Lexicon Subtleties: Antithesis

Blog Entry #93

Antithesis is a literary device to introduce two opposing propositions for contrasting effect. Two similar concepts are paradox and oxymoron. Paradox is an argument which shows inconsistency with logic and common sense. Antithesis is the juxtaposition of two contrasting ideas or words in the same statement to create a contrasting effect whereas paradox is a juxtaposition of a set of seemingly contradictory concepts that reveal a hidden truth. Oxymoron, on the other hand, is the combination of seemingly contradictory terms, such as bigger half, alone together, act naturally, or my favourite: deafening silence!

Example of antithesis:

Many are called but few are chosen.

Let’s look at some examples in Literature:

Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare:

Marcus Brutus and Mark Antony were painted in opposite colors, albeit subtly

A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens:

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times."

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs:

Snow White and the Wicked Witch are always at odds. Snow White wanted to be kind and helpful to everyone while the Wicked Witch wanted to poison her with an apple, thus taking away her beauty and charm.

Lexicon Subtleties: Ablaut Reduplication

Blog entry #92

Why do we say hip-hop instead of hop-hip and King Kong instead of Kong King?

There seems to be an unwritten rule in English that native speakers seem to know almost instinctively. The reason for the above question is usually stated as "Because saying it any other way just sounds wrong"!

So what’s the rule?

Rule: if you have three words, then the vowel order has to be I, A, O (big, bad wolf). In case of two words, the first is almost always an I and the second is either an A or O (little green men, and not green little men).

Fascinatingly, ablaut reduplication isn’t seen just in English. It’s also prevalent in Indo-European languages, wherein the most commonly used letter is 'e’, akin to that of the English language.

Ablaut reduplication pairs words with internal vowel alternations, such as chit-chat, ping-pong, and jibber-jabber.

Other types of reduplication are as follows:

Rhyming Reduplication - boogie-woogie, easy-peasy, and hoity-toity

Exact Reduplication (used in baby talk) - bye-bye, choo-choo, and no-no

Shm- Reduplication (feature of American English with Yiddish roots) - fancy-shmancy

Comparative Reduplication - my balloon went higher and higher, her skin got whiter and whiter

Contrastive Focus Reduplication - I’m awake, but I’m not AWAKE-awake

Related topic:

The Unwritten Adjective Rule:

Adjectives in English absolutely have to be written in this order: opinion-size-age-shape-colour-origin-material-purpose Noun.

A lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife feels correct whereas rearranging the words does not. Also, as size comes before colour, green great dragons can’t exist. This construction creates dissonance in English speakers’ ears. Something just doesn’t sound right. 

Lexicon Subtleties: Phonotactics

Blog Entry #91

Despite English being a unique and whimsical language, it still adheres to certain rules. Apart from grammar, there are multiple components that all work together to create meaningful communication among individuals. These which concern the structure of language, are phonemes, morphemes, lexemes, syntax, and context. Phonotactics on the other hand, is a branch of phonology, related to sonority. Phonotactics are restrictions on the types of sounds that are allowed to occur next to each other or in particular positions in the word

Phonotactic constraints restrict the ways in which syllables can be created in a language. Languages do not allow random sequences of sounds; rather, the sound sequences a language allows are a systematic and predictable part of its structure. Syllables in a word can be split into an onset, nucleus and coda. Onset and coda are optional whereas the nucleus is obligatory.

Let’s look at certain simple rules:

English: 'bl’ is a permissible sequence at the start of a syllable, it cannot occur at the end of one

Conversely, 'nk' is permitted at the end, but not the start

Japanese: consonant clusters like 'st’ cannot occur

German: 'lt' is not allowed at the start, but is allowed at the end

Lexicon Subtleties: Silent letters

Blog entry #90

What are silent letters?

'e' in table is not pronounced. 'e' is the silent letter in table.

'h' is school is silent.

'k' in knee, 'l' in half, 'g' in sign, 'c' in indict are a few other examples.

Origin

Words borrowed into English from other languages:

'Tsunami’ borrowed from Japanese

'Psychology' borrowed from Greek

Before the Great Vowel Shift (see footnotes for reference),  the Germanic language had open syllables with long vowels, meaning the word 'bit' would be said with short 'i' whereas the word 'bite' would be long and would have been something like 'beetuh'. After the GVS, the distinction between long and short vowels in English is more than just length. The eventual elision (omission of sound) of the final 'e' made its modern pronunciation 'byt' with the 'e' becoming silent.

