Words typically develop from a root of some sort, and derivatives are formed from a primary word by changing or adding something. You can do this in many ways. You […]
Jeff Aronson’s Words
Jeffrey Aronson: When I use a word . . . Breaking worst
There are other ways of breaking words besides the ones we have so far dealt with: metanalysis, aphaeresis, aphesis, and apocope. Take, for example, ellipsis (Greek ἔλλειψις), which means coming short. […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I use a word . . . Breaking worse
There is a bewildering number of ways to break a word. In metanalysis you reinterpret the form of a word, creating a new one. An umpire, for example, was originally […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I use a word . . . Breaking bad
Metanalysis is when you break a word badly. It’s defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as “the reinterpretation of the form of a word, resulting in the creation of a […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I use a word . . . An indefinite article
The grapheme <a> is used as a symbol for the phoneme /a/ when it is pronounced as the low front unrounded form of the vowel, as in the Scottish pronunciation […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I use a word . . . The story of ough
Violet Elizabeth’s “croth-word puthle,” composed for William to solve in Richmal Crompton’s William—In Trouble (picture further below), contains two three lettered words crossing at the centre letters. The first clue […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I use a word . . . Medical logos
“Grapheme” is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as “The class of letters and other visual symbols that represent a phoneme or cluster of phonemes” and “in a given writing […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I Use a Word … Phonetic alphabets
So, there are phonemes and graphemes. A phoneme is a basic indivisible unit of sound, the linguistic atom. A grapheme is a symbol that represents a phoneme. Each grapheme in […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I Use a Word … Join the Q
Just like the grapheme /x/, which I discussed last time, the grapheme /q/ is among the symbols in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) that do not represent the sounds of […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I use a word . . . The X factor
There are symbols in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) that do not represent the sounds of letters they look like. Among these is the grapheme /x/, which does not represent […]