Month: March 2009

Brain > Language Area > glitch!


I was writing earlier today, and was stuck on something that was too colloquial. So I went to a Web page that does translations.
This is why it’s odd ; I was writing in French. Yet the Web page I had loaded was for French to English translations.

So for my brain what was “colloquial French” was obviously a language different than French. And the default when I’m not writing in French seems to be English [it is the case].

I guess that explains why I loaded the French to English dictionary.

But that was not the end of it. I wrote on IRC that I was stuck with some colloquial French and that I couldn’t find any good English equivalent. A colleague offered a few silly stuff and a valid suggestion.

Only when I returned to my draft with that English suggestion did I realise that the language was French.

Odd, isn’t it?

How many times you can change the first letter of a name and still have a name?

I have been working hard and am now in much need of a break. This assignment I’m working on makes my brain hurt. So much that for the past hour, I’ve been wandering from one butterfly to the other. I may as well blog, and then go back to the assignment.

The other day on TV there was a character which name I couldn’t quite make out. She was either a “Dina” or a “Tina”. That made me think how the suffix “ina” could fit with numerous consonants:

{d,f,g,h,l,m,n,p,r,t,,}ina

“Ina” is also an existing first name.

I’ve always been somewhat interested by language stuff. However not enough to know how it is called.

I remember as a teenager how I realised with wonder that “aude” was similar to “claude” and “maude” and how all of them could be transformed into “audine”, “claudine”, “maudine” and still sound nice.