Evolution

Most words beginning with a silent k are remnants of Old English, which was the language that evolved from the Saxons who settled in England around the 5th century. Historically, they were voiced and are still pronounced in modern German words. For example, the word ‘knot’ in English is knoten in German. Despite having the same origins, English lost the initial k sound while German still has it. The assumption is that English speaker simply chose to stop saying them. 

Old English texts comprise several awkward consonant clusters that are difficult to pronounce. Even Shakespeare would have still pronounced the initial k, but shortly after that its use dwindled in modern times. The k and gh was lost quite recently, so the old spellings have stuck. Some of the earlier consonant clusters like 'h' prefixed in words like ‘ring’, originally spelt and voiced as 'hring', disappeared much earlier, resulting in the spelling to also change.

The word ‘knight’ has two consonant clusters and it’s a lot easier to pronounce as 'nyt' than the German equivalent 'knecht', where both clusters are voiced. In some cases, it’s useful to keep the initial k as it helps distinguish one word from another (e.g. ‘knot’ and ‘not’, ‘know’ and ‘now’).

Footnotes:

The Great Vowel Shift:

https://guernseydonkey.com/english-language-history-what-caused-the-great-vowel-shift/

http://facweb.furman.edu/~mmenzer/gvs/what.htm

Lexicon Subtleties: Diacritics

Blog Entry #89

Technical stuff first:

• A diacritic (aka accent) is a glyph added to a letter or basic glyph
• A glyph is an elemental symbol within an agreed set of symbols intended to represent a readable character
• Some diacritical marks, such as the acute ( ´ ) and grave ( ` ), are often called accents. 
• Diacritical marks may appear above or below a letter, or in some other position such as within the letter or between two letters

Examples:

Hindi:

What we call 'maatras' when we learn 'Barakhadi' are nothing but diacritics. They are compound letters having vowels combined with consonants to change the sound of the basic letter:

English:

Acute: Resumé or résumé (rehz-yoo-may) is used for a work summary versus resume, which means "to begin again"

Grave: à la carte, crème de la crème

Both: déjà vu

Circumflex:  château, crêpe, maître d'

Other languages:

German: Umlaut - tschüss (goodbye)

Spanish: Tilde - mañana (tomorrow)

French: Cedilla - garçon (boy)

Purpose:

Used for additional sounds, in place of adding distinct letters to the alphabet

Aids pronunciation (such as apostrophes used to shorten two words into one - "don't")

Indicates other information about the pronunciation of words such as stress, tone or vowel length

Footnote:

Types of diacritics

Lexicon Subtleties: Allusion

Blog Entry #88

The first time I came across this word, I thought it was a typo of illusion! But this one’s an easy figure of speech - to allude to something simply means to make a reference to something. Allusions help to quickly create a visual imagery of the scene, provided you’re aware of the context being referred to. It can also aid in making your point quickly and effectively.

Let’s look at an example of allusion from a song written by one of my all-time favourite artists, Taylor Swift. Her hit single Love Story goes like this: 

"That you were Romeo, you were throwin’ pebbles

And my daddy said, "Stay away from Juliet"

Another way to hint at something and expect the other person to understand what we are referencing would be to simply say 'Chocolate is his Kryptonite' rather than explaining what the person’s weakness is. 

We come across allusions a lot in our daily lives. You might hear people say 'My Mom has a Spartan workout routine', or 'Some people are calling me the Tiger Woods of miniature golf' or a very common allusion of ’You don’t have to be Albert Einstein to understand poetry'. I’ve observed that people mostly allude to famous personalities or well-known superheroes and their traits. It’s interesting to note that people allude differently based on the city they hail from. For instance, I’ve not seen anyone other than Mumbaikars allude to the punctual train schedule or the bus conductor yelling in Marathi to everyone.

A couple of my favourite allusions are "Don Quixote" and "Pandora’s Box", probably because I’ve studied these lessons in my fifth grade at school.

Lexicon Subtleties: Synecdoche

Blog Entry #87

Definition:

A synecdoche is a rhetoric trope in which a term for a part of something refers to the whole of something.

Pronunciation: 

"sih-nek-duh-kee"

Example:

• "New York won the game", meaning, the New York Yankees baseball team won the game.
• "Can I buy you a glass?"

