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Fields of work and science, and their practitioners

Let’s review the patterns in English fields of science and work:

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The fifteen-fifty problem

English has an irritating problem: fifty and fifteen sound almost the same, as do other pairs like sixteen and sixty. In a noisy room or via radio, miscommunication is easy, and when the listener asks the speaker to repeat themself, the second utterance is usually no more clear than the first.

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Thoughts about compounding

In Ungglish, all parts of a compound word must help give meaning to the word, and must do so in a reasonable way. The English word “sunset”, for example, is not acceptable because the word “set” does not normally mean “to go down” except when we’re talking about the sun. Ungglish almost never makes special exceptions like that, so we use “sundown” in Ungglish instead.

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Picking words for Ungglish

There are many difficulties in designing an Interlanguage based on English, because English is a messy language with numerous homonyms and ambiguities that must be removed to achieve the goals of Ungglish. Every day that I write the English-Ungglish dictionary, it seems, I encounter a fairly substantial difficulty. Generally, I think about it, plan a solution and move on, but I may later re-examine and change a decision.

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