May i distrouble you?
Tina, our old friend from Sichuan (also little Ling Ling’s aunt) , was wondering why some people say “Sorry for troubling you” and some other people say “Sorry for disturbing you”. She decided to combine the word and made a new word - distrouble.
People are going to come up with creative new words and our spellcheck tools will have to learn more and more words.
UPDATE: Such words are called Portmanteau words. Just learnt about it on Wikipedia.
Another of our friend from Sichuan, when we asked her “Do you have any ice-cream?”, she replied “We have no that.” I like that sentence structure and I often use it. If someone asks me “Do you have travel books?”, I will reply “We have many that”.
MSNBC is running a story titled Not the Queen’s English that says that currently there are three times more non-native speakers of English compared to the native speakers. And that is going to change the way people communicate. Get ready for new words, pronounciations and grammers.
With native speakers a shrinking minority of the world’s Anglophones, there’s a growing sense that students should stop trying to emulate Brighton or Boston English, and embrace their own local versions. Researchers are starting to study non-native speakers’ “mistakes”—”She look very sad,” for example—as structured grammars. In a generation’s time, teachers might no longer be correcting students for saying “a book who” or “a person which.” Linguist Jennifer Jenkins, an expert in world Englishes at King’s College London, asks why some Asians, who have trouble pronouncing the “th” sound, should spend hours trying to say “thing” instead of “sing” or “ting.” International pilots, she points out, already pronounce the word “three” as “tree” in radio dispatches, since “tree” is more widely comprehensible
March 6th, 2005 at 1:09 pm
That is very interesting. We also have some literal translations that are used very frequently for teasing each other most of the time. For example: Good good study, day day up (好好å¦ä¹ , 天天å‘上) Or Give you some color see see (ç»™ä½ ä¸€ç‚¹é¢œè‰²çœ‹çœ‹)…Those phrases apparently have strong culture context.:-)
March 12th, 2005 at 4:25 pm
My favorite non-word is “frutile’ -a combination two contradictory words: futile (Having no useful result; Trifling and frivolous) and fruitful (Producing results; profitable). I use it to describe events that are pleasureable but have no productive results (i.e, an Sunday afternoon at a pub). I’m also keen on underwhelmed.