Usages:

Often used to personify, such as "All hands on deck!"

Types:

• Macrocosm: saying 'I need a hand with this project’, when you really need the entire person’s help for it.
• Microcosm: saying "the world," when the speaker really means a certain country or part of the world.

Related term: Metonymy

Here, the relationship between two things is not part-to-whole or vice-versa, but rather one of being conceptually related. 

Example - "The pen is mightier than the sword" 

"Pen" stands for writing and"sword" refers to physical power

This is not a synecdoche because a pen is not a part of writing, and a sword is not part of physical power. Rather, each of them is related to a concept.

Lexicon Subtleties: Onomatopoeia

BLOG ENTRY # 86

Oink, Meow, Roar, Chirp

Chew, Chomp, Gurgle, Burp

Word resembling that of its sound

Usage in humour and comics abound! 

Onomatopoeia is not new to those of us who have spent our childhood reading Amar Chitra Katha comics and Tinkle digests. I bet those kids who’ve grown up reading superhero comics would be familiar with words like Thump, Whack, Wham and Bam! For me, I love this word not only because its meaning intrigued me but also because my English teacher in the 6th grade used to ask me to spell it in front of the class. I was the teacher’s pet and would love to keep spelling new words for her as and when she used them, such as endeavour, magnificent, accommodate, or onomatopoeia.

Another reason I like reading comics is that the writer gets creative to conjure up interesting onomatopoeic sounds, such as 'FWEET!' to describe a whistle sound, or 'Kerplunk!' for rocks that are falling into a lake. If you think about it, the nursery rhyme “Old MacDonald had a farm” is full of onomatopoeic animal sounds - moo, cluck, oink, quack. Interestingly, though certain sounds may be heard similarly by people speaking different languages across the world, they are often expressed differently in their own languages. For instance, the “snip” of a pair of scissors is katr-katr in Hindi, cri-cri in Italian, and su-su in Chinese.

Now that you know onomatopoeia is not unique to English, other languages have it too, why do you think it originated? Some linguists theorize that language itself evolved from humans trying to imitate sounds in the natural world. Fascinating, isn’t it?

Lexicon Subtleties: Syllogism

Blog entry # 85

What is syllogism?

Popularized by Aristotle, syllogism is a logic-based argument where a conclusion is deduced from the combination of a general statement and a specific statement. If you’ve studied logic in school or college, you’d be familiar with modus ponens: P implies Q and P is true, therefore Q must be true.

What are the types of syllogism?

• Conditional Syllogism: If A is true then B is true (If A then B).
• Categorical Syllogism: If A is in C then B is in C.
• Disjunctive Syllogism: If A is true, then B is false (A or B).

Why syllogism?

It is a tool in the hands of a speaker or a writer to persuade the audience. This is because their belief in a general truth may tempt them to believe in a specific conclusion drawn from those truths.

Examples of syllogism

General: "Every virtue is laudable; kindness is a virtue; therefore kindness is laudable."

Aristotle: “All men are mortal. Socrates is a man. Therefore, Socrates is mortal.”

In advertising: “With a name like Smucker’s, it has to be good.” —Smucker’s jams

René Descartes: "Cogito ergo sum" ("I think, therefore I am.")

William Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice
"Who chooseth me shall gain what many men desire."
Why, that’s the lady. All the world desires her.

George Orwell: Animal Farm
"All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others."

Syllogistic Fallacies

Dogs are animals; all dogs have four legs; hence all animals have four legs.

Lexicon Subtleties: Malapropism

Blog Entry #84

Have you heard of Mrs. Malaprop? If not, let me introduce you to this humorous aunt who gets mixed up with words in Richard Sheridan’s 1775 comedy, The Rivals. Her character is such that she often uses an incorrect word to express herself and that’s where the term ‘malapropism’ originated from. It refers to the intentional or accidental usage of another word that sounds similar to the right word. In French, ‘malapropos’ means “inappropriate”.

Mrs. Malaprop is known to use phrases like “The pineapple of politeness”, instead of “pinnacle of politeness”, and a humorous simile “She’s as headstrong as an allegory on the banks of the Nile”, where she’s used allegory instead of ‘alligator.’ 

