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#ielts #toefl #gre #english_vocabulary #english
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Had get the self promo in somehow #DebateNight #CampaignVideo
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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
dweeb
a studious but socially inept person
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Idiom of the Day
let the good times roll
To have as much fun or live life as richly as possible. (Often said as an imperative.) Watch the video
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Word of the Day
duster
Definition: (noun) A loose coverall (coat or frock) reaching down to the ankles.
Synonyms: gaberdine, smock.
Usage: In the office he wore also a linen duster with huge pockets into which he continually stuffed scraps of paper.
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The Craziest Thing Nimay Ndolo Saw At The DNC
Nimay sits down with Funny or Die to talk about the crazy antics of the Democratic National Convention, how to debate hot button topics, and who she would kiss/marry/kill. #CreatorsForKamala #HarrisWalz2024
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Language Log
"Word salad"
According to Wikipedia, word salad
is a "confused or unintelligible mixture of seemingly random words and phrases", most often used to describe a symptom of a neurological or mental disorder. The name schizophasia is used in particular to describe the confused language that may be evident in schizophrenia. The words may or may not be grammatically correct, but they are semantically confused to the point that the listener cannot extract any meaning from them. The term is often used in psychiatry as well as in theoretical linguistics to describe a type of grammatical acceptability judgement by native speakers, and in computer programming to describe textual randomization.
The phrase {word salad} has become increasingly common recently in the popular press, most often as an insulting description of Donald Trump's spontaneous speech. See for example Sahil Kapur and Peter Nicholas, "'Incoherent word salad': Trump stumbles when asked how he'd tackle child care", NBC News 9/6/2024.
The examples focus on Trump's habit of stringing together a sequence of fragments and parentheticals, while hopping around among semi-related topics. As I wrote in "Trump's eloquence" (8/5/2015), this to some extent (mis-)represents "the apparent incoherence of much transcribed extemporized speech, even when the same material is completely comprehensible and even eloquent in audio or audio-visual form". And in many of the examples discussed in my (too many) "Past posts on Donald Trump's rhetoric", the material is indeed "comprehensible and even eloquent" in spoken form.
Sometimes, as in the much-discussed child-care Q&A, the sequence of fragments includes some puzzling bits. But even there, the women who asked the question, Reshma Saujani, got a clear message from Trump's answer, although it was not a message that she liked.
FWIW, here's the full audio of her question, taken from this recording of the New York Economic Club session:
Your browser does not support the audio element.
Here's the full audio of Trump's answer:
Your browser does not support the audio element.
For a complete transcript of that answer, and a funny but accurate comment on how the NYT describes such content, see Alexandra Petri, "The Wonderful Trump Headline Machine", WaPo 9/6/2024.
But getting to my point, here's Reshma Saujani's evaluation of Trump's answer, from a CNN interview with Jake Tapper on 9/6/2024:
Your browser does not support the audio element.
Jake Tapper: With us now is uh Reshma Saujani. She asked the question yesterday. She's a member of the Economic Club of New York's board of trustees. I don't know if you watched the debate in June, but I tried three times to get him to answer that question, you tried a fourth — did you get anything out of that?
Reshma Saujani: Kinda. I- I may have done a little bit more than you did, because he did answer the question. And what he told us is that child care expens- expenses are no big deal. The fact that you're drowning in debt because of them — sorry, but not sorry. And he also told us that "no, I don't have any ideas or proposals or legislation". And it's insulting. And it's insulting to parent who are constantly having to choose between funding their day care and feeding their kids. And the thing is, is like if you don't have a plan to solve child care, you are not fit to be president.
So Trump's answer included a few confusing fragments, but it was absolutely not "word salad", in the sense of words that "may or may not be grammatically correct, but […] are semantically confused to the point that the listener cannot extract any meaning from them".
By the laws of bothsiderism, the press also often uses the phrase "word salad" with reference to Kamala Harris — and the examples are even further from the original meaning of the term, focusing on her use of slogans (sometimes described as [...]
Word of the Day
Word of the Day: scalable
This word has appeared in 31 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
lay out (2)
to explain an idea or a plan clearly and in detail
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Word of the Day
imperceptible
Definition: (adjective) Impossible or difficult to perceive by the mind or senses.
