Re: SURVEY: Idiomatic Expressions In Your ConLang Or ConCulture

On Fri, 18 Nov 2005, R A Brown wrote:
>
> Yahya Abdal-Aziz wrote:
> > Hi all,
> [snip]
> > linguist's definition', I'd say that since it is imposs-
> > ible for even a native speaker to predict the meaning
> > of any grammatical construction with only one
> > member, 'Strewth!' is indeed an idiom in Strine.
>
> I simply do not understand what you mean by "any grammatical
> construction with only one member". It does not make sense to me.
>
> If you are referring to the origin of the word, i.e. "God's truth", that
> is hardly a grammatical construction with only one member - English is
> full of construction like that: John's house, Mary's honesty, Harry's
> hospitality etc, etc, etc.
No, I'm referring to the fact that 'Strewth' is the sole
surviving member in Strine of a wider class of expressions
in BritEnglish, all of the pattern  <ellipsis for 'God's'> + <noun>,
where the <noun> may have been 'wounds', 'blood', 'cross',
'rood', 'nails' etc, giving rise to 'Zounds', 'Zblood' etc.

I'm sure you're familiar with them, as you alluded to 'Zounds'
earlier.  Because these oaths all used the name of God, it was
common practice to do so indirectly, to avoid censure for
breaking the commandment: 'Thou shalt not take the LORD's
name in vain'.

Strictly religious people, including some member of my family,
being aware of the origins of these oaths, held that they still
broke the commandment.  To them, saying 'Strewth' or even
'Gee' or 'Geez' (a contraction of 'Jesus') or 'Cripes' (a
euphemism for 'Christ') was swearing.

Now, as a kid, I could understand when it was explained to me
how 'Cripes' and 'Geez' originated, as they used mechanisms
familiar from the language.  OTOH, I had no handle on the
entire word 'God' disappearing, leaving behind only its possess-
ive suffix ''s'; there were simply no other occurrences of this
pattern to draw from.  Today, of course, we even have a brand
of potato crisps or some such junk food called 'S'OK', which
exactly mirrors the way we now contract 'It's OK'.


> Or are you referring to the fact that "Strewth" is an interjection? You
> are surely not trying to tell us that Strine is such an impoverished
> language that it has only one single (presumably all-purpose)
> interjection.
IIRC, I gave several examples of Strine interjections.


> But _synchronically_ "strewth" is a *monomorphemic word.* ...
I'm not clear about that ... It sounded to me, when I first heard it,
as though it obviously contained the (statistically unlikely) string
of sounds that I was familiar with in 'truth'.  So I _thought_ it
had something to do with 'truth', but couldn't work out what the
other bit meant.  It seemed to me at the time to have two parts
to its meaning (I hadn't heard the word 'morpheme' then).


> ... It is in fact
> impossible for any native speaker of any language on earth to predict
> the meaning of a word s/he does not know! It does not make the word an
> idiom in Strine or any other language.
But it IS possible for a native speaker to conjecture, with a
reasonable chance of success, as to the meaning of any
combination of familiar morphemes.  I simply didn't have the
morpheme <'God's' represented by /s/ or /z/> as a familiar
morpheme, since it occurs only once in Strine.

So that means I was unable to predict the meaning of 'Strewth'
based on the language rules I had learned.  Had 'Zblood' and
'Zounds' survived into 1950s Strine, I should have had a better
chance of correctly predicting the third if I already knew the
other two.  There IS a rule or pattern at work here, even if a
rare one.   So on that basis none of the three would have been
an idiom in this alternative Strine.  But can we speak of a rule
with one instance?  If we did, what use would that rule be?  It
comes down to exactly the same thing - one has to learn the
singular exemplar of such a rule explicitly, exactly the same as
if it were the kind of rule-breaker that the idiom 'I'm not clear
about that' is.  In practical terms, if one has to learn each in-
stance, one might as well call it by the same name: an idiom.


> [snip]
> >
> > (*) 'Strine' comes from the title of a book by, IIRC,
> > 'Nino Culotta' (John O'Grady), 'Let's Talk Strine',
> > popular here in Australia in the early sixties,
>
> It reach Pommieland in the 60s also   ;)
Glad it made you grin! :-)

Regards,
Yahya

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