much to reform the spelling. For example, he got rid of the “u” in “honour,” “flavour,” etc. The British seem to look down on the American spelling as low-class. In one of his adventures, Sherlock Holmes remarks with some distain on a business card printed up by an American who spelled “plough” as “plow.” In a TV episode of the British detective serial “Morse,” the educational level of a suspect is gauged by whether he spells a verb with “-ise” or “-ize.”
Modern English has two characteristics which seem to contradict one another. One is a huge number of words, drawn from many sources. Pick up any foreign language dictionary, and you will likely find that the “English to ……” side is considerably larger than the “….. to English” side. I was working as an English teacher in Germany when I had to take a standardized test to apply for graduate schools in the United States. When I told my fellow teachers that I would be taking an intelligence test, they were curious as to what would be in an intelligence test. I told them that a large part of it was on vocabulary, and they were very surprised. A vocabulary test for general intelligence was not conceivable for German speakers.
The opposite characteristic of English is that a person can get along with an unusually small number of core words. This is because there are so many meanings that are made up from those few words. Consider that phrase “made up,” for example. The child made up a story. A woman made up her face. A man made up his mind. A couple made up after an argument. A trucker made up time on the highway after passing through a city. And so on. Of course, “make” and “up” as separate words have little or no relationship to all of these meanings. Thus, if you can learn the pronunciation of a small core of words – and a lot of different meanings – you can express a lot of things in English.
I am impressed by the number of you who have studied such things as Old Norse and Icelandic, and what I have written may well be rather elementary to such people. I hope that there are others for whom this information is new and interesting.
B
Bitmap
Guest
never heard of that word ... but I did find it in a German dictionary :>simplissimus dixit:
did you read that anywhere or was it part of a documentary film? To my knowledge, that conquest merely consisted of raids (as was usual for Vikings) until the Scandinavians were finally given land in the North-Western part of England.simplissimus dixit:
Well, the contact of spoken French and English was not very extensive, but since most official documents were in French or Latin, there was quite some Romance influence on written English that later also made it into the spoken language. Apart from a lot of vocabulary, English also imported morphological items like Romance pre- and suffixes (re-read; eat-able) or conjunctions (be-cause). The tempora have also undergone a number of changes. Originally, Germanic languages only had 2 tempora: a past tense and a non-past tense (i.e. present and future) ... to some extent, the tempora of modern English (pluperfect, perfect, preterite/simple past, present tense, future tense) came into being in accordance with the Romance modelsimplissimus dixit:
that's not a unique characteristic of English, but pretty common for a lot of languages (even Latin, I think) ... and simple as it may seem, this is usually one of the most difficult bits when learning a language :/simplissimus dixit:
Thank you for your kind and flattering words, Akela!
Bitmap, I must admit that I have only seen the word “welsch” a few times in the German literature of 19th century Romanticism. In one case I saw, Italy was even referred to as “Welschland.” If you, as a modern German, are not familiar with the term, it must have fallen out of use.
As to your objection to my statement about the Scandinavian role in the development of English, I think that you might be underestimating the Scandinavians or overestimating the importance of a conquest. My actual error was in overlooking the fact that the Scandinavians DID control England at one point: under King Canute (Knut) and his two sons, who ruled England somewhat before the Norman invasion. Of course, I was referring to an earlier period, when Alfred the Great came back from defeat and out of hiding to fight the Scandinavians back out of the kingdom of Mercia after they had conquered the surrounding kingdoms. In both cases of Scandinavian conquest, the effect of their rule was slight: the rulers changed, but those who were ruled simply paid their taxes to a different lord. The occupation was not long – or genocidal – enough to have made great changes in the culture or language of the people. It was more like the Moorish conquest of Spain than the Anglo-Saxon conquest of Romano-Celtic Britannia. As I wrote, it appears that the Scandinavians and Anglo-Saxons lived relatively peacefully together, with the biggest linguistic effect being (it is theorized) the loss of the case endings in English.