Synonyms: unperceivable.
Usage: The world may indeed be considered as a vast machine, in which the great wheels are originally set in motion by those which are very minute, and almost imperceptible to any but the strongest eyes.
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Language Log
"The Truth About English Grammar"
It's past time for me to feature Geoff Pullum's new book, The Truth About English Grammar. The publisher's blurb:
Do you worry that your understanding of English grammar isn’t what it should be? It may not be your fault. For hundreds of years, vague and confused ideas about how to state the rules have been passed down from one generation to the next. The available books for the general reader – thousands of them, shamelessly plagiarizing each other – repeat the same misguided definitions and generalizations that appeared in the schoolbooks used by your great-great-grandparents.
Geoffrey K. Pullum thinks you deserve better. In this book he breaks away from the tradition. Presupposing no prior knowledge or technical terms, he provides an informal introduction to the essential concepts underlying grammar and usage. With his foundation, you will be equipped to understand the classification of words, the structure of phrases and clauses, and why some supposed grammar rules are really just myths. Also covered are some of the key points about spelling, apostrophes, hyphens, capitalization, and punctuation.
Illuminating, witty, and incisive, The Truth About English Grammar is a vital book for all who love writing, reading, and thinking about English.
The start of the preface:
If you have ever been led to believe that your grammar is bad, relax a little. This book aims to liberate you, not berate you. Its main aim is to lay out some of the most basic principles of grammar from the ground up, without presupposing any previous acquaintance, and to lay out those principles in a more modern and consistent way. But it also to some extent aims to free you from fears of accidentally violating grammar and being judged for it. Far too many alleged “grammatical errors” aren’t mistakes at all: they presuppose rules that don’t exist and never did.
And the start of the final section, with the header Disrecommendations:
Now for a few remarks that are just between you, me, and the gatepost. It may upset millions, but I owe it to you to speak the truth. Some of the most famous and much-loved books on how to write are grossly misinformed on grammar and usage, not to be trusted on style, and way past their use-by dates, which are spread across the 20th century.
A flagrant case is the book commonly known as The Elements of Style. It’s actually E.B. White’s revision and expansion of a 1918 book by William Strunk called Elements of Style, which White was assigned when he was in one of Strunk’s classes at Cornell in 1919. Parts of it were four decades old when White published his version with Macmillan in 1959, and they are over a century old now, after several more editions by different publishers. Much of what it says about grammar and usage is very bad advice, and some of White’s changes and additions (which Strunk never saw) are flagrant nonsense – like when White says that stranding a preposition “sounds like murder” (4th edition, page 78). Stay away from this book.
George Orwell’s “Politics and the English language” (1946) is an essay, not a book, but millions of students will have seen it in a book because it was reprinted at least 118 times in 325 editions of fifty-eight college readers between 1952 and 1996 (see “The essay canon” by Lynn Bloom in College English 61.4, 1999, 401–430). Its text can be found in scores of places on the web, and hordes of English teachers have been singing its praises for three-quarters of a century. It is full of sanctimonious virtue signaling, dishonestly cherry-picked examples, and dumb advice about writing that no one follows, like that you should never use any familiar phrase, and of course that you should never use the passive (when his own essay uses the passive far more than most writing in English does). My advice: don’t even read it, but if a[...]
Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
john
the bathroom, toilet
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Idiom of the Day
let (someone) loose (on something)
To allow someone to do something as they please, without supervision or control. Watch the video
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, which now exists in the form of Tifinagh. Today, they may also be written in the Berber Latin alphabet or the Arabic script, with Latin being the most pervasive.
The Berber languages have a similar level of variety to the Romance languages, although they are sometimes referred to as a single collective language, often as "Berber", "Tamazight", or "Amazigh". The languages, with a few exceptions, form a dialect continuum. There is a debate as to how to best sub-categorize languages within the Berber branch. Berber languages typically follow verb–subject–object word order. Their phonological inventories are diverse.
Millions of people in Morocco and Algeria natively speak a Berber language, as do smaller populations of Libya, Tunisia, northern Mali, western and northern Niger, northern Burkina Faso and Mauritania and the Siwa Oasis of Egypt. There are also likely a few million speakers of Berber languages in Western Europe. Tashlhiyt, Kabyle, Central Atlas Tamazight, Tarifit, and Shawiya are some of the most commonly spoken Berber languages. Exact numbers are impossible to ascertain as there are few modern North African censuses that include questions on language use, and what censuses do exist have known flaws.
