Month: November 2008

At the end of the day it’s not rocket science

By Simon

At the end of the day I personally think it’s not rocket science, and at this moment in time and with all due respect, it absolutely shouldn’t of been a 24/7 nightmare that’s fairly unique.

What on earth am I on about? Well the above sentence contains the top ten most overused phrases in English, according to this blog post. The phrases are listed below in descending order of usage.

  1. At the end of the day
  2. Fairly unique
  3. I personally
  4. At this moment in time
  5. With all due respect
  6. Absolutely
  7. It’s a nightmare
  8. Shouldn’t of (for shouldn’t have)
  9. 24/7
  10. It’s not rocket science

These phrases all come from the Oxford English Corpus and the list was compiled by scholars at Oxford University.

Do you use/avoid these phrases? Are there other phrases that you think are overused?

Learning Hebrew

By Simon

A visitor to Omniglot has contacted me on behalf of a relative who recently moved to Israel. The relative is finding Hebrew a very challenging language to learn and is looking for an alternative to Ulpan, the total immersion courses for immigrants to Israel. Any suggestions?

An article I found in The Jerusalem Post reports that 60% of immigrants to Israel who are over 30 finish their initial Ulpan courses consisting of 500 hours of instruction without fully mastering Hebrew. Many such immigrants are unable to find work, or have difficulties doing so. The article dates from 2006, and I haven’t been able to find any more recent ones on this problem.

Have any of you been through the Ulpan system, or something similar in other countries?

Linguistic research

By Simon

I did some research on grammatical gender for my bilingualism class today which was similar to the experiment I tried out here last week.

The victims participants were all native speakers of Welsh and we asked them to assign male or female voices to inanimate objects, some of which are usually associated with men – (beard, hammer, screwdriver); some are usually associated with women (brooch, dress, needle); while others are semantically neutral (clock, table, television). We were trying to see whether they would be guided by the semantic or Welsh grammatical gender, and in most cases they went with the semantic gender, except for the neutral objects, for which some of them followed the Welsh genders.

Apart from the assignment of genders, I found it interesting that most of the participants learnt Welsh first and only started learning English from the age of 4 or 5, i.e. when they started school. This is quite common in this part of Wales. We also asked them estimate the percentage of Welsh and English they use. Some said they use both languages equally, others use Welsh far more than English -up to 90% of the time.

Word of the day – rhewlif

By Simon

The Welsh word rhewlif was mentioned during Iolo Willams’ programme, Byd Iolo, on Radio Cymru yesterday. At first I wasn’t quite sure what he was talking about, but then I realised the word was a compound of rhew (frozen) and llif (flood) and guessed that it meant glacier. He was in Patagonia at the time, so the context helped. It’s great when you can work out what a word means without having to look it up.

Another Welsh word for glacier is afon iâ (ice river). The equivalent in Irish is oighearshruth (ice river/flow) and in Chinese it’s 冰川 (bīng chuān) – ice river.

The English word glacier comes from the France glacier, which is apparently from Savoy dialect word glacière (moving mass of ice) and is related to glace (ice).

No more Latin

By Simon

A number of local councils in the UK have decided to ban their staff from using phrases of Latin origin, such as vice versa, bona fide, ad lib, QED and pro rata, in speech or writing, according to this report.

Some of the councils believe that Latin is elitist and discriminatory because not everybody understands it, especially if English is not their first language.

Suggested alternatives include ‘for this special purpose’ for ad hoc and ‘existing condition’ or ‘state of things’ for status quo.

Classicists have not welcomed this move and one described it as “absolutely bonkers” and the “linguistic equivalent of ethnic cleansing”, but the Plain English Campaign approve and believe that officials only use Latin to make themselves feel important.