Shakespeare too, is no stranger to using malapropism. In his plays, one of his characters says “indicted to dinner” in lieu of “invited to dinner”, while the other says “comprehended auspicious persons” in lieu of “apprehending suspicious persons,” notably Constable Dogberry. Thus emerged “Dogberryism” that became synonymous with malapropism. Though malapropism has been largely used to elicit humour, it is also used to deem intelligent characters as uneducated. If they mispronounce words or phrases, it instantly lowers their credibility.

“We will not anticipate the past, our retrospection will now be all to the future.”

-Mrs. Malaprop

Footnotes:

A few other places where writers have used malapropisms or the likes:

Sons of the Desert - Stan Laurel: “nervous shakedown” (correct: breakdown)

All in the Family - Archie Bunker: “house of ill refute” (correct: repute) and “off-the-docks Jews” (correct: orthodox)

Lexicon Subtleties: Alliteration

Blog Entry #83

Let’s start with an easy one. Most of us have been taught alliteration in schools, and if you’re from an ICSE school that studied the Golden Lyre poetry book for grades 9 and 10, you are all too familiar with this concept. This element is used to create harmony and unity within a poem.

Sometimes, alliteration works with just two words (which is like the minimum for the condition to even be satisfied!) such as 'treasure trove'. It need not match the spelling, as long as the sounds are phonetically the same, such as 'fish' and 'physics' or 'nest' and 'know'. It’s basically not the repetition of letters, but the repetition of sounds. 

Alliteration is also called head rhyme. TIL that similar to alliteration, which is concerned with the beginning of the words sounding the same, consonance is the repetition at the end of words, while assonance takes the middle ground. I came across these under the topic of rhymes. It might also interest you to know that there are several types of rhymes, other than the repetitive kind, such as the three mentioned above. See the footnotes below for more information.

I enjoy using alliterations, and that’s the theme I’ve chosen for the title of each of my posts on book summaries. You can check them out here.

That’s all for today! 

Stay safe.

Footnotes:

Types of rhymes:

Masculine or Singular end rhyme: vowels and succeeding consonant sounds are the same at the end and the emphasis is on the final stressed syllable

E.g. pan-tan, sing-thing

Feminine rhyme: the correspondence of sounds in two or more consecutive syllables

E.g. flower-power, lighting-fighting, habit-rabbit

Sight (or eye) rhyme: imperfect pattern that uses words similar in spelling rather than sound

E.g. dove-move, cry-envy, tone-gone

Slant (or para) rhyme: inexact or distant rhyme scheme where the sound matches but inconsistently

E.g. live-leaf, mill-mall

Homonym rhyme: word rhymes with its homonym 

E.g. blue-blew, bear-bare

Echo rhyme: same syllable endings utilized

E.g. appease-ease

Identity rhyme: whole word repeated

E.g. trip-trip

Repeat rhyme: whole line is repeated

A few other unique types are off-centered rhyme, mirror rhyme, sporadic rhyme, thorn rhyme, and last but not least: No-rhyme rhyme. This occurs when there are no words in the English language that match a particular word to rhyme it, such as purple and orange. The poet can still try to rhyme orange with door hinge or create neologisms like burple, the colour of a happy burp (LOL), to rhyme with purple.

Introduction to Blog Challenge #4: Lexicon Subtleties

Blog Entry #82

Welcome to the fourth blogging challenge! In this, I would like for us to explore the nuances of this epigrammatic yet expansive, plain yet metaphorical, serious yet poetic, and sesquipedalian yet succinct language. Over the course of this month, let’s delve into the joys and admire the heterogeneousness of all the elements this language provides, right from linguistics and phonetics to malapropisms and synecdoches to the etymology of words and idiosyncrasies of the Shakespearean dialect (I googled 'dialects of English' to see if I used the word correctly and I found this extensive list - Wow!).

I am currently reading a book on this very topic called 'Mother Tongue: English and How it Got that Way' by Bill Bryson. It is hilarious and informative, and the idea for this blog challenge dawned on me while reading the very first chapter itself, which talks about how funnily difficult this language can be for non-native speakers, while how unpronounceable English speakers may find other languages such as Welsh. It also enlists the terms present only in the English language but not in others (such as: there’s no word in Italian for the term 'wishful thinking', and the French have no word that differentiates a 'man' from a 'gentleman') and vice-versa (the Gaelic Scottish speakers have a word for the itchiness that overcomes their upper lip before taking a sip of whiskey - of course they do!).

Blog Challenge #4: September 2020 Challenge: Nuances of the English Language

Happy learning!