A Figure of Speech Common in Classical Greek, Occasional in English

Greek is highly inflected, far more than English, so for classical Greek, word order is pretty flexible, and poets liked to use this figure of speech. It’s called chaismus. It means using a phrase twice, once in reverse order. Here’s an example in English. Only two words, but that’s English for you.

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What’s typical is that the word uses a Latin prefix and a Greek root. This bugs come folks.

And the word isn’t even all that simple. mono is Latin, meaning “one,” but it’s derived from the Greek monos meaning “alone.”

Lithos is Greek for “stone,” by the way. The material. The thing you can hold in your hand is petros, a rock.

Idioms are phrases in a language not meant to be taken literally. When we don’t understand something, we might say “It’s Greek to me,” whereas in Germany you’d say (in German) “It’s a Bohemian village to me.”

Here are some idioms whose meanings depend on context:

What are your favorite idioms? Feel free to put some in the comments.

This post first appeared on The Writing Rag.

Reduplication is repeating a syllable with a slight change to the vowel or to a consonant. Reduplication is how you make the present and past perfect tenses in Greek, so you probably know the word already if you studied Greek. 

We have it in English, too, but we don’t mention it (except maybe in linguistic circles). We use reduplication mainly in onomatopoetic words: tic tock, clip clop, and so on. 

Why do I mention this? I ran into an article that mentions reduplication that also mentions a topic I wrote about two or so years ago but didn’t know the source, so I’m giving credit now. 

(I wrote about ablaut a while back, too, but in a different context. In case you’re interested, it’s here. Ablaut is when you change a vowel following a pattern.)

Here’s a paragraph from the article:

You are utterly familiar with the rule of ablaut reduplication. You’ve been using it all your life. It’s just that you’ve never heard of it. But if somebody said the words zag-zig, or ‘cross-criss you would know, deep down in your loins, that they were breaking a sacred rule of language. You just wouldn’t know which one.

http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20160908-the-language-rules-we-know-but-dont-know-we-know

It’s an interesting article; I recommend you read the whole thing.

PS—sigh. Wouldn’t you know, today I ran into a comic that features ablaut reduplication.

PPS—and here’s a serious use of the word:

The name comes from Hawaiian ʻoumuamua, meaning ‘scout’ (from ʻou, meaning ‘reach out for’, and mua, reduplicated for emphasis, meaning ‘first, in advance of’), and reflects the way this object is like a scout or messenger sent from the distant past to reach out to humanity. (That apostrophe at the beginning of the name is a glottal stop, not an orphaned single quote.)

JJB JJBrearton@aol.com [astrophysig] <astrophysig@yahoogroups.com>

English, being light on inflections, uses word order a lot. Classical Greek, for example, is heavily inflected, so word order can be played with more than it can be played with in English. They even have a figure of speech called chiasmus, in which they arrange the words symmetrically in the sentence (for example, noun, adjective, adverb, verb, adverb, adjective, noun) and you use the inflections to figure out what refers to what. 

Sometimes getting the word order correct in English can be tricky. I have mentioned where “only” should go several times. (Search for “only” in the search box in the upper right corner to see some examples.)

So this Buckles comic, first panel, gets it wrong, at least in expository writing. Perhaps we’re more relaxed in conversational speech.

The rule is that adjectives go right before the word they modify, so technically, the dog is saying that it’s Paul’s good pair, not good shoes. 

Not a lot of difference there; it could go either way, and you might even make the excuse that “pair of shoes” counts as one word. Well, maybe.

But when you’re explaining something, be on the lookout for ambiguity, and avoid it.