Tag Archives: Language
Great Words… What’s Your Favorite?
Posted on June 4, 2008 in Pen on paper.
Words are a great thing. What would one do without them? Can you imagine not being able to explain how it feels to be in complete euphoria? I think that words are not only good for everyday use but also good to just give us good feelings.
We have all come across e-mail and sms forwards that require you to send back one word to that person describing them. Personally I love those. The best word that someone has used to describe me is EFFERVESCENT, and it’s one that I will never forget (makes me happy every time I think about it).
So here are some of the most beautiful words (in my opinion) that I have come across:
Effervescent (bubbly, enthusiastic, breezy, buoyant, zestful, lively)
Champagne (An effervescent wine)
Chaos (A condition of great disorder)
Ephemeral (short-lived)
Epiphany (A sudden revelation)
Evanescent (vanishing quickly)
Fragile (very delicate)
Fugacioius (Escaping)
Loquacious (Talkative)
Onomatopoeia (The creation of words by imitating sound)
Pastiche (A mixture of artwork from a number of sources)
Rhapsody (A beautiful musical piece)
Ripple (A small, circular wave emerging from a central point)
Serendipity (A fortunate discovery by accident)
Soliloquy (Dramatic speech intended to give the illusion of unspoken reflections)
Whisper (Speaking without the vibration of the vocal folds)
Please add words to this list that you find beautiful (if you have any) by comments.
The Afrikaans Language
Posted on April 28, 2008 in Pen on paper.
As a native-speaking English person I know how much Afrikaans people are constantly ripped off by the English. Having a completely mixed up family I am also lucky to be completely bilingual. This all means that i have the best of both worlds, which I would like to share a bit of.
Afrikaans is an extremely expressive and descriptive language with words that can’t even possibly be translated into English like ‘soutpiel’ (not something I’d like to explain as it is extremely derogative towards English speaking people), translated meaning is salt cock.
It is also a gutterish language, which is often found to be difficult as far as pronunciation is concerned for the English. This is where we come across the ‘g’ sound in ‘Gerda’.
Then we come across expressions that ,if translated into English make no sense but in Afrikaans, make completes sense. Here we find expressions like ‘Ja, Nee’ meaning ‘Yes, No’ (in Afrikaans this is often used when agreeing with what a person had said), and Lekker Kak meaning Nice Crap (in Afrikaans this means that something is really bad).
So a lot of this makes no sense to the English but to the Afrikaans makes complete sense. The way that i have translated these meanings and expressions doesn’t even do them justice as it’s more-or-less a deffinition but not really, ha ha ha. Now isn’t that confusing?