Following independence in the 20th century, the Berber languages have been suppressed and suffered from low prestige in North Africa. Recognition of the Berber languages has been growing in the 21st century, with Morocco and Algeria adding Tamazight as an official language to their constitutions in 2011 and 2016 respectively.
Most Berber languages have a high percentage of borrowing and influence from the Arabic language, as well as from other languages. For example, Arabic loanwords represent 35% to 46% of the total vocabulary of the Kabyle language and represent 51.7% of the total vocabulary of Tarifit. Almost all Berber languages took from Arabic the pharyngeal fricatives /ʕ/ and /ħ/, the (nongeminated) uvular stop /q/, and the voiceless pharyngealized consonant /ṣ/. Unlike the Chadic, Cushitic, and Omotic languages of the Afro-Asiatic phylum, Berber languages are not tonal languages.
"Tamazight" and "Berber languages" are often used interchangeably. However, "Tamazight" is sometimes used to refer to a specific subset of Berber languages, such as Central Tashlhiyt. "Tamazight" can also be used to refer to Standard Moroccan Tamazight or Standard Algerian Tamazight, as in the Moroccan and Algerian constitutions respectively. In Morocco, besides referring to all Berber languages or to Standard Moroccan Tamazight, "Tamazight" is often used in contrast to Tashelhit and Tarifit to refer to Central Atlas Tamazight.
The use of Berber has been the subject of debate due to its historical background as an exonym and present equivalence with the Arabic word for "barbarian." One group, the Linguasphere Observatory, has attempted to introduce the neologism "Tamazic languages" to refer to the Berber languages. Amazigh people typically use "Tamazight" when speaking English. Historically, Berbers did not refer to themselves as Berbers/Amazigh but had their own terms to refer to themselves. For example, the Kabyles use the term "Leqbayel" to refer to their own people, while the Chaouis identified themselves as "Ishawiyen" instead of Berber/Amazigh.
(Wikipedia)
All things considered, my original conception of the "Berbers", i.e., the Amazigh, as being a noble people from the mountains was not so far off the mark after all.
As cited above, "The term Amazigh also has a cognate in the Tuareg 'Amajegh"', meaning noble".
P.S.: For those who are interested, Wikipedia has an even more detailed article on "Names of the Berber people". Selected reading
* "Berbers in Libya" (4/23/11)
* "African (il)literacy" (6/21/21) — has much of relevance to say about an ancient African script called Tifinagh
* "Arabic and the vernaculars, part 5" (6/20/22)
* "Arabic and the vernaculars, part 6" (5/12/24)
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Language Log
Berber, emic vs. etic
My mental image of Berbers is one of brave, noble people of the Maghreb (western and central North Africa, comprising Algeria, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, and Tunisia) who were there before the advent of the Arabs, whose migration into the region took place largely in the 7th and later centuries. As happened in Southeast Asia (including Taiwan) with the Han people from the north pushing the indigenes into the mountainous areas from the lowlands to become montagnards, the Berbers also substantially retreated into the mountains of northern Africa.
When my Uber driver told me last Sunday in Philadelphia that he was a Berber, I told him that he must be proud of his heritage, he responded, "Actually, we don't like that name. It was imposed on us by Arabs, and it means the same thing as 'barbarian'. We prefer to call ourselves 'Amazigh'."
I had barely heard of Amazigh before, and what the driver told me was so much at odds with my preconception of the name Berber that I had to look into the basis for the difference between what I had heard and believed about the Berbers since secondary school and what a Berber himself thought about that name.
The first and simplest etymology for "Berber" I turned to comes from Wiktionary:
From Arabic بَرْبَرِيّ (barbariyy, “Berber”), from Ancient Greek βάρβαρος (bárbaros, “non-Greek, foreign, barbarian”), apparently imitative of foreign speech. Cognate of English barbarian.
That seems pretty standard and is widely accepted, but I wanted to dig deeper, so I looked for more details.
