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#ielts #toefl #gre #english_vocabulary #english
Word of the Day
Word of the Day: centennial
This word has appeared in 125 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year. Can you use it in a sentence?
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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
knock over (1)
to hit somebody with a vehicle and injure or kill them
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Word of the Day
brow
Definition: (noun) The projecting upper edge of a steep place.
Synonyms: top, summit, peak, edge, tip, crown, verge, brink, rim, crest, brim.
Usage: The sun set behind the brow of the distant hills.
Discuss
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Word of the Day
Word of the Day: luminescent
This word has appeared in 13 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year. Can you use it in a sentence?
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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
go over (1)
to look carefully at something like a report, essay, document, etc. to check for mistakes or to make improvements
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Word of the Day
unabashed
Definition: (adjective) Not disconcerted or embarrassed; poised
Synonyms: unembarrassed.
Usage: And on this evening success stood at his back, patting him on the shoulder and telling him that he was making good, so that he could afford to laugh…and remain unabashed.
Discuss
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Language Log
Probably
From Technology Connections on Bluesky:
My favorite weird language thing is the near universal shortening of "probably" to "pry" in speech.
And people don't notice they're doing it! If I write "yeah that's pry not gonna work" that doesn't parse right, but if you say it out loud it absolutely does.
— Technology Connections (@techconnectify.bsky.social) Aug 10, 2024 at 2:52 PM
As a first pass at checking this, I took 100 instances at random from the 39,731 occurrences of "probably" in the NPR podcast corpus that I've referenced before (3,199,859 transcribed turns from 105,817 NPR podcasts, comprising more than 10,648 hours).
What did I find?
The (dictionary pronunciation of the) word "probably" /ˈpɹɒbəbli/ has two intervocalic onsets, /b/ and /bl/, that are not followed by tautosyllabic stresssed vowels. They are therefore are candidates for the general process of intervocalic non-pre-stress lenition that's typical of American English, the best-known version of which is the flapping and voicing of coronal stops.
This articulatory and acoustic weakening happens to various degrees in the /b/ and /bl/ of "probably", including to the point of apparent deletion.
Let's start with an example that happens to have no lenition, from "Online Calculator Estimates Breast Cancer Risk", Morning Edition 4/19/2007:
Professor KARLA KERLIKOWSKE (Medicine, University of California San Francisco): When you do these models, you want something that's relatively simple and easy to measure.
AUBREY: And lifestyle isn't. No one can remember precisely what they eat or drink. But there are ways Kerlikowske would like to revive the Gail model. She would toss out the question asking women how old they were when their first baby was born. Not because other factors such as breast-feeding confound it, but because research suggests it is not as important as breast density.
Prof. KERLIKOWSKE: We've appreciated the significance of breast density for probably 30 years.
AUBREY: The trouble is, there's never been an automated way to measure in a mammogram, the volume of epithelial cells and surrounding tissue that are typically involved in breast cancer.
Prof. KERLIKOWSKE: We think if we had a quantitative measure of breast density that might add to the specificity of the model and really improve prediction for the individual woman.
Here's the full phrase containing un-lenited "probably":
Your browser does not support the audio element. http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/ProbablyReduction0.png And here we zero in on the word "probably" itself:
Your browser does not support the audio element. http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/ProbablyReduction0X1.png As you can see, each of the two /b/ performances has a well-defined silent stop gap, followed by a clear release burst.
At the other end of the lenition continuum, here's an example where both onsets are lenited unto apparent deletion, from "Machines Slowly Mastering Art of Recognizing Faces", Talk of the Nation 1/22/2022:
CATHY (Caller): Well, hi, Ira. I love your show and you have a very interesting subject today as usual. My question for your guests is about the ability of the facial recognition technology to recognize faces as they change over the years, say a photo of an infant versus a teenager, adult or a senior.
FLATOW: Hmm. Jonathan, any comment on that?
Dr. PHILLIPS: So theres probably – there again, this is a very active research. But there's probably two different areas of aging with face recognition. The first, for example, is going from an infant as somebody grows through adulthood, because there are fixed ways of changing and there is substantial change. The other is for an adult from the age, say, from age 20 as they grow older in life.
And face recognition seems to be relatively stable up to about five years. But the challenge is then how do you [...]
Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
pass on
If you pass something on, you give it to another person after receiving it yourself.
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Word of the Day
audacity
Definition: (noun) Fearless daring; intrepidity.
Synonyms: temerity.
Usage: Skill, coolness, audacity, and cunning he possessed in a superior degree, and it must be a cunning whale to escape the stroke of his harpoon.
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Language Log
Primate preferences
Today's SMBC:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/SMBC_AppleGorillas.png
Mouseover title: "Unprompted, they will walk into a cafe and pretend they have important business to do."
