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NKM |
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Advanced Member |
| Retired computer programmer; musician |
| Language in general, English in particular |
| Male |
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Saturday, February 14, 2015 |
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Wednesday, June 20, 2018 12:04:17 PM |
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Aside from differences of dialect, there are some clear examples of this kind of vowel change in English.
One of those is "the". If it is followed by a vowel sound, it is usually pronounced like "thee"; otherwise its "-e" is reduced to schwa.
Then there's "estimate". When it's a noun, the stress is on the first syllable and vowel of the unstressed third syllable is a schwa. When it's a verb, the first and last syllables are stressed more or less equally and that third syllable sounds like the word "mate".
That also happens with the adjective "intimate" and the verb "to intimate".
(Not everybody adheres to these conventions.)
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Nowadays we don't often hear the phrase "color TV", because that's the default (at least in my part of the world). But back in the day, all TV sets and all television broadcasts were "black and white". (Of course we didn't start saying "black and white" until the alternative became possible.)
Some of us are old enough to remember how astonishing it was to actually see TV pictures in color.
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Drag0nspeaker wrote:
Isn't it true that the "LAST will and testament" is the one which is followed?
If there were four wills, and this one was the second, it is invalid, surely. The fourth one would be the one to use.
That would be true here. Elsewhere, perhaps …?
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Bourgeois buffoon that I am, it did not occur to me that those few lines might have been penned by a writer of some repute.
Now, having been told of the provenance of the piece and presented with the whole series of stanzas, I must say that it strikes me as an overlong train of forced rhymes and strange inversions. It shows evidence of considerable cleverness and diligence, but it still reads like doggerel.
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#1 is not correct. At least, it's something I'd never expect a native speaker to say.
You might hear "I feel like vomit/puke/crap/crud," meaning "I feel sick." (The most common form would use a more vulgar word for feces.)
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Is there a word missing?
"The automaker aims for the steel to make up up to 25 percent of the company’s vehicle parts by weight."
I suspect it should be:
"The automaker aims for the steel to make up as much as 25 percent of the company’s vehicle parts by weight."
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I'm perfectly willing to accept the experts' opinions as opinions, and I don't mind their using those opinions as underlying assumptions for their analyses and explanations. After all, logic is logic, and for some purposes a postulate is as good as an axiom.
On the other hand, I'm not inclined to accept anybody's opinions (other than my own, of course!) as established truth.
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I don't want to write about her, so indignant am I. (I'm too indignant to write about her.)
Indignant as I am, I don't want to write about her. (Even though I'm indignant, I don't want to write about her.)
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Seems arbitrary to me.
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After I tried so hard to be charitable and avoid using the word "doggerel"!
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