I don’t understand the objection you raise to what I wrote about the influence of Norman French on modern English. I don’t dispute that, together with complete words, some word elements, like the “re-“ in “reread” or the “cause” in “because” were derived from the Romance family of languages and that they quite likely were brought into English through Norman French. However, I can’t understand what seems to be an assertion that the structure of English verb tenses comes, not from the Germanic “Anglo-Saxon” basis of English, but from the Romance languages. I look at
I see / ich sehe
I saw / ich sah
I have seen / ich habe gesehen
I had seen / ich hatte gesehen
I shall see / ich werde sehen
I shall have seen / ich werde gesehen haben
Those certainly look pretty close to me, and very different from the system of infixes that make up the tenses in Latin. Are you saying that English and German evolved such similar forms separately, with the English taking the forms from Norman French?
Bitmap, I must admit that I have only seen the word “welsch” a few times in the German literature of 19th century Romanticism. In one case I saw, Italy was even referred to as “Welschland.” If you, as a modern German, are not familiar with the term, it must have fallen out of use.
As to your objection to my statement about the Scandinavian role in the development of English, I think that you might be underestimating the Scandinavians or overestimating the importance of a conquest. My actual error was in overlooking the fact that the Scandinavians DID control England at one point: under King Canute (Knut) and his two sons, who ruled England somewhat before the Norman invasion. Of course, I was referring to an earlier period, when Alfred the Great came back from defeat and out of hiding to fight the Scandinavians back out of the kingdom of Mercia after they had conquered the surrounding kingdoms. In both cases of Scandinavian conquest, the effect of their rule was slight: the rulers changed, but those who were ruled simply paid their taxes to a different lord. The occupation was not long – or genocidal – enough to have made great changes in the culture or language of the people. It was more like the Moorish conquest of Spain than the Anglo-Saxon conquest of Romano-Celtic Britannia. As I wrote, it appears that the Scandinavians and Anglo-Saxons lived relatively peacefully together, with the biggest linguistic effect being (it is theorized) the loss of the case endings in English.
I don’t understand the objection you raise to what I wrote about the influence of Norman French on modern English. I don’t dispute that, together with complete words, some word elements, like the “re-“ in “reread” or the “cause” in “because” were derived from the Romance family of languages and that they quite likely were brought into English through Norman French. However, I can’t understand what seems to be an assertion that the structure of English verb tenses comes, not from the Germanic “Anglo-Saxon” basis of English, but from the Romance languages. I look at
I see / ich sehe
I saw / ich sah
I have seen / ich habe gesehen
I had seen / ich hatte gesehen
I shall see / ich werde sehen
I shall have seen / ich werde gesehen haben
Those certainly look pretty close to me, and very different from the system of infixes that make up the tenses in Latin. Are you saying that English and German evolved such similar forms separately, with the English taking the forms from Norman French?
In English, you drive on a parkway yet park on a driveway.
One notable exception to that rule is the Don Valley Parkway in Toronto, Canada. Sometimes, it becomes so congested that one can park in there and not interfere with traffic flow, hence the nickname Don Valley Parking Lot. Read this article on this phenomenon: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Valley_Parkway.
If you don’t mind me reviving an old topic, in a conversation about the inanities of the English language, I made a contribution in which I said that English had two seemingly contradictory characteristics: an extraordinarily large number of words drawn from a variety of other languages and an ability to express most things with an extremely small number of words. I don’t think that I made my point as clearly as I would have wished. However, I recently ran across a better statement of the same thought in a book I bought in a used-book sale. This is from The Treasure of Our Tongue, by Lincoln Barnett (Alfred A. Knopf; New York; 1964), pp. 29-32.
“…. In the vast lexicon of English, thousands of precise, highly specialized, and often elegant words flower side by side with small, easy-to-learn, highly flexible “parts of speech.” It is one of the marvelous endowments of English that these two species of words – the specialized and the general – complement, augment, define, and analyze each other. Thus one may put out a fire or extinguish a fire; dismount or get off; ascend or go up. Among linguists, English is commonly known as an “analytic” language, which is to say that the relationships of words in a sentence are indicated by the order in which they appear (rather than by case endings or other mutations of form) and by an extensive use of prepositions and auxiliary verbs.
