English
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Telling the Future: Will vs Going to vs Shall/Should
Like many of the languages related to it, English has more than one way to talk about actions in the future. The first is the future tense, which is the ‘will‘ future (and the closely related ‘shall‘). The other is the ‘going to‘ future. If you are not familiar with the ‘going to‘ (present progressive)…
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Hedging
Time to get out the trimmers! No, not that kind of hedging!! Hedging is an important tool that all writers should have in their arsenal, especially when writing in an academic or scientific context. But what is hedging? Hedging is a writing style used to make the meaning of a sentence less absolute. For example:…
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French Phrases in English the French Wouldn’t Understand
French and English have a long and interwoven linguistic history. English wouldn’t be the language it is today without its French influences over the past thousand years. Not only do countless English words have their origin in French, but English also uses French sayings with a much higher frequency than sayings from other languages. But…
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Doublets (and Triplets) in English
Have you ever heard of doublets before? No, I don’t mean a type of old-fashioned men’s shirt used until the 17th century, I mean doublets in the linguistic sense. A doublet in linguistics is two words that have something in common. Usually, this ‘thing in common’ has to do with where the words originally come…
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A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue
Have you ever typed an unknown word into Google to figure out what it means and come across a website called UrbanDictionary? If not, I highly recommend it. Warning: this website includes many vulgar terms and while it is constantly evolving, changing, and growing in size, anyone can edit it, so many of the examples are…
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Contronyms – a word that is its own opposite
Have you ever seen a word in English and thought ‘I know what that means!’ only to realise that it was being used to mean the exact opposite? If so, you have encountered something known as a contronym. What are contronyms? According to Oxford, a contronym is: A word with two opposite meanings, e.g. sanction (which…
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Great Green Dragon – English Adjective Order
Have you ever wondered why ‘a red, large coat’ just doesn’t sound quite right in English? Did you know that in English, we have a preference for adjective order? This is especially true when they go before a noun? If you aren’t a native speaker, how can you become used to certain adjectives going in…
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International Phonetic Alphabet and Phonemic Alphabets
/gɛt jɔː ʃwɑː ɒn/ Have you ever seen something that looks like the Roman Alphabet but then it has some extra dots, symbols and letters you have never seen before? Does it follow other words and come after vocabulary (usually)? If you answered yes to these questions, then you have most likely come across something…
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Great Vowel Shift
Have you ever wondered why English pronunciation is so difficult? Why are words written one way but pronounced in another? In addition to English’s bastard origins, there was a great event over a couple of centuries of extreme linguistic and phonological importance called the Great Vowel Shift. Questions, questions? So what is this Great Vowel…
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Puns – Watt is Love? Baby don’t Hertz me, don’t Hertz me, no Morse
A pun is a joke that exploits the different possible meanings of a word or the fact that there are words which sound alike but have different meanings. Puns are rife in languages that have words called homophones, or multiple words that have the same or similar pronunciation but have different meanings. English is rife with…
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The Most Important Word in the English Language and Its History
What is the most important word in the English language? How can we even begin to classify words in terms of their importance? What does that even mean? To answer this question, we need to look at some history. History and language For anyone who has studied a little bit of British history, you know…
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What is the plural of ‘you’ ?
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English As She Is Spoke
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Sant Jordi/Saint George’s Day Comparison
