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Inkhorn Term
An inkhorn term is a loanword, or a word coined from existing roots, which is deemed to be unnecessary or overly pretentious. Etymology An inkhorn is an inkwell made of horn. It was an important item for many scholars, which soon became symbolic of writers in general. Later, it became a byword for fussy or pedantic writers. The phrase "inkhorn term" is found as early as 1553. Adoption Controversy over inkhorn terms was rife from the mid-16th to the mid-17th century, during the transition from Middle English to Modern English, when English competed with Latin as the main language of science and learning in England, having just displaced French. Many words, often self-consciously borrowed from classical literature, were deemed useless by critics who argued that the understanding of these redundant borrowings depends on knowledge of classical languages. Some borrowings filled a technical or scientific semantic gap, but others coexisted with Germanic words, often overtaking ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Inkhorn And Ivory Case, 9th-13th C, Exh
An inkhorn term is a loanword, or a word coined from existing roots, which is deemed to be unnecessary or overly pretentious. Etymology An inkhorn is an inkwell made of horn. It was an important item for many scholars, which soon became symbolic of writers in general. Later, it became a byword for fussy or pedantic writers. The phrase "inkhorn term" is found as early as 1553. Adoption Controversy over inkhorn terms was rife from the mid-16th to the mid-17th century, during the transition from Middle English to Modern English, when English competed with Latin as the main language of science and learning in England, having just displaced French. Many words, often self-consciously borrowed from classical literature, were deemed useless by critics who argued that the understanding of these redundant borrowings depends on knowledge of classical languages. Some borrowings filled a technical or scientific semantic gap, but others coexisted with Germanic words, often overtaking ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Charles Dickens
Charles John Huffam Dickens (; 7 February 1812 – 9 June 1870) was an English writer and social critic. He created some of the world's best-known fictional characters and is regarded by many as the greatest novelist of the Victorian era.. His works enjoyed unprecedented popularity during his lifetime and, by the 20th century, critics and scholars had recognised him as a literary genius. His novels and short stories are widely read today. Born in Portsmouth, Dickens left school at the age of 12 to work in a boot-blacking factory when his father was incarcerated in a debtors' prison. After three years he returned to school, before he began his literary career as a journalist. Dickens edited a weekly journal for 20 years, wrote 15 novels, five novellas, hundreds of short stories and non-fiction articles, lectured and performed readings extensively, was an indefatigable letter writer, and campaigned vigorously for children's rights, for education, and for other social ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Uncleftish Beholding
"Uncleftish Beholding" (1989) is a short text by Poul Anderson, included in his anthology "All One Universe". It is designed to illustrate what English might look like without its large number of loanwords from languages such as French, Greek, and Latin, especially with regard to the proportion of scientific words with origins in those languages. Written as a demonstration of linguistic purism in English, the work explains atomic theory using Germanic words almost exclusively and coining new words when necessary; many of these new words have cognates in modern German, an important scientific language in its own right. The title phrase ''uncleftish beholding'' calques "atomic theory." To illustrate, the text begins: It goes on to define ''firststuffs'' (chemical elements), such as ''waterstuff'' (hydrogen), ''sourstuff'' (oxygen), and ''ymirstuff'' (uranium), as well as ''bulkbits'' (molecules), ''bindings'' ( compounds), and several other terms important to ''uncleftish worl ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Prestige (sociolinguistics)
In sociolinguistics, prestige is the level of regard normally accorded a specific language or dialect within a speech community, relative to other languages or dialects. Prestige varieties are language or dialect families which are generally considered by a society to be the most "correct" or otherwise superior. In many cases, they are the standard form of the language, though there are exceptions, particularly in situations of covert prestige (where a non-standard dialect is highly valued). In addition to dialects and languages, prestige is also applied to smaller linguistic features, such as the pronunciation or usage of words or grammatical constructs, which may not be distinctive enough to constitute a separate dialect. The concept of prestige provides one explanation for the phenomenon of variation in form among speakers of a language or languages. The presence of prestige dialects is a result of the relationship between the prestige of a group of people and the language th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
