United States or Cuba ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
It is owing to this wonderful elasticity that Japan, when suddenly confronted by foreign arts and sciences, soon succeeded in building up for herself a vocabulary containing all the new terms, and containing them in self-explaining forms.
There was a perfect babel, and Lottie began to cry plaintively. Ermengarde answered them slowly as if she were half plunged out into what, at the moment, seemed the most important and self-explaining thing. "There WERE diamond mines," she said stoutly; "there WERE!" Open mouths and open eyes confronted her. "They were real," she hurried on. "It was all a mistake about them.
A tone of pride or petulance repressed, A selfish inclination firmly fought, A shadow of annoyance set at naught, A measure of disquietude suppressed, A peace in importunity possessed, A reconcilement generously sought, A purpose put aside, a banished thought, A word of self-explaining unexpressed, Trifles they seem, these petty soul-restraints; Yet he who proves them so must needs possess A constancy and courage grand and bold.
At first sight, his works look far harder to read than they really are, because the spelling has changed so much since Chaucer's day. This period is also specially important because it gave to England a new language of greater flexibility and power. The old inflections, genders, formative prefixes, and capability of making self-explaining compounds were for the most part lost.
Prefixes, Suffixes, and Self-explaining Compounds. The English tongue lost much of its power of using prefixes. A prefix joined to a well-known word changes its meaning and renders the coining of a new term unnecessary. The Anglo-Saxons, by the use of prefixes, formed ten compounds from their verb fl=owan, "to flow." Of these, only one survives in our "overflow."
From sittan, "to sit," thirteen compounds were thus formed, but every one has perished. A larger percentage of suffixes was retained, and we still have many words like "wholesome-ness," "child-hood," "sing-er." The power of forming self-explaining compounds was largely lost.
Word Of The Day