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Shm-reduplication
Shm-reduplication is a form of reduplication originating in Yiddish in which the original word or its first syllable (the base) is repeated with the copy (the reduplicant) beginning with shm- (sometimes schm-), pronounced . The construction is generally used to indicate irony, sarcasm, derision, skepticism, or lack of interest with respect to comments about the discussed object. In general, the new combination is used as an interjection. Examples Using a noun Shm-reduplication is often used with a noun, as a response to a previously-made statement to express the viewer's doubts (eg. "He's just a baby!", ", he's five years old!") or disinterest ("What a sale!", "Sale, , there's nothing I would want.") Used as an adjective When used as an adjective, the reduplicated combination can belong to the same syntactical category as the original. It can be used as an intensifier, as in "Whenever we go to a restaurant, we feel like James Bond." - the speaker is implying that the restauran ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Reduplication
In linguistics, reduplication is a morphological process in which the root or stem of a word (or part of it) or even the whole word is repeated exactly or with a slight change. The classic observation on the semantics of reduplication is Edward Sapir's: "generally employed, with self-evident symbolism, to indicate such concepts as distribution, plurality, repetition, customary activity, increase of size, added intensity, continuance." Reduplication is used in inflections to convey a grammatical function, such as plurality, intensification, etc., and in lexical derivation to create new words. It is often used when a speaker adopts a tone more "expressive" or figurative than ordinary speech and is also often, but not exclusively, iconic in meaning. Reduplication is found in a wide range of languages and language groups, though its level of linguistic productivity varies. Reduplication is found in a wide variety of languages, as exemplified below. Examples of it can be found at ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Reduplication
In linguistics, reduplication is a morphological process in which the root or stem of a word (or part of it) or even the whole word is repeated exactly or with a slight change. The classic observation on the semantics of reduplication is Edward Sapir's: "generally employed, with self-evident symbolism, to indicate such concepts as distribution, plurality, repetition, customary activity, increase of size, added intensity, continuance." Reduplication is used in inflections to convey a grammatical function, such as plurality, intensification, etc., and in lexical derivation to create new words. It is often used when a speaker adopts a tone more "expressive" or figurative than ordinary speech and is also often, but not exclusively, iconic in meaning. Reduplication is found in a wide range of languages and language groups, though its level of linguistic productivity varies. Reduplication is found in a wide variety of languages, as exemplified below. Examples of it can be found at ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Rainforest Shmainforest
"Rainforest Shmainforest" is the third season premiere of Comedy Central's animated series '' South Park''. It originally aired on April 7, 1999 and is the 32nd episode overall. This episode features Jennifer Aniston providing the voice for Miss Stevens. The episode criticizes the American Movement to Save the Rain Forest and mocks Costa Rica. The episode's title includes a shm-reduplication. This episode was inspired by Trey Parker's personal intense distaste towards rainforests and Costa Rica. Parker explains on the DVD commentary that, at the suggestion of Flea, Parker and his girlfriend went to Costa Rica and hated the country, and that everything Cartman says about the rainforests and Costa Rica during the episode is how he (Parker) personally feels. The episode is also filled with famous environmentalist clichés, such as, " We must take only photos and leave only footprints", "It's more afraid of us than we are of it", and "We have to respect mother nature and she will r ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Turkic Languages
The Turkic languages are a language family of over 35 documented languages, spoken by the Turkic peoples of Eurasia from Eastern Europe and Southern Europe to Central Asia, East Asia, North Asia (Siberia), and Western Asia. The Turkic languages originated in a region of East Asia spanning from Mongolia to Northwest China, where Proto-Turkic is thought to have been spoken, from where they expanded to Central Asia and farther west during the first millennium. They are characterized as a dialect continuum. Turkic languages are spoken by some 200 million people. The Turkic language with the greatest number of speakers is Turkish language, Turkish, spoken mainly in Anatolia and the Balkans; its native speakers account for about 38% of all Turkic speakers. Characteristic features such as vowel harmony, agglutination, subject-object-verb order, and lack of grammatical gender, are almost universal within the Turkic family. There is a high degree of mutual intelligibility, upon mode ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Nilsson Schmilsson
''Nilsson Schmilsson'' is the seventh studio album by American singer Harry Nilsson, released by RCA Records in November 1971. It was Nilsson's most commercially successful work, producing three of his best-known songs. Among these was the number 1 hit " Without You", written by Pete Ham and Tom Evans of the group Badfinger. The album was the first of two Nilsson albums recorded in London and produced by Richard Perry. "Jump into the Fire" and "Coconut", both written by Nilsson, also became hits. The album performed well at the 1973 Grammy Awards, earning a nomination for Album of the Year, while "Without You" won the Grammy for Best Male Pop Vocal Performance. In 2006, ''Nilsson Schmilsson'' was ranked number 84 on Pitchfork's "Top 100 Albums of the 1970s". The album was ranked #281 in the 2020 revision of ''Rolling Stone'''s 500 Greatest Albums of All Time list. Track listing Personnel According to the 1971 LP credits: * Harry Nilsson – vocals; piano on 1, 5, 8, 10; ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Spoonerism