“The special formula of little verb-plus-preposition is the key to a quick grasp of English speech, if not necessarily to a gracious literary style. In 1920 two Cambridge scholars, Dr. I. A. Richards, now of Harvard, and the late C. K. Ogden, discovered while collaborating on The Meaning of Meaning, a book about English semantics, that certain small, persistent words tended to turn up again and again in their analyses of other words and idioms. They became convinced that with a limited set of these indispensible, analytical words, any other word could be defined and any reasonably simple concept clearly and adequately expressed. After ten years of lexicological labor, Ogden evolved what is known as Basic English – an elixir, distilled from the ancient wine of our language, of 850 volatile, versatile words that can say just about anything that needs to be said in ordinary, non-technical talk. Basic English proved invaluable in World War II, when speed of instruction was crucial. Today language courses can afford to be a little more leisurely and vocabularies a little more generous.
“The critical discovery made by Richards and Ogden was that their stripped-down lexicon required only eighteen verbs – as against four to ten thousand that may be available in the vocabulary of a college-educated man. The eighteen vital verbs are: be, come, do, get, give, go, have, keep, let, make, may, put say, see, seem, send, take, and will. The ability of these words to do the work of all the others stems from their gift of being able to enter into an astonishing number of mergers with prepositions. Thus a combination like give out can fulfill the essential purposes of announce, award, bequeath, bestow, dispense, distribute, emit, expend, exude, grant, proclaim. And even more spectacularly, give up can cover the pivotal meanings of abandon, abdicate, abjure, cease, cede, desert, desist, discontinue, forgo, forsake, relinquish, renounce, resign, sacrifice, stop, succumb, surrender, vacate, withdraw, and yield.
“It is evident that the little words of English constitute a kind of inner voice – a language within a language – capable of understudying most of the flashier ornaments of The Oxford English Dictionary and Webster’s New International Dictionary, Unabridged. They can be of enormous value to the English novitiate because they cover so much ground; each one pitch-hits for hundreds of bigger, if subtler, words; and they are simple to spell and pronounce. But their simplicity is deceptive. They can be used in so many ways that their very versatility sometimes creates confusion in the mind of the learner. This is the “masked complexity” which the foreign student may discover when he looks more closely at the apparently innocuous alliance of the little verbs and little prepositions.
“Contemplate, for example, the little word up. What is it? Most of the time it behaves like a preposition, indicating direction (He lives up the street). But it can also masquerade as an adverb (It’s time to get up); a noun (Every life has its ups and downs); a verb (I’ll up you five dollars); or an adjective (The sun is up). In addition to its multiple function in the combination give up, it plays an ubiquitous and sometimes superfluous role in a variety of other expressions, such as add up, clean up, do up, drink up, hurry up, join up, line up, lock up, look up (as in a dictionary), mix up, offer up, pay up, play up, ring up, set up, stop up, tie up, tidy up, wake up, wash up, work up, wrap up, up to now, and up to you. To the foreign student it seems paradoxical that the same meaning is conveyed by His house burned up and His house burned down; My wife isn’t up yet and My wife isn’t down yet; The train slowed up and The train slowed down. Even more bewildering are those situations where utterly unrelated concepts are evoked by one and the same phrase – e.g. make up, whose transient meaning depends on whether the context is cosmetics (She takes an hour to make up her face); indecision (I just can’t make up my mind); domesticity (Let’s make up the bed); forgiveness (Kiss and make up); fiction (I’ll make up some kind of a story); or atonement (Some day I’ll make up for this mistake).”
“…. In the vast lexicon of English, thousands of precise, highly specialized, and often elegant words flower side by side with small, easy-to-learn, highly flexible “parts of speech.” It is one of the marvelous endowments of English that these two species of words – the specialized and the general – complement, augment, define, and analyze each other. Thus one may put out a fire or extinguish a fire; dismount or get off; ascend or go up. Among linguists, English is commonly known as an “analytic” language, which is to say that the relationships of words in a sentence are indicated by the order in which they appear (rather than by case endings or other mutations of form) and by an extensive use of prepositions and auxiliary verbs.
“The special formula of little verb-plus-preposition is the key to a quick grasp of English speech, if not necessarily to a gracious literary style. In 1920 two Cambridge scholars, Dr. I. A. Richards, now of Harvard, and the late C. K. Ogden, discovered while collaborating on The Meaning of Meaning, a book about English semantics, that certain small, persistent words tended to turn up again and again in their analyses of other words and idioms. They became convinced that with a limited set of these indispensible, analytical words, any other word could be defined and any reasonably simple concept clearly and adequately expressed. After ten years of lexicological labor, Ogden evolved what is known as Basic English – an elixir, distilled from the ancient wine of our language, of 850 volatile, versatile words that can say just about anything that needs to be said in ordinary, non-technical talk. Basic English proved invaluable in World War II, when speed of instruction was crucial. Today language courses can afford to be a little more leisurely and vocabularies a little more generous.
