25 Handy Words That Simply Don’t Exist In English Approximately 375 million people speak English as their first language, in fact it's the 3rd most commonly spoken language in the world (after Mandarin Chinese and Spanish). Interestingly enough it's the number 1 second language used worldwide - which is why the total number of people who speak English, outnumber those of any other. But whilst it's the most widely spoken language, there's still a few areas it falls down on (strange and bizarre punctuation rules aside). We look at 25 words that simply don't exist in the English language (and yet after reading this list, you'll wish they did!) 1 Age-otori (Japanese): To look worse after a haircut 2 Arigata-meiwaku (Japanese): An act someone does for you that you didn’t want to have them do and tried to avoid having them do, but they went ahead anyway, determined to do you a favor, and then things went wrong and caused you a lot of trouble, yet in the end social conventions required you to express gratitude Source
WordBrewery. Améliorer son vocabulaire dans une langue étrangère Mise à jour avril 2019 : Malheureusement WordBrewery n’accepte plus de nouveaux comptes. WordBrewery est une plateforme en ligne qui va vous aider à développer votre vocabulaire de base dans une langue étrangère. Elle s’appuie sur des phrases extraites chaque jour d’articles de presse. Comment pratiquer une langue avec des phrases de tous les jours quand on n’est pas immergé dans la réalité d’un pays ? WordBrewerry a calculé que les 2 500 mots les plus courants dans n’importe quelle langue représentent 95 % du vocabulaire quotidien. Vous allez pouvoir choisir un niveau pour démarrer : débutant, intermédiaire ou expert. Quand vous cliquez sur un mot dans une phrase, vous obtenez sa définition, vous pouvez afficher d’autres phrases dans lesquelles il est utilisé, vous pouvez aussi l’ajouter à une de vos listes de mots. Ces listes vont ensuite vous permettre de demander à WordBrewerry des séquences de révision et d’exercices centrés sur une ou plusieurs d’entre elles. Lien : WordBrewery
The Top 10 Relationship Words That Aren't Translatable Into English | Marriage 3.0 Here are my top ten words, compiled from online collections, to describe love, desire and relationships that have no real English translation, but that capture subtle realities that even we English speakers have felt once or twice. As I came across these words I’d have the occasional epiphany: “Oh yeah! That’s what I was feeling...” Mamihlapinatapei (Yagan, an indigenous language of Tierra del Fuego): The wordless yet meaningful look shared by two people who desire to initiate something, but are both reluctant to start. Oh yes, this is an exquisite word, compressing a thrilling and scary relationship moment. Yuanfen (Chinese): A relationship by fate or destiny. From what I glean, in common usage yuanfen means the "binding force" that links two people together in any relationship. But interestingly, “fate” isn’t the same thing as “destiny.” Cafuné (Brazilian Portuguese): The act of tenderly running your fingers through someone's hair. Ya’aburnee (Arabic): “You bury me.”
100 Mostly Small But Expressive Interjections David Bier Thanks for this – what a fun post considering there’s no actual narrative in it! Cecily Some of these interjections are quite culturally and age specific, so if people need to be told what they mean, they should probably not be using them.For example, to many Brits, va-va-voom is not old-fashioned at all, but instead is firmly linked to the long-running ads that footballer Thierry Henry made for the Renault Clio. Himanshu Chanda Whoa ! What a biiiig list. And yes this ones really great. Listen and Write - Dictation 100 Exquisite Adjectives By Mark Nichol Adjectives — descriptive words that modify nouns — often come under fire for their cluttering quality, but often it’s quality, not quantity, that is the issue. Plenty of tired adjectives are available to spoil a good sentence, but when you find just the right word for the job, enrichment ensues. Practice precision when you select words. Here’s a list of adjectives: Subscribe to Receive our Articles and Exercises via Email You will improve your English in only 5 minutes per day, guaranteed! 21 Responses to “100 Exquisite Adjectives” Rebecca Fantastic list!
