Re: SURVEY: Idiomatic Expressions In Your ConLang Or ConCulture
| From: | R A Brown <ray@...> |
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| Date: | Thursday, November 17, 2005, 18:57 |
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caeruleancentaur wrote:
> --- In conlang@yahoogroups.com, Herman Miller <hmiller@I...> wrote:
>
>
>>(There we go with one of those weird English idioms again, I
>>mean "it's not clear to me" :-)
>
> I'm beginning to think that any definition of "idiom" is in the mind
> of the beholder. Why is the above cited example an idiom?
Amen.
> David Crystal in "a Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics" defines
> as idiom as "...a sequence of words which is semantically and often
> syntactically restricted, so that they function as a single unit."
And Trask defines 'idiom' thus:
"An expression consisting of two or more words whose meaning cannot be
simply predicted from the meanings of its constituent parts."
> I don't find "it's not clear to me" any more idiomatic/peculiar
> than "it's not plain to me" or "it's not evident to me."
... and almost identical expression occur in many other languages.
===================================
caeruleancentaur wrote:
> --- In conlang@yahoogroups.com, Yahya Abdal-Aziz <yahya@m...> wrote:
>
>
>>13. Strewth! (Old Australian oath, meaning 'God's Truth'.)
>
>
> Why is this an idiom?
It can't be cannot if? A single word may be used metaphorically - but I
fail to see how it can be an idiom.
In any case, it is not peculiar to Australia and is an even older minced
oath in northern hemisphere, being used longer before that island was
known to the rest of the world.
This thread seems to have migrated far from Conlangs and seems mainly to
be (a) arguing about the definition of idiom, and (b) finding as many
_English_ "idioms" as possible - rather reminiscent of the YAEDT which
occur with regular frequency.
In fact, there seems to have been a dearth of stuff about Conlangs
recently. In any case, we engelangers are not going to be able to
contribute much, it seems to me ;)
--
Ray
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