First, who were the so-called Berbers? Berbers, or the Berber peoples, also called by their endonym Amazigh or Imazighen, are a diverse grouping of distinct ethnic groups indigenous to North Africa who predate the arrival of Arabs in the Arab migrations to the Maghreb. Their main connections are identified by their usage of Berber languages, most of them mutually unintelligible, which are part of the Afroasiatic language family. They are indigenous to the Maghreb region of North Africa, where they live in scattered communities across parts of Morocco, Algeria, Libya, and to a lesser extent Tunisia, Mauritania, northern Mali and northern Niger. Smaller Berber communities are also found in Burkina Faso and Egypt's Siwa Oasis.
Descended from Stone Age tribes of North Africa, accounts of the Imazighen were first mentioned in Ancient Egyptian writings. From about 2000 BCE, Berber languages spread westward from the Nile Valley across the northern Sahara into the Maghreb. A series of Berber peoples such as the Mauri, Masaesyli, Massyli, Musulamii, Gaetuli, and Garamantes gave rise to Berber kingdoms, such as Numidia and Mauretania. Other kingdoms appeared in late antiquity, such as Altava, Aurès, Ouarsenis, and Hodna. Berber kingdoms were eventually suppressed by the Arab conquests of the 7th and 8th centuries CE. This started a process of cultural and linguistic assimilation known as Arabization, which influenced the Berber population. Arabization involved the spread of Arabic language and Arab culture among the Berbers, leading to the adoption of Arabic as the primary language and conversion to Islam. Notably, the Arab migrations to the Maghreb from the 7th century to the 17th century accelerated this process. While local Arab dynasties came to rule parts of the Maghreb after the 7th century, Berber tribes remained powerful political forces and founded new ruling dynasties in the 10th and 11th centuries, such as the Zirids, Hammadids, various Zenata principalities in the western Maghreb, and several Taifa kingdoms in al-Andalus. Islam later provided the ideological stimulus for the rise of fresh Berber empires, the Almoravids and Almohads in the 11th to 13th centuries. Their Berber successors – the Marinids, the Zayyanids, and the Ha[...]
Word of the Day
stoop
Definition: (verb) Debase oneself morally, act in an undignified, unworthy, or dishonorable way.
Synonyms: condescend, lower oneself.
Usage: The neighborhood bully constantly shouts insults at the children, but they refuse to stoop to his level and instead choose to ignore his rude remarks.
Discuss
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Word of the Day
Word of the Day: impunity
This word has appeared in 256 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 through (1)
to look through a collection of things like documents, books, clothes, etc. to find something or to sort them out
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Now THIS is avant garde #NYFW #Fashion #avantgarde
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catch-phrases), ordinary spontaneous-speech syntax, and so on.
But maybe over-use of the term "word salad" goes back to its origins in the 19th century. The OED's earliest citation is from Granville Stanley Hall, Adolescence: its psychology and its relations to physiology, anthropology, sociology, sex, crime, religion and education (1904):
Youth normally comes into a new attitude toward speech at puberty. The vocabulary is enlarged; meanings are re-adjusted; words seem different; there is always a new speech consciousness: interest in new terms shows that in some cases we have loquacity which becomes almost verbigeration; diaries and letters, and even stories and treatises are scribbled at great length. We often observe, too, an inverse ratio between thought and speech, so that as the former becomes scanty and indefinite the stream of words flows more copiously and smoothly; and conversely, as meanings deepen the vocabulary becomes more select and the lapse of speech and pen more restrained. In other normal types the mass of new inner experiences of thought, motive, and sentiment prompt concealment and reticence, and the subject becomes dumb-bound, silent, and perhaps seems to brood, or the range of expression is very confined and narrow. Both these tendencies have asylum out-crops in Forel’s “word-salad” or Krafft-Ebing’s “word- husks” on the one hand, or in mumbling and taciturnity, even speechlessness, on the other.
That's Auguste-Henri Forel, who would have used the French phrase "salade de mots". A search for that term confirms the translation, and also gets us to a StackExchange answer, which links to an 1895 publication that draws an ironic parallel between word-invention by psychotics and Forel's creation of the "word salad" term:
The earliest attestation I can find ascribes the origin to Forel's wortsalat, as translated by Kraepelin to 'wordsalad'. This appears in The Medical Standard of 1895, recounting events from the May, 1894 meeting of the Association of German Alienists and Neurologists, where "Kraepelin of Heidelberg described a 'peculiar group of insane patients,' who, among 'other distressing symptoms,' exhibited as 'the most striking phenomenon' a tendency to the coinage of new words": http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/1895WordSalad.png ➖ @EngSkills ➖
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Language Log
"Welcome in!"