A spoonerism is an occurrence in speech in which corresponding consonants, vowels, or morphemes are switched (see metathesis) between two words in a phrase. These are named after the Oxford don and ordained minister William Archibald Spooner, who reputedly did this. They were already renowned by the author François Rabelais in the 16th century, and called . In his novel ''Pantagruel'', he wrote ("insane woman at mass, woman with flabby buttocks"). An example is saying "The Lord is a shoving leopard" instead of "The Lord is a loving shepherd" or "runny babbit" instead of "bunny rabbit." While spoonerisms are commonly heard as slips of the tongue, they can also be used intentionally as a play on words. Etymology Spoonerisms are named after the Reverend William Archibald Spooner (1844–1930), Warden from 1903 to 1924 of New College, Oxford, who was notoriously prone to this mistake. The Oxford English Dictionary records the word as early as 1900. The term ''spoonerism'' w ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Pig Latin
Pig Latin is a language game or argot in which words in English are altered, usually by adding a fabricated suffix or by moving the onset or initial consonant or consonant cluster of a word to the end of the word and adding a vocalic syllable to create such a suffix. For example, Wikipedia would become Ikipediaway (taking the 'W' and 'ay' to create a suffix). The objective is to conceal the words from others not familiar with the rules. The reference to Latin is a deliberate misnomer; Pig Latin is simply a form of argot or jargon unrelated to Latin, and the name is used for its English connotations as a strange and foreign-sounding language. It is most often used by young children as a fun way to confuse people unfamiliar with Pig Latin. Origins and history Early mentions of pig Latin or hog Latin describe what we would today call dog Latin, a type of parody Latin. Examples of this predate even Shakespeare, whose 1598 play, ''Love's Labour's Lost'', includes a reference to do ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Redundancy (linguistics)
In linguistics, redundancy refers to information that is expressed more than once. Examples of redundancies include multiple agreement features in morphology, multiple features distinguishing phonemes in phonology, or the use of multiple words to express a single idea in rhetoric. Grammar Redundancy may occur at any level of grammar. Because of agreement – a requirement in many languages that the form of different words in a phrase or clause correspond with one another – the same semantic information may be expressed several times. In the Spanish phrase ''los árboles verdes'' ("the green trees"), for example, the article ''los'', the noun ''árboles'', and the adjective ''verdes'' are all inflected to show that the phrase is plural. An English example would be: ''that man is a soldier'' versus ''those men are soldiers.'' In phonology, a minimal pair is a pair of words or phrases that differs by only one phoneme, the smallest distinctive unit of the sound system. Even so, p ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Joe Shmoe
Joe Shmoe (also spelled Joe Schmoe and Joe Schmo), meaning "Joe Anybody", or no one in particular, is a commonly used fictional name in American English. Adding a "Shm" to the beginning of a word is meant to diminish, negate, or dismiss an argument (for instance, "Rain, shmain, we've got a game to play"). It can also indicate that the speaker is being ironic or sarcastic. This process was adapted in English from the use of the "schm" prefix in Yiddish to dismiss something; as in, "Fancy, schmancy" (thus denying the claim that something is fancy). While "schmo" ("schmoo", "schmoe") is thought by some linguists to be a clipping of Yiddish שמוק "schmuck", that derivation is disputed. See also * Average Joe *Joe Bloggs *John Doe * John Q. Public *Man on the street *Placeholder name Placeholder names are words that can refer to things or people whose names do not exist, are tip of the tongue, temporarily forgotten, are not relevant to the salient point at hand, are to avoid ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Inherently Funny Word
An inherently funny word is a word that is humorous without context, often more for its phonetic structure than for its meaning. Vaudeville tradition holds that words with the letter ''k'' are funny. A 2015 study at the University of Alberta suggested that the humor of certain nonsense words can be explained by whether they seem rude, and by the property of entropy; the improbability of certain letters being used together in a word. The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer posited that humor is a product of one's expectations being violated. Funny words in English Vaudeville words can be found in Neil Simon's 1972 play ''The Sunshine Boys'', in which an aging comedian gives a lesson to his nephew on comedy, saying that words with ''k'' sounds are funny: Richard Wiseman, a professor of the public understanding of psychology at the University of Hertfordshire, conducted a small experiment to determine whether words with a ''k'' sound were actually considered funnier than others for ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Geometric Sequence
In mathematics, a geometric progression, also known as a geometric sequence, is a sequence of non-zero numbers where each term after the first is found by multiplying the previous one by a fixed, non-zero number called the ''common ratio''. For example, the sequence 2, 6, 18, 54, ... is a geometric progression with common ratio 3. Similarly 10, 5, 2.5, 1.25, ... is a geometric sequence with common ratio 1/2. Examples of a geometric sequence are powers ''r''''k'' of a fixed non-zero number ''r'', such as 2''k'' and 3''k''. The general form of a geometric sequence is :a,\ ar,\ ar^2,\ ar^3,\ ar^4,\ \ldots where ''r'' ≠ 0 is the common ratio and ''a'' ≠ 0 is a scale factor, equal to the sequence's start value. The sum of a geometric progression terms is called a ''geometric series''. Elementary properties The ''n''-th term of a geometric sequence with initial value ''a'' = ''a''1 and common ratio ''r'' is given by :a_n = a\,r^, and in general :a_n = a_m\,r^. Such a geometric ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Context-free Grammar
In formal language theory, a context-free grammar (CFG) is a formal grammar whose production rules are of the form :A\ \to\ \alpha with A a ''single'' nonterminal symbol, and \alpha a string of terminals and/or nonterminals (\alpha can be empty). A formal grammar is "context-free" if its production rules can be applied regardless of the context of a nonterminal. No matter which symbols surround it, the single nonterminal on the left hand side can always be replaced by the right hand side. This is what distinguishes it from a context-sensitive grammar. A formal grammar is essentially a set of production rules that describe all possible strings in a given formal language. Production rules are simple replacements. For example, the first rule in the picture, :\langle\text\rangle \to \langle\text\rangle = \langle\text\rangle ; replaces \langle\text\rangle with \langle\text\rangle = \langle\text\rangle ;. There can be multiple replacement rules for a given nonterminal symbol. The ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
