“Nuclear families” have nothing to do with “nuclear energy,” in spite of the word “nuclear” in both phrases. Most people know that two unrelated words can look the same: the “bank” in “river bank” and in “money bank,” for example. Such words usually mean completely different things. It’s less commonly appreciated that closely related words…
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It turns out that “um” means something in English, and we can learn about translation by looking at that short word. The following hypothetical conversation between a shopper and a sales associate at a book store demonstrates: Shopper: “Where can I find a complete bilingual text of Aristotle?” Clerk: “Aristotle who?” Shopper: “Um, the Greek…
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Also from the about page: Is it true that in Greek they didn’t have multiple words that meant the same thing or one word that meant multiple things? More clearly — that every word had only one meaning and each thing/idea had only one word for it. Thanks! Thanks for the question, which I think…
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In an interview with Karyn Traphagen, Pete Enns says: Second, I would be prepared at how Hebrew does not “behave itself,” i.e., how grammars necessarily abstract the language almost to the point where a fair amount of what you’ve been learning doesn’t correspond to the actual biblical text. While a printed grammar of a language…
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“Luck” is an interesting word in English, because people can have “good luck” or “bad luck,” but if they are “lucky” it only means “good luck.” That is, the word “luck” can refer to positive or negative things, but in order to mean something negative, it has to be qualified, either explicitly or by context.…
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A quick note about “they” in colloquial English. It’s used for two purposes: (1) when the speaker doesn’t know the gender of the referent; and (2) when the speaker doesn’t care about the gender of the referent. For example, if I see a cell phone in the aisle of a plane as I’m exiting, I…
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