I'm in the little (population about two hundred) town of Wamsutter in southwest Wyoming. It's just west of the Continental Divide and bills itself as "The Gateway to the Red Desert". It is the largest settlement, and the only incorporated town in the Great Divide Basin.
The name Wamsutter is intriguing, but it doesn't sound Native American, like so many other toponyms in Wyoming. As a matter of fact, Wamsutter was originally known as Washakie (c.1804/1810 – February 20, 1900) after the formidable Shoshone chief, but was later changed to its current name due to confusion with nearby Fort Washakie. No great loss for the Shoshone leader, since so many other places and things in Wyoming are named after him, including the excellent student dining center at the University of Wyoming in Laramie, in front of which stands a most impressive statue of the chief on his horse. When the town decided to switch its name, at least they retained the initial "Wa" of the original designation, which reminds me of "The Good Old Song" of the University of Virginia, with its "Wah-hoo-wa" cheer, borrowed from Dartmouth.
Wamsutter is the surname of a Union Pacific bridge engineer, but that's not what I want to write about today. Instead, I will talk about a thought-provoking experience I had at one of the three big gas stations / truck stops that seem to constitute the raison d'être for the town in its present manifestation. (Earlier it would have been a stage coach stop, and in medieval Central Asia it would have been a caravanserai filled with Sogdian traders and their stinking, drooling camels.)
The three stations / stops are One9, Love's, and Conoco. I went in all three to get supplies and food. While I was in the One9, I was puzzled by the frequent shouts of the employees that punctuated the bustling atmosphere of the shoppers and drivers coming and going. "Eh Uh Ih!" "Eh Uh Ih!" (Don't forget that I have tinnitus, which causes one to lose most consonants.)
I really didn't know what they were saying, and I was dying with curiosity to know what it was. Curiosity got the better of the cat, so I went up and asked one of the workers what it was.
"Welcome in!" he said. I almost fell over, both because of my perplexity at not understanding it in the first place and because of my instant realization the it was the exact analog of the ubiquitous Japanese greeting, "irasshaimase". The latter is invariably translated as "welcome", but it literally means "(please) come (in)". Thus the One9 employees' greeting "Welcome in!" is an ingenious combination of "welcome" and "(please) come (in)", with an emphasis on the adverb. We'll have to ask Master Grammarian Geoff Pullum exactly what "in" is doing in the phrase "Welcome in".
Curosity continued to get the better of the cat, so I asked one of the One9 employees if he and his coworkers were instructed by their manager to call out "Welcome in!" to each customer who entered the store. He replied, "Yep! Meet and greet." The cat pursued, "Is this company policy at all One9 travel centers?" "Yes," he acknowledged. "It's not just a local thing."
By the way, One9 is owned by Berkshire Hathaway. They know how to do business.
After I filled up my tank and was about to head down the road to Rock Springs, I looked up and noticed this large sign above the entrance to the One9 store: WELCOME. Selected readings
* "Irasshaimase?" (4/19/21)
* "Irasshaimase?, part 2" (11/10/21)
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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
pack heat
to carry a gun
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Idiom of the Day
let (someone) off the hook
To pardon, release, or allow someone to escape from blame, responsibility, obligation, or difficulty. Watch the video
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n English teacher asks, pretend you think it’s wonderful.
John McIntyre, "It's a grand day for grammar", 9/5/2024:
In the fifth through eighth grades, I was drilled in the traditional schoolroom grammar by two formidable ladies, Mrs. Jessie Perkins and Mrs. Elizabeth Craig, and while their results with other students were variable, what they taught me stuck.
Over years as an editor it was brought home to me that the schoolroom grammar was seriously flawed. Originally developed to apply Latin grammar to English, a bad fit because the two languages operate on different principles, but Latin was the prestige language when English was the new kid on the block. Over the centuries that grammar was distorted by an accretion of arbitrary rules and superstitions that have been exposed by linguists. But those of us who had the schoolroom grammar had little or no contact with the linguists.
