Six Words You Never Knew Had Something to Do with Pigs and Other Fascinating Facts about the Language from Canada's Word Lady (review)
Notice bibliographique
Résumé
Reviewed by: Six Words You Never Knew Had Something to Do with Pigs and Other Fascinating Facts about the Language from Canada's Word Lady J.K. Chambers Katherine Barber . Six Words You Never Knew Had Something to Do with Pigs and Other Fascinating Facts about the Language from Canada's Word Lady. Oxford University Press. xvi, 224. $24.95 No language has travelled as far as English or served as the prime medium of communication for so many cultures. And no language has [End Page 175] been so absorbent, soaking up words and phrases from every language it touched. By the time English was first written down, around 700, it already had lots of borrowed words from Norse, Latin, and Celtic. Now, thirteen centuries later, half its vocabulary comes from French and the other half comes from Arabic, German, Greek, Hindi, Italian, Scottish, Spanish, and two dozen other languages including (lest we forget) Anglo-Saxon, the ur-language. Katherine Barber, editor-in-chief of the Canadian Oxford Dictionary, discovered that she had the knack of charming literate listeners with exotica about English words when she was called upon to promote her dictionary. In radio interviews and book-club talks, she took on the persona of the Word Lady, schoolmarmish in style but witty and surprisingly worldly, and unafraid of going wherever her scholarship takes her. (So, for example, she tells us that before loom became the name of a specific weaving tool it had meant any tool at all, and she adds, 'Amusingly it went through a phase from about 1400 to 1600 when it was used to mean "penis,"' as does 'tool' nowadays.) As the Word Lady, Barber became a regular contributor on CBC-Toronto's early-morning show and an irregular contributor in other media. Six Words You Never Knew Had Something to Do with Pigs gathers together numerous radio pieces into a tidy package suitable for browsing, referencing, or even close reading. Barber organizes it topically by the four seasons with sub-topics ('Easter Bonnet and Nine Others for Spring,' 'Tennis Anyone? and Nine Others for Summer,' 'Back to School and 13 More for Fall,' and 'Happy New Year! with 12 More for Winter'). The titular words that have something to do with pigs come early and more or less run the gamut of etymological incredulity. Porcelain looks as if it has pig in it (or at least pork, porcine) but it was named for a seashell, which in turn had been named for its piggy shape. Screw, as in corkscrew (though the Word Lady cites only carpentry screws) comes from Latin scrofa 'sow,' presumably because a sow's tail is (cork)screw-like. As for soil, porpoise, root, and swain, space does not permit tracing their pig origins in this review. You can look them up, of course, along with no fewer than 370 other words, each one given its due in the unfolding almanac-like themes of this handsome little book. The overriding appeal of the book comes from our sense of wonder at the magnificent patchwork that is the English vocabulary. The Word Lady points out, for instance, that hospital, hospice, hostel, and hotel were borrowed into English at four different historical moments, the first from Latin and the others from French developments of that very same Latin root. Extravagant accommodations like these, registering the names for things that are foreign and then adopting the name with the thing, have been repeated thousands of times in the global expansion of [End Page 176] the language. No other language has travelled as far, and the words we use mark its travels like stamps in a passport. J.K. Chambers Department of Linguistics, University of Toronto Copyright © 2008 University of Toronto Press Incorporated
Récupéré en direct depuis OpenAlex et désinversé. Les résumés ne sont pas conservés dans cette base de données : les index inversés représentent 8,6 Go des 9,3 Go de texte de la base, et le serveur dispose de 13 Go libres.
Comment cette classification a été obtenuedéplier
Prédiction distillée sur la base complète
Imitation des enseignantsNi prévalence calibrée, ni vérité terrain. Validation humaine à venir. Apprise à partir de 10 348 étiquettes directes de Codex et de 10 348 étiquettes directes de Gemma. Le mode candidate est l'union des têtes enseignantes seuillées; le consensus est leur intersection. Ces sorties portent le statut machine_predicted_unvalidated et ne sont ni des étiquettes humaines ni des étiquettes directes de modèles de pointe.
Scores Codex et Gemma par catégorie
| Catégorie | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Métarecherche | 0,000 | 0,000 |
| Méta-épidémiologie (sens strict) | 0,000 | 0,000 |
| Méta-épidémiologie (sens large) | 0,000 | 0,000 |
| Bibliométrie | 0,000 | 0,000 |
| Études des sciences et des technologies | 0,001 | 0,000 |
| Communication savante | 0,000 | 0,000 |
| Science ouverte | 0,000 | 0,000 |
| Intégrité de la recherche | 0,000 | 0,000 |
| Charge utile insuffisante (le modèle a refusé de juger) | 0,001 | 0,000 |
Scores machine (provisoires)
Les deux têtes enseignantes du modèle étudiant, lues sur ce travail. Un score ordonne la base pour la relecture; il n'affirme jamais une catégorie, et le statut de validation accompagne chaque rangée tel quel.
Scores de référence d'un modèle non mature (critères de maturité non atteints, 7 itérations). Un score ordonne; il n'affirme jamais une catégorie.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · tel quel depuis la passe de notation : score_only signifie que le nombre peut ordonner les travaux, et qu'aucune étiquette de catégorie n'en découleClassification
machine, non validéePrédiction automatique; un appel candidat d’une seule tête enseignante, pas un consensus.
Le détail, modèle par modèle et score par score, se trouve en fin de page sous « Comment cette classification a été obtenue ».