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Fields of work and science, and their practitioners
24 Apr 2017Let’s review the patterns in English fields of science and work:
The fifteen-fifty problem
23 Apr 2017English 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.
Thoughts about compounding
22 Apr 2017In 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.
Picking words for Ungglish
18 Apr 2017There 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.