The aftercomic:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/SMBC_AppleGorillasAfter.png
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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
knock around (2)
If you knock around with someone, you spend time together because you're friends.
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Word of the Day
centromere
Definition: (noun) The most condensed and constricted region of a chromosome, to which the spindle fiber is attached during mitosis.
Synonyms: kinetochore.
Usage: Down syndrome, a congenital disorder caused by the presence of an extra twenty-first chromosome, can result from aberrant functioning of the centromere.
Discuss
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Language Log
Griffins: the implications of art history for language spread
A Language Log reader asked:
I’m curious, do griffin motifs (creatures with four legs but beak) appear in China at a known date? do you think the imagery dispersed from the East, i.e., from Scythia and Asia westward to the Mediterranean or vice versa, from the West to the East?
Since we have often discussed language spreads of the Scythians and other nomadic groups of Central, Inner, and Southwest Asia, I believe it is a worthy topic to pursue the transmission of art motifs associated with these groups across the Eurasian expanse. Consequently, I asked Petya Andreeva, who is a specialist on this type of nomadic art, what her response to this question would be. She replied (note especially the last two sentences):
While no definitive trajectory has been agreed upon, I would say transmission certainly happened from the Iranian plateau – actually without a doubt. We see griffins on cylinder seals from Uruk, very early on, then we see them with great frequency at Ziwiye. It is worth noting that they also dominate the Urartian repertoire – I spent a lot of time at the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations in Ankara last summer, and noticed they are present in some reliefs and on smaller scale objects. Then they permeate the Luristan culture very noticeably, and it is from the Iranian realm that the Scythians – many later captured by Darius [king of the Achaemenid Empire]- might have transmitted the motif. No doubt the intrusion into Chinese material culture happened from Iran. We start to see some creatures resembling griffins in the Eastern Zhou when nomadic contact is quite tangible in China.
See Petya Andreeva, Fantastic Fauna from China to Crimea: Image-Making in Eurasian Nomadic Societies, 700 BCE-500 CE (Edinburgh: University Press, 2024). Selected readings
* "Idle thoughts upon the Ides of March: the feathered man" (3/11/23) — very important (not so idle) observations about griffins in the pre-Classical West by Adrienne Mayor
* "Bronze, iron, gold, silver" (1/29/21)
* "The dissemination of iron and the spread of languages" (11/5/20)
* "The Names of Metals in the Turkic, Indo-European, and Finno-Ugric Languages"
* "Indo-European religion, Scythian philosophy, and the date of Zoroaster: a linguistic quibble" (10/9/20) — with a bibliography of numerous relevant previous posts
* "Sword out of the stone" (8/9/08) — see especially this comment
* "Trefoils across Eurasia: the importance of archeology for historical linguistics, part 4" (10/11/20)
* "Headless men with face on chest" (9/28/20)
* "The geographical, archeological, genetic, and linguistic origins of Tocharian" (7/14/20)
* "The importance of archeology for historical linguistics, part 3" (6/3/20)
* "The importance of archeology for historical linguistics" (5/1/20) — with a list of more than a dozen previous posts related to archeology and language
* "The importance of archeology for historical linguistics, part 2" (5/11/20)
* "Archeological and linguistic evidence for the wheel in East Asia" (3/11/20)
* "Of armaments and Old Sinitic reconstructions, part 6" (12/23/17) — particularly pertinent, and also draws on art history as well as archeology
* "Of precious swords and Old Sinitic reconstructions, part 5" (3/28/16)
* "Horses, soma, riddles, magi, and animal style art in southern China" (11/11/19) — details how the akinakes and other attributes of Saka / Scythian culture penetrated to the far south of what is now China; excessive sacrifices of horses in the south and in Shandong
* "Planet power, plus dinosaurs and dragons: myth and reality of heaven and earth" (5/7/24)
* "Winged lions through time and space" (5/4/24)
* "What is the difference between a dragon and a /lʊŋ³⁵/?" (2/10/24)
* "The role of long-distance communication in[...]
Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
memo
a written message or note, usually in business
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Idiom of the Day
last-minute
(used before a noun) Done at the very last possible moment or opportunity. Watch the video
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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
fib
a small, harmless lie (n.) | to tell a small, harmless lie (v.)
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Idiom of the Day
the last thing (one) wants
Something which one absolutely does not want or has no use for. Watch the video
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Language Log
Tocharian in South Asian languages?
In a comment to this post, "Yuezhi archeology without concern for Tocharian language" (8/4/24), Gokul Madhavan raised an interesting question:
I’m very curious to know if there are any reliable and up-to-date sources for Tocharian loanwords into Sanskrit or other Indo-Aryan languages.
Given both the use of Gāndhārī Prakrit across the region and the presence of the Kuṣāṇa empire in India, I would expect to find at least some Tocharian-origin names or words that got absorbed into Indo-Aryan languages.
