ENGLISH-speakers are sure their language is especially perplexing. But while it has its quirks, so does every other language (aside from planned ones like Esperanto). In one way, though, English really is confusing. A small new book, “That Doesn’t Mean What You Think It Means”, by Ross and Kathryn Petras, helps readers distinguish many words that are confusingly similar. Some are nearly homophones with different spellings and completely different meanings, like elicit and illicit. Some are near homophones with distinct but related meanings, like emigrate and immigrate. And some are similar-looking words with opposite meanings, like adjure and abjure. What kind of language is this?
It is not the English kind so much as the Latin kind. About 28% of the words in the “Shorter Oxford Dictionary” come from that language. This huge layer of vocabulary was...
from The Economist: Books and arts https://ift.tt/2CsFrIY
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