Now we can. The Truth About English Grammar by Geoffrey K. Pullum, has just been published in this country by Polity Press. Pullum, the distinguished linguist and co-author of The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, speaks not as the scribes and Pharisees but as one who has authority, and bridges the gap between the traditional grammar and current linguists in a short, concise book accessible to any reader willing to put in a little time.
As the new book states explicitly, it's basically a more accessible introduction to Geoff's earlier, longer, and denser work:
The first port of call for anyone who wants to delve more seriously into this book’s modern approach to English grammar would be A Student’s Introduction to English Grammar by Rodney Huddleston, Geoffrey K. Pullum, and Brett Reynolds (2nd edition, Cambridge University Press, 2022). It’s a 400-page undergraduate-level textbook that’s fully compatible with this book in its theoretical assumptions, but it goes into a lot more detail. It’s not elementary, but then if you have read this book you are not exactly a beginner anymore.
That textbook is based on a much larger and more advanced work: The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (by Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey K. Pullum et al., Cambridge University Press, 2002) – the book I’ve been referring to as CGEL. It’s a large scholarly reference work (over 1,800 pages), and although it doesn’t presuppose a linguistics degree, it uses more technical concepts and vocabulary than this book, and it attempts to be complete and exhaustive. It’s intended for grammarians and designers of courses rather than for students or for the casual reader.
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Language Log
"…X, let's say Y…"
Justin Weinberg, "Analytic Philosophy's Best Unintentional (?) Self-Parodying", Daily Nous 9/6/2024:
“Someone, let’s say a baby, is born; his parents call him by a certain name.”
That line–recently circulated on social media by Eric Winsberg (South Florida / Cambridge) as “the funniest sentence in the history of philosophy”—is from Saul Kripke‘s Naming and Necessity.
I’m not sure its the funniest sentence in the history of philosophy, but it is pure poetry.
Justin Weinberg added:
*UPDATE: Some are suggesting Kripke’s line was meant to be funny, in which case I suppose we should broaden the request for suggestions to include intentional self-parodies by analytic philosophers.
In the comments, Eric Winsberg responded:
I don’t think he’s joking. You have to remember this is the transcript of a talk. He’s just throwing in very standard though [sic] experiment language. Compare “a number of people, say five, are tied to a railroad track”. You’re just signaling that the number 5 is only important in that it’s more than one. But in Kripke’s case, the whole point of the example is that there’s nothing distinctive about the person at all except the ensuing baptism. So he’s going “someone is born” and he’s brain goes “we need a “say” clause, and ends up making the funniest sentence ever. Kenny Easwaran added:
I’ve always interpreted this line as a clear self-parody. When he’s trying to stay object-level, he has no trouble coming up with specifics, like naming his pet aardvark Napoleon, or any example involving, say, Nixon. In this case, I think he’s observing the need to include “say X” afterwards, and then filling it in with the one thing that actually adds nothing, rather than “someone, let’s say, the future teacher of Aristotle, is born”.
FWIW, Eric Winsberg's comment about "standard thought experiment language" seems persuasive to me.
In (the transcribed and edited text of) Naming and Necessity, "let's say" is used 18 times as a rhetorical device to introduce a specific but arbitrary assumption for the purposes of the current argument, e.g. on p. 80:
Let's see if Thesis (2) is true. It seems, in some a priori way, that it's got to be true, because if you don't think that the properties you have in mind pick out anyone uniquely — let's say they're all satisfied by two people — then how can you say which one of them you're talking about? There seem to be no grounds for saying you're talking about the one rather than about the other.
He also uses plain "say" for the same rhetorical purpose, e.g. on p. 17:
Nor, when we regard such qualitatively identical states as (A, 6; B, 5) and (A, 5 ; B, 6) as distinct, need we suppose that A and B are qualitatively distinguishable in some other respect, say, color. On the contrary, for the purposes of the probability problem, the numerical face shown is thought of as if it were the only property of each die.
And on p. 87, he uses "let's say" to introduce an assumption arguendo that's vague nearly to the point of emptiness, probably because he didn't care to come up with anything more specific:
What's going on here? Can we rescue the theory? First, one may try and vary these descriptions — not think of the famous achievements of a man but, let's say, of something else, and try and use that as our description. Maybe by enough futzing around someone might eventually get something out of this; however, most of the attempts that one tries are open to counterexamples or other objections.
