can a house burn up as it burns down, can one fill out a form by filling it in. If a vegetarian eats only vegetables, than what does a humanitarian eat?
The English language is one of the hardest languages for foreigners to learn because it is SO DARN SCREWY!!!
Believe me master, when you're bilingual you'd get it. All word mix-ups like this are categorized as the same. Besides, it's basically means the same thing to people who only speak one language too.
Believe me master, when you're bilingual you'd get it. All word mix-ups like this are categorized as the same. Besides, it's basically means the same thing to people who only speak one language too.
I do get it, i've heard the joke a million times before. You don't get how its not its not the same thing.
The reason English can be so confusing? Because it was formed from so many different languages. (Latin, Germanic, Hebrew, etc.) These original languages can eventually run together, making said "contradictions" and such in English.
Ex. Knight's "The bandage was wound around the wound."
Let's take it one step at a time. We'll start with the first "wound." That evolved from a series of languages. At the core, it comes from the Latin "Viere", "to twist/plait/weave." That evolved into the modern "wind" and "wound." Now for the second "wound." It evolved into modern English from Old English "wund", evolving into wound. So from languages evolving into English, they simply happened to "run together" a bit.
No. However, that joke isn't actually correct. In the case of pro/con, con comes from the Latin "contra", meaning "against." However, with the case of con(gress), con comes from the Latin "***," meaning "with."
(In case the second Latin word doesn't come up, take "cam", and replace the "a" with "u".)
Meh... in French there are words with different spellings meaning different things, yet all have the same pronunciation: ver=worm, verre=glass, vert=green, vers=line(noun) or towards(preposition), vair=vair(?)... but I'm pretty sure there are no words written the same way that mean different things, at least I can't think of any right now. Some of the things you posted here are quite funny^^
Well, the English language is really based off of Old and Middle Latin and Greek dialects, so if you learn prefixes and suffixes it is a lot easier to read. The questions you asked at the beginning were more riddles than anything else, and its not often that you will hear someone speaking like that on a regular basis. The sentence structure of the English language is a lot different from other languages, and we Americans have a tendency to misplace nouns and pronouns skewing the meanings of the words and phrases. Knowing that I grew up speaking English, I have to say I dont find it that hard, but honestly i think Spanish and German are easy to learn and their meanings and structures are much more literal.