“The critical discovery made by Richards and Ogden was that their stripped-down lexicon required only eighteen verbs – as against four to ten thousand that may be available in the vocabulary of a college-educated man. The eighteen vital verbs are: be, come, do, get, give, go, have, keep, let, make, may, put say, see, seem, send, take, and will. The ability of these words to do the work of all the others stems from their gift of being able to enter into an astonishing number of mergers with prepositions. Thus a combination like give out can fulfill the essential purposes of announce, award, bequeath, bestow, dispense, distribute, emit, expend, exude, grant, proclaim. And even more spectacularly, give up can cover the pivotal meanings of abandon, abdicate, abjure, cease, cede, desert, desist, discontinue, forgo, forsake, relinquish, renounce, resign, sacrifice, stop, succumb, surrender, vacate, withdraw, and yield.
“It is evident that the little words of English constitute a kind of inner voice – a language within a language – capable of understudying most of the flashier ornaments of The Oxford English Dictionary and Webster’s New International Dictionary, Unabridged. They can be of enormous value to the English novitiate because they cover so much ground; each one pitch-hits for hundreds of bigger, if subtler, words; and they are simple to spell and pronounce. But their simplicity is deceptive. They can be used in so many ways that their very versatility sometimes creates confusion in the mind of the learner. This is the “masked complexity” which the foreign student may discover when he looks more closely at the apparently innocuous alliance of the little verbs and little prepositions.
“Contemplate, for example, the little word up. What is it? Most of the time it behaves like a preposition, indicating direction (He lives up the street). But it can also masquerade as an adverb (It’s time to get up); a noun (Every life has its ups and downs); a verb (I’ll up you five dollars); or an adjective (The sun is up). In addition to its multiple function in the combination give up, it plays an ubiquitous and sometimes superfluous role in a variety of other expressions, such as add up, clean up, do up, drink up, hurry up, join up, line up, lock up, look up (as in a dictionary), mix up, offer up, pay up, play up, ring up, set up, stop up, tie up, tidy up, wake up, wash up, work up, wrap up, up to now, and up to you. To the foreign student it seems paradoxical that the same meaning is conveyed by His house burned up and His house burned down; My wife isn’t up yet and My wife isn’t down yet; The train slowed up and The train slowed down. Even more bewildering are those situations where utterly unrelated concepts are evoked by one and the same phrase – e.g. make up, whose transient meaning depends on whether the context is cosmetics (She takes an hour to make up her face); indecision (I just can’t make up my mind); domesticity (Let’s make up the bed); forgiveness (Kiss and make up); fiction (I’ll make up some kind of a story); or atonement (Some day I’ll make up for this mistake).”
I have a feeling that natives think that so-called phrasal verbs make English easier. Actually they are a real headacke for a learner. When you memorise ‘put out = extinguish’ it doesn’t help at all that both ‘put’ and ‘out’ look familiar. Moreover, for me a single word is easier to remember.
I have a good command of few phrasal verbs, what really upsets me.
I have a good command of few phrasal verbs, what really upsets me.
I'm fully aware of that difficulty. There is a parallel difficulty in your native language, namely verb prefixes.Quasus dixit:
The meanings are not exactly the same. Burning up has the sense of using up as in fuel. When a house has been burned up there is no combustible material left but the structure may or may not be to some extent intact. Burning down means there is nothing left standing but there may or may not be combustible material left.simplissimus dixit:
These have completely different meanings. One means not up from her bed and the other means not down the stairs. You wouldn't use "not down yet" in a single storey dwelling.
I'll give you that one.
 Tongue.gif "(1) Tongue out :p")
When I was small and my mother was trying to get me to eat properly, if I got distracted and turned away from the table she would tell me, "Sit round; sit square."
Needless to say, when I became a parent in my turn I was astonished to hear the same oxymoron come unbidden from my own mouth.
Needless to say, when I became a parent in my turn I was astonished to hear the same oxymoron come unbidden from my own mouth.