The Meanings Behind Words for Emotions Aren't Universal, Study Finds | Smart News | Smithsonian Magazine In May 1993, Trinidadian-German Eurodance artist Haddaway posed a crucial query to the world: “What is love?” Haddaway asked his question in English, but he received a range of responses—in part, perhaps, because there were so many other languages listeners could use to answer. By analyzing words from nearly 2,500 languages, researchers have found that terms describing emotions—like anger and happiness—can have very different meanings depending on the cultures and geographies where they originate. The study, published this week in the journal Science, reveals that while some common themes exist across the linguistics family tree, seemingly equivalent ideas have evolved away from each other, shaped in part by the different ways in which people around the world express their feelings. To identify universal themes across languages—or lack thereof—Lindquist and her colleagues compiled a database of 100,000 words from 2,474 spoken languages spanning 20 major language families.
The Phrontistery: Obscure Words and Vocabulary Resources We Have a New Shortest Science Paper. It Also Has No Words, and Is Utterly Brilliant. To most laypeople, a scientific paper is a wordy jumble of jargon, the abstruse monotony occasionally punctured with a confusing chart, and maybe a table or two brimming with numbers. Many scientists recognize that this perception is at least partly deserved, and do their best to communicate their work clearly, correctly and as briefly as possible. To salute their efforts, last year, we drew attention to the shortest scientific paper ever published. Published in 1974 to the Journal of Applied Behavioral Analysis, "The unsuccessful self-treatment of a case of “writer's block” had no words (and, as it turns out, was successfully and hilariously replicated in 2007). Now, we can report that there is actually a tie for the distinction of "shortest scientific paper." "On nonrecoverable deletion in syntax," published in 1972 to the journal Linguistic Inquiry, also had no words, and -- in its own fashion -- was equally brilliant. (Image: John T.
List of English terms of venery, by animal This is a list of English-language terms of venery (venery being an archaic word for hunting), comprising terms from a tradition that arose in the Late Middle Ages, at least partly from the Book of Saint Albans of 1486, a historic list of "company terms". The present list also includes more common collective terms (such as "herd" and "flock") for some animals. Standard terms for particular groups are listed first in each group and shown in bold. See also[edit] References[edit] Further reading[edit] Hodgkin, John (1909).
Language Log » Alignment charts and other low-dimensional visualizations « previous post | next post » The current xkcd: There's a long history of similar diagrams in language-related areas. A century and a half ago, C.S. Peirce was fond of triangles, like this one: And this one: About a century ago, we get the "semantic triangle", from Charles Ogden and Ivor A. But those diagrams are not really in direct line to modern "alignment charts", since they represent a graph of pair-wise relations among concepts or processes, rather than points in a low-dimensional vector space whose dimensions have intuitive meaning. For a more appropriate proximate history, we can start with the idea of "semantic differential" spaces, based on the ideas in Charles Osgood, "The Nature and Measurement of Meaning", 1952. And another one: A similar set of ideas lie behind Valence-Arousal theories of emotion: Doug Biber used factor analysis to induce a set of dimensions for register/style/genre: [W]e conjecture that verbal meaning is irreducibly high dimensional. Permalink
15 Beautiful Dutch Words and Phrases We Need in English Gezelligheid Although gezelligheid is often equated to cosiness, this catchall concept has considerably more depth than its English counterpart. For the Dutch, gezelligheid represents a broad spectrum of fun, jovial or amicable situations that are united by their sense of personal comfort and togetherness. Lekker In Dutch, the adjective lekker connotes several positive attributes including nice, appealing and high-quality. Whilst tasty or hearty food is commonly called lekker, the word extends well beyond gastronomy and is often applied to attractive people, well-made clothing, nice weather or even a good night’s sleep. Hè Hè This short exhalation primarily denotes comfort, satisfaction or relief and is employed when someone wishes to relate their alleviation to others, e.g. after completing a busy day at work. Lekker Bezig Lekker Bezig literally translates into English as ‘nice busy’ and denotes the feeling of accomplishment someone has whilst pursuing a particularly engaging activity. -tje
How does language emerge? New study provides insights into the first steps -- ScienceDaily How did the almost 6000 languages of the world come into being? Researchers from the Leipzig Research Centre for Early Childhood Development at Leipzig University and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology have tried to simulate the process of developing a new communication system in an experiment -- with surprising results: even preschool children can spontaneously develop communication systems that exhibit core properties of natural language. How the languages of the world emerged is largely a mystery. Considering that it might have taken millennia, it is intriguing to see how deaf people can create novel sign languages spontaneously. In a series of studies, researchers at the Leipzig Research Centre for Early Childhood Development and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology attempted to recreate exactly this process. The children's task was to describe an image with different motifs in a coordination game. How does a language emerge?