It might still be true that Kripke was intentionally parodying this device when he said "Someone, let's say a baby, is born" — but Eric Winsberg's hypothesis is consistent with Kripke's overall patterns of usage.
As an aside, it's worth noting that Kripke refers to the baby with the male pronouns "his" and "him", probably because that was a common prescription for generic third-person singular pronouns in 1970 when the lectures were delivered.
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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
finish off
to complete something, or to eat the last piece of something
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Word of the Day
ignoble
Definition: (adjective) Not of the nobility; common.
Synonyms: ungentle, untitled.
Usage: The princess loved the stable boy, but he was of ignoble birth, and her father refused to let them marry.
Discuss
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fsids – continued to rule until the 16th century. From the 16th century onward, the process continued in the absence of Berber dynasties; in Morocco, they were replaced by Arabs claiming descent from the Islamic prophet Muhammad.
Berbers are divided into several diverse ethnic groups and Berber languages, such as Kabyles, Chaouis and Rifians. Historically, Berbers across the region did not see themselves as a single cultural or linguistic unit, nor was there a greater "Berber community", due to their differing cultures. They also did not refer to themselves as Berbers/Amazigh but had their own terms to refer to their own groups and communities. They started being referred to collectively as Berbers after the Arab conquests of the 7th century and this distinction was revived by French colonial administrators in the 19th century. Today, the term "Berber" is viewed as pejorative by many who prefer the term "Amazigh". Since the late 20th century, a trans-national movement – known as Berberism or the Berber Culture Movement – has emerged among various parts of the Berber populations of North Africa to promote a collective Amazigh ethnic identity and to militate for greater linguistic rights and cultural recognition.
The indigenous populations of the Maghreb region of North Africa are collectively known as Berbers or Amazigh in English.
Tribal titles such as Barabara and Beraberata appear in Egyptian inscriptions of 1700 and 1300 B.C, and the Berbers were probably intimately related with the Egyptians in very early times. Thus the true ethnical name may have become confused with Barbari, the designation naturally used by classical conquerors.
The plural form Imazighen is sometimes also used in English. While Berber is more widely known among English-speakers, its usage is a subject of debate, due to its historical background as an exonym and present equivalence with the Arabic word for "barbarian". Historically, Berbers did not refer to themselves as Berbers/Amazigh but had their own terms to refer to themselves. For example, the Kabyles use the term "Leqbayel" to refer to their own people, while the Chaouis identified themselves as "Ishawiyen" instead of Berber/Amazigh. Stéphane Gsell proposed the translation "noble/free" for the term Amazigh based on Leo Africanus's translation of "awal amazigh" as "noble language" referring to Berber languages, this definition remains disputed and is largely seen as an undue extrapolation. The term Amazigh also has a cognate in the Tuareg "Amajegh", meaning noble. "Mazigh" was used as a tribal surname in Roman Mauretania Caesariensis.
Abraham Isaac Laredo proposes that the term Amazigh could be derived from "Mezeg", which is the name of Dedan of Sheba in the Targum. Ibn Khaldun says the Berbers were descendants of Barbar, the son of Tamalla, son of Mazigh, son of Canaan, son of Ham, son of Noah.
The Numidian, Mauri, and Libu populations of antiquity are typically understood to refer to approximately the same population as modern Berbers.
(Wikipedia)
When I was investigating the orthography and prehistory of the Berbers and the Tuaregs in the 70s and 80s as part my research on writing systems worldwide, I found evidence for their advanced civilization in North Africa dating as far back as twelve millennia ago in the cave paintings and rock inscriptions of the region, chiefly in the Atlas Mountains. Still today, the Atlas Mountains are home to various groups of Berbers. Among the Tuaregs, the idea of a noble class, especially noble warriors, figures prominently.
The Berber languages, also known as the Amazigh languages or Tamazight, are a branch of the Afroasiatic language family. They comprise a group of closely related but mostly mutually unintelligible languages spoken by Berber communities, who are indigenous to North Africa. The languages are primarily spoken and not typically written. Historically, they have been written with the ancient Libyco-Berber script[...]
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