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Are we just making up language rules as we go?
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A collection of some classic Lemmy memes for your enjoyment
Ahh, I've been speaking english for over a decade, and I still sometimes get caught up with these and say the opposite thing of what I want
Like the whole thing of flammable and inflammable meaning the same thing.. just why?
Also "off" meaning both off and on
The alarm went off (the alarm started) The light went off (the light suddenly stopped producing light)
Went off really just means everything :3. "Wow you really went off on that guy" = yelled at someone, "the milk went off" = spoiled, "we went off on an adventure" = left to travel and so on
As a non-native English speaker I sometimes struggle with those words added after verbs: off, on, up, down, etc.
I went off my head reading this
"flammable" actually has an interesting story:
Ref: inflammable on Etymonline
So which is sanctioned...?
Merriam-Webster says this:
Personally I use "inflammable", but if I were writing warning posters I would have to reconsider that.
English-speakers are really unlucky to have one of the most ambiguous word for situations where the need for clarity is of such great importance, especially as it concerns safety, even saving lives.
:-)
I also like to reduce the likelihood of being understood.
Cuz the prefix "in-" can mean both "not" (as in invalid) and "to cause to be" (as in indebted)
But why?
Yes.
Romantic words were incorporated differently into other languages as the Roman Empire's influence spread. Words like inflammable have more direct Latin roots than words like indebt. So where Inflammable comes directy from the latin inflammo, indebt came from old French and middle English, going from something like endetter and endetten, using the root word dete and dette, but stemming from the root Latin word, debitum. Then en became in at some point.
That's how I understood it anyway through a very short amount of google searching. Anyone feel free to correct me.
As a French-speaker, it has always been my instinctual understanding from seeing the word and knowing how English has taken words from Latin and French.
Where the words come from. Remember: English is many languages in a trench coat, not really its own set of hard rules.
Hell, even languages with hard rules like Japanese have some exceptions even without the modern trend of borrowing words from other languages!
In French you can say ininflammable
Also in Italian: infiammabile
Cause the verb is inflame and means to place a flame in on on something, as opposed to not flame. The problem being in both inflammable and the issue the OP of the image is the notion of re-bracketing. Rather than think of it as [inflame]able it gets converted into in[flammable] in the minds of new readers/listeners which flips the in- prefix meaning to not rather than in/on like it is supposed to be.
Should have been enflammable
Latin
Bah! Latin. Always making everything more difficult than it needs to be