I agree with Gokul that this is an interesting question, and it seems likely that there ought to be traces of Tocharian in South Asia. Aside from the Kuṣāṇa (c.30-c. 375 AD) vectors in India mentioned by Gokul, even afterward there was considerable coming and going between India and Tocharia during the heyday of the latter (2nd-7th cc.). For example, the famous Indian monk-translator, Kumārajīva कुमारजीव (344-413 AD; Jiūmóluóshí 鳩摩羅什), was married to a princess of Kucha, when the latter was the center of Tocharian B speakers. Consequently, for all such reasons, there is likely to be a significant number of Tocharian names and terms in Indo-Aryan languages, but I do not know of a systematic study or collection of such words. Perhaps this post will elicit helpful references from Language Log readers.
Selected readings
* "Yuezhi archeology without concern for Tocharian language" (8/4/24)
* "Rethinking the Yuezhi?" (8/5/24)
* "The origins and affinities of Tocharian" (8/20/23) — with very long, classified bibliography
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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
sack (1)
to fire someone from a job, to dismiss
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Idiom of the Day
(one's) final resting place
The location where one's body is interred after death. Watch the video
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model or account for people change from, say, 20 – from 10 to 20 years or beyond?
The full "probably" phrase:
Your browser does not support the audio element. http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/ProbablyReduction1.png And zeroing in on the pronunciation of "probably", which shows the type of reduction described in the Bluesky link:
Your browser does not support the audio element. http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/ProbablyReduction1X1.png The speaker there is Jonathon Phillips, electrical engineer, program manager, Multiple Biometric Grand Challenge, National Institute of Standards and Technology, Washington, DC. This is not a speech error — he's an articulate native speaker of American English, speaking in a fairly formal style, though rapidly.
In my modest 100-phrase "probably" sample, there were many other lenition patterns. Sometimes one or both of the /b/s lost their stop closure and turned into the kind of voiced approximant that phoneticians sometimes call "frictionless fricatives". Sometimes one of them was lenited unto apparently deletion while the other one remained stop-like, with results the might be spelled "probly" or "probby". This sample did not validate the claim that the full lenition-to-one-phonetic-syllable is "near universal", and the result is not the generally the same as the pronunciation of the word "pry", though the patterns probably overlap. But "pry"-like pronunciations of "probably" certainly happen.
I don't have time this morning to survey the full range of "probably" variants and to estimate their relative frequency in the NPR sample — or to look at samples from less formal sources. Those are tasks for another time, maybe — though because the variant performances of "probably" reflect gradient articulatory and acoustic changes, it's not easy to assign them to qualitatively distinct categories, or even decide exactly what to measure. If I were forced to define a set of "probably"-pronunciation categories, there would need to be a dozen or so of them. A qualitative and quantitative analysis of these patterns of variation, and the factors that correlate with them, would be a good phonetics-course term project!
Some earlier posts on the issue of phonetic lenition in English:
"Weak t", 4/17/2017
"On beyond the (International Phonetic) Alphabet", 4/19/2018
"Farther on beyond the IPA", 1/18/2020
"First novels", 3/13/2022
"Pronunciation evolution", 4/15/2022
"More post-IPA astronauts", 4/16/2022
"Political flapping and voicing", 5/29/2022
"Ron's Princibles", 8/22/2023
"'There's no T in Scranton'", 3/10/2024
"Annals of intervocalic coronal reduction", 7/26/2024
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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
ill
good, excellent
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Idiom of the Day
be (one's) last resort
To be the only remaining thing or person that may help one or be of any use after all other options have been exhausted. Watch the video
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Language Log
A new Trump speaking style?
Like some others, I have an (empirically unsupported) impression that features of Donald Trump's speaking style have changed recently. I first noticed this in listening to his 8/8/2024 press conference in Mar-a-lago — which seems rather different from e.g. his 7/21/2015 rally speech in Sun City., or the many other samples in "Past posts on Donald Trump's rhetoric", 1/5/2024.
At some point before long, I'll provide some numbers to support or undermine this impression. Meanwhile, the comments section is open for your reactions.
Here's a short sample from the 8/8/2024 press conference:
Your browser does not support the audio element.
Most dangerous period of time I've ever seen for our country.
With that being said uh
we have somebody that
hasn't received one vote for
president and she's running
and that's fine with me.
But we were given
Joe Biden
and now we're given
somebody else
and I think frankly I'd rather be running against the somebody else.
But that was their choice, they decided to do that because uh
Kamala's record is horrible.
She's a radical left
person at a level that nobody's seen.
She picked a radical left
uh
man
that is uh-
he's got things done that he's-
he has positions that are just not- it's not even possible to believe
that they exist.
uh
he's going for things that
that nobody's ever
even heard of.
