some-antics.com

One night, while sitting in a Starbucks in Garden Grove, CA with Mike Lawson (of theLiberalOC.com) and Celeste, Mike asked if you could use the verb “to videotape” in the context of recording something with a digital camcorder.  Celeste and I both agreed that even if the original meaning of “videotape” meant capture video on an actual tape, it can well be understood now as meaning capturing video in any manner.  Mike responded by making a neat observation that we do this with “CC:” as well.  And, perhaps this is an obvious observation, but it’s still neat to me that some words evolve in use even after their original exact meanings are outdated.  Another example of this is the German word Der Smoking, which means tuxedo in English.  I remember learning this word in German class and thinking, “How funny!  They think that tuxes look so good that they’re smokin’!”  But then I found out that actually, this comes from tuxedos having been referred to in older English as “smoking jackets”.  Yet another example from German: spießig, which means bourgeois in English.  Spießig comes from the noun Der Spieß (skewer, spike) – the things that they would place decapitated heads of the aristocracy on back in the day!

emma :: Feb.07.2007 :: misc :: 2 Comments »

Der Eifer[noun] + süchtig[adj.] (from suchen[verb]) = eifersüchtig[adj.] = jealousy

(Prompted by use of eifersüchtig in a comment at Aaron’s blog.)

emma :: Feb.07.2007 :: misc :: No Comments »

I’m working on the semantic combinatorics of relative clauses, with a particular focus on how this happens in Chinese.  (Following the less-popular NP-S view, as proposed in Bach & Cooper (1978), which has the relative clause combine with the entire noun phrase constituent, rather than the much more standard – at least standardly-taught – view that relative clauses combine with the noun to give another noun (or noun-ish thing depending on who you ask) that in turn then combines with the determiner to give the meaning of the NP.)  Eventually I think this will fit in nicely with some of the questions I explored at the end of last semester as I was wrapping up the work on exceptive constructions (and, yes, I’m still polishing my notes on that–but don’t you worry, I’ve been sleeping no more than 4 hours per night, so it’ll get done soon enough).

I know, still not really a provocative or contentful post, but at least more so than the many previous ones.

emma :: Feb.07.2007 :: misc, semantics, linguistics :: 2 Comments »

Today’s xkcd:

emma :: Feb.07.2007 :: misc, philosophy :: No Comments »