{"id":1415,"date":"2011-12-01T16:08:41","date_gmt":"2011-12-01T23:08:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/theglessners.org\/?p=1415"},"modified":"2011-12-01T16:09:48","modified_gmt":"2011-12-01T23:09:48","slug":"english","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/theglessners.org\/index.php\/2011\/12\/english\/","title":{"rendered":"English"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ok, I just tweeted this (see in the sidebar to the left?), but English is really weird (or is it “wierd”? I always get it wrong the first time). I was reading Fellowship of the Ring<\/em> to Drew last night and came across this sentence: “Their cold eyes glittered, and they called to him with fell<\/u> voices.” (Can anyone tell me who they<\/em> are, and where this is from in the book?) Anyway, it occurred to me, where does English get off using fell<\/em> as the past tense to fall<\/em> AND as a word meaning cruel, evil<\/em>? What’s up with that. Well a quick look on the Online Etymology Dictionary<\/a> for the word fell<\/a><\/em> gives the answer. Fell<\/em>, as in “I fell down yesterday” comes from Old English, West Saxon, German (?), Old Norse, and a host of other abbreviations I’m not going to look up. It’s Northern European. Fell<\/em> as in “cruel, fierce, vicious” comes from Middle (?) Latin and Old French, and of course is related to felon<\/em> (but what about fellow<\/em>?). Maybe both of them come from Ancient Indo-European and before that the Tower of Babel and the Flood and who knows, but I’m not looking THAT up. <\/p>\n

So there you have it in (very) short. English is a hodge-podge of languages, coming with words that are the same sounds but come from different other languages, so you’ve really got to be on your toes. <\/p>\n

So, would you like to come teach it? It’s fun! You get questions like that, even when they’re not from Mexicans! At least you’ll have the Internet to help.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ok, I just tweeted this (see in the sidebar to the left?), but English is really weird (or is it “wierd”? I always get it wrong the first time). I was reading Fellowship of the Ring to Drew last night and came across this sentence: “Their cold eyes glittered, and they called to him with […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[46,10,6,19],"tags":[153,77],"class_list":["post-1415","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-english","category-literature","category-misc","category-reading","tag-english","tag-fell"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/theglessners.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1415","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/theglessners.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/theglessners.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theglessners.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theglessners.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1415"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/theglessners.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1415\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1421,"href":"https:\/\/theglessners.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1415\/revisions\/1421"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/theglessners.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1415"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theglessners.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1415"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theglessners.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1415"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}