Heavy into the transgender world, heavy into lots of different worlds
having to do with safety
he doesn't want to have
borders he doesn't want to have walls he doesn't want to have any form of safety for our country.
He doesn't mind people coming in from prisons and
neither does she, I guess, because she's not-
she couldn't care less she's the border czar.
By the way, she was the border czar
a hundred percent
and all of a sudden for the last few weeks she's not the border czar any more,
like nobody ever said it.
And I just hope that the uh
media becomes
more diligent, more honest,
frankly, because if they're not going to be honest it's going to be much tougher to bring our
country back.
We have a very very sick country right now.
From "Past posts on Donald Trump's rhetoric", 1/5/2024:
[O]ver the past 8 years, many LLOG posts have analyzed several aspects of his rhetorical style, both the text and the delivery, which are strikingly different from other contemporary American politicians and public figures. Specifically, these posts have described his
* Repetition
* Informality
* Fluency
* Melody
This has nothing to do with the political and cultural orientation of his speeches — the same techniques could in principle be applied to the promotion of internationalism rather than nationalism, for example. No doubt the content is a large part of the reason for his appeal, but the rhetorical affinity with professional wrestling is probably the rest of it, as discussed in "The art of the promo", 10/31/2020.
The recent recordings certainly continue to be repetitive, but they seem less fluent to me.
A strange side note — YouTube's automated transcription for the 8/8/2024 press conference renders "border czar" as "Bazar":
Your browser does not support the audio element.
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/Bazar.png
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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
junk
a dangerous drug, especially an opiate like heroin or morphine
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Idiom of the Day
the last of the lot
The last or final person(s) or thing(s) in a given group or list. Watch the video
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human history" (1/26/23)
* C. Scott Littleton, "Were Some of the Xinjiang Mummies 'Epi-Scythians'? An Excursus in Trans-Eurasian Folklore and Mythology." In Victor H. Mair, The Bronze Age and Early Iron Age Peoples of Eastern Central Asia. Washington D.C. and Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Man and the University of Pennsylvania Museum, 1998. Vol. 2, pp. 746-766.
* C. Scott Littleton and Linda A. Malcor, From Scythia to Camelot: A Radical Reassessment of the Legends of King Arthur, the Knights of the Round Table, and the Holy Grail. New York and London: Garland, 1994; rev. pb. 2000. In the British journal, Religion, 28.3 (July, 1998), 294-300, I [VHM] wrote a review in which I pointed out that the celebrated motif of a mighty arm rising up out of the water holding aloft the hero's sword can also be found in a medieval Chinese tale from Dunhuang. That review is available electronically from ScienceDirect, if your library subscribes to it. Otherwise, I think this version on the Web is a fairly faithful copy.
* "Faces of ‘Siberian Tutankhamun’ and his ‘Queen’ buried 2,600 years ago reconstructed by science", by Olga Gertcyk and Svetlana Skarbo, The Siberian Times (1/8/21). Buried with vast amounts of gold and ornate metalwork. "The Arzhan-2 burial of the Scythian ‘King’ and the ‘Queen’, found in 1997 and studied between 2001-2003 by Russian-German expedition is one of the most extraordinary discoveries ever made by archeologists."
* J. P. Mallory, The Problem of Tocharian Origins: An Archaeological Perspective (Sino-Platonic Papers, 259 [Nov. 2015]; free pdf, 63 pp.)
* Victor H. Mair. "The Horse in Late Prehistoric China: Wresting Culture and Control from the 'Barbarians'." In Marsha Levine, Colin Renfrew and Katie Boyle, ed., Prehistoric steppe adaptation and the horse. McDonald Institute Monographs. Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 2004. Pp. 163-187.
* Barry Cunliffe. By Steppe, Desert, and Ocean: The Birth of Eurasia. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.
* Andrew Sherratt, "The Trans-Eurasian Exchange: The Prehistory of Chinese Relations with the West". In Victor H. Mair, ed., Contact and Exchange in the Ancient World. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2006. Pp. 30-61. Especially important for the study of the spread of bronze technology from west to east.
* Hajni Elias, "The Southwest Silk Road: artistic exchange and transmission in early China", published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 March 2024; Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, First View, pp. 1 – 26. This article has impressed me to such a degree that I have rechristened the road she wrote about as "The Southwest Bronze Road".
[Thanks to Adrienne Mayor]
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Word of the Day
Word of the Day: cuneiform
This word has appeared in six articles on NYTimes.com in the past year. Can you use it in a sentence?
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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
fix up (1)
to repair something or to improve the condition of something, especially something old or second-hand
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Word of the Day
farsighted
Definition: (adjective) Planning prudently for the future.
Synonyms: foresighted, long, longsighted, prospicient.
Usage: The presidential candidate spoke about his farsighted policies that would stabilize the economy for years to come.
Discuss
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