Cedric's Journal

2020-01-17 22:38:30 Why Is English The Way We Have It Today?

English is the largest language by number of speakers. It has developed over the course of more than 1,400 years and has a rich interesting history.
The variation among the accents and dialects of English used in different countries and regions can sometimes lead to confusion or even mutual unintelligibility between English speakers.

It’s useful to those who study English to know its' history. It can help to shed light upon its' quirks of spelling and pronunciation and understand why English is the way we have it today.

Take a look at these 25 maps and charts presented by Vox that explain how English got started and how it evolved.

#mustread Open / Comment

2020-01-15 23:55:32 ​​Accent Reduction

Why is English hard to pronounce? One of the reasons is that pronunciation often is not taught. However it is not just knowledge you need to sound correct, it requires skill and that means you have to practice a lot!

English is stress-timed language (as well as Ukrainian and Russian) what means that to sound more naturally you have to pay attention to the timing of speech.

Timing depends on the number of stress words. But what are these words? We call them content words i.e. words that have meaning (nouns, main verbs, adjectives, and adverbs). The rest of the words are called function words (auxiliary verbs, pronouns, articles, and prepositions) and they are unstressed in the sentence.

Let’s take a look at these sentences:
Cows eat the grass. (Cows eat th’grass)
Cows are eating the grass. (Cows r’eating th’grass)
Cows have been eating the grass. (Cows evbn’eating th’grass)

Each of these sentence has the same amount of content words (not the italicised ones). It means they are given more consideration while pronouncing. The other syllables are spoken more rapidly, often under-enunciated. Even though these sentences have different length they are all pronounced with the same timing.

To check the timing just clap three times and on each clap pronounce a content word while connecting function words to it.

#phonetics Open / Comment

2020-01-13 17:56:03 ​​Epenthesis

You study a true English pronunciation (as you think) and then one day you turn on your favorite TV show to enjoy some English and you no longer concentrate on watching but listening to the distortion of that pronunciation.

Specifically, I am referring here to the pronunciation of the word “interesting”. Why do some people pronounce it as "in-te-rE-sting" with the stress on the third syllable but not "In-tre-sting" with the stress on the first one? Here are other examples: some people say not "diff-rent", but "diff-er-ent", not "ev-ree", not "ev-er-ee".

In linguistics, this phenomenon is called epenthesis, which is when we add more sounds to a word. Epenthesis is sometimes used for a humorous or childlike effect. For example, "pic-a-nic basket" for "picnic basket." Another example is found in the chants of England football fans in which England is usually rendered as [ˈɪŋɡələnd] or the pronunciation of "athlete" as "ath-e-lete".

It doesn't mean that people who use epenthesis are not smart. As for why they do it, they're probably speaking another variety of English, or they're a different age or different background. Some people have little quirks in their enunciations from childhood that they never dropped.

#phonetics Open / Comment

2020-01-11 15:54:17 ​​How Come Or Why?

Basically, “How come” is another way of asking "Why", but it is considered to be more informal than “Why.” The Oxford English Dictionary labels it as colloquial, and you’re more likely to see it on Twitter than in a corporate annual report.

Where we get the phrase “How come”?

Well, ”how come" is believed to be short for "how did it come about that," "how is it that," or "how comes it.” As we know, people love to shorten things. “Pantaloons” became “pants” and “how comes it that” became “how come.”

Usage of the phrase “How come”.

“How come” differs from “Why” in the word order of the question:
How come you didn’t leave?
Why didn’t you leave? Open / Comment

2020-01-06 17:45:53 Struggling To Learn New Words?

Well, everybody does. If it was that simple, we wouldn’t devote so much time memorizing them.

But how can you boost this process rationally? Learn root words!

The root word is the form of a word after all affixes are removed. The root of the word "vocabulary", for example, is ​“voc”, a Latin root meaning "word" or "name." This root also appears in such words as "advocacy", "convocation", "evocative", "vocal", and "vowel".

Luckily, the English language, being influenced by Greek and Latin, has a huge amount of such roots.

The Greek root “anti” meaning “against” forms words as:
antibacterial - intended to kill bacteria
antithesis - the exact opposite

Or the Latin root “ab” meaning “to move away”:
abstract - to remove something from somewhere
abstain - to decide not to do something

Click on the link to see a full list of root words and enjoy studying!

#vocabulary Open / Comment

2020-01-04 23:27:30 Present Perfect For Future

When we study Present Perfect Tense at school or by ourselves, we usually avoid its aspect of being used for the future. It’s unhelpful to think of the Present Perfect construction solely in terms of past time as it may influence your understanding of a context of a sentence or a text it is used in.

It is not common for our language to use the past for the future, therefore it may sound weird to you and you will avoid using it while speaking, but knowing it passively will be helpful for you.

When and how to use it?

With the time clauses introduced by after, when, until, as soon as, once, by the time present perfect refers to future events:

We'll begin when everyone has arrived.
I'll keep looking until I have found my book.

#grammar

Guys, thank you for reading this channel and for your positive feedback. As some of you asked, I created a group chat for us to discuss posts and share ideas. Please, feel free to join! Open / Comment

2020-01-02 16:20:30 Palindrome

Rise to vote sir, level, madam, racecar.

Now read these words backward. Interesting, huh? This phenomenon is called palindrome - word, sentence, verse, or even number that reads the same backward or forward. It derives from Greek roots that literally mean “running back”

Some well-known English palindromes are: ”A man, a plan, a canal – Panama", "Madam, I'm Adam" and "Never odd or even".

Semordnilap (palindromes spelled backward) - is a name coined for words that spell a different word in reverse. The word was coined by Martin Gardner in his notes to C.C. Bombaugh's book Oddities and Curiosities of Words and Literature (I advise you to read) in 1961. An example of this is the word stressed, which is desserts spelled backward. In fiction, many characters have names deliberately made to be semordnilaps of other names or words, such as Alucard (a semordnilap of "Dracula").

Some names are palindromes, such as the given names Hannah, Ava, Anna, Eve, Bob and Otto, or the surnames Harrah, Renner, SalasI, and Nenonen. Open / Comment