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2012-11-24 06:13 AM +0630
TIL
TIL Grammar Glossary
B01.htm
Compiled by U Kyaw Tun (UKT), M.S. (I.P.S.T.,
U.S.A.), and staff of TIL (Tun Institute of Learning,
http://www.tuninst.net ), from various
sources. Prepared for students of TIL Computing and Language Center, Yangon,
Myanmar. Not for sale.
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GramGloss-indx.htm
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Grammar Glossary - B
Babu English
balanced sentence
base form
belief
bilingual dictionary
body
bookmark
brainstorming branching
browser
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See
pretentious writing .
From www.xrefer.com
The most pretentious form of writing is perhaps the Babu English
(also Baboo English) -- from
www.xrefer.com.
"[Late 19c: from babu, a mode of address and reference
in several Indo-Aryan languages, including Hindi, for officials working for
rajahs, landlords, etc. It became a generic term during the British Raj for
Hindu and especially Bengali officials and clerks working in English, and was
often disparaging]. A variety of South Asian English* used by middle-level
bureaucrats and associated with a flowery, extremely deferential, and indirect
style of writing and speaking. It has attracted the attention of scholars for
over a century (see Hobson-Jobson, 1886, p.44) and provided entertainment in
such works as Babu Jabberjee, BA, by Thomas Anstey Guthrie (Dent, 1898), --
Honoured Sir -- from Babujee by Cecil Hunt (Allan, 1931), and Babuji Writes
Home: Being a New Edition of 'Honoured Sir' with Many Additional Letters (Allan,
1935). The following excerpt is representative:
" 'Sir, Being in much need and suffering many
privations I have after long time come to the determination to trouble your
bounteous goodness. To my sorrow I have not the good friendships with many
people hence my slow rate of progression and destitute state. Here on earth who
have I but thee, and there is Our Father in heaven, needless to say that unless
your milk of human kindness is showered on my sad state no other hope is left in
this world (from Baboo English; or Our Mother-tongue as our Aryan brethren
understand it; Amusing specimens of Composition and Style, or English as written
by Her Majesty's Indian subjects, collected and edited by T.W.J.: Calcutta: H.P.
Kent & Co., no date: late 19c. '
" Kipling, in his novel Kim (1901), has a Bengali
character named Hurree Babu, who on one one occasion observes: ' I am of
opeenion it is not your old gentleman's precise releegion, but rather
sub-variant of same. I have contributed rejected notes to Asiatic Quarterly
Review on these subjects.' The classic parody of Babu English is to be found in
G.V. Desani's All About H. Hatterr (1948). See Hobson-Jobson, Indian English,
Indo-English [Asia Variety]. B.B.K., T.McA." -- The Oxford Companion to the
English Language, © Tom McArthur 1992.
[* UKT: Note the meanings of the following highlighted words.
"South Asia" and "South-East Asia."
"South Asia" is
another term for the subcontinent of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh -- former
India before partition in the late 1940s. "South-East Asia" is the group of
countries in Indochina peninsula: Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos,
Malaysia, Myanmar, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.]
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From LBB :
A sentence consisting of two clauses with parallel constructions:
Do as I say, not as I do.
Befriend all animals; exploit none.
Their balance makes such sentences highly emphatic. (See pp. 42324.)
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From UseE :
The Base Form is the same as the Infinitive
form, without 'to'; 'Come', 'See' etc.
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From LBH :
A conviction based on morality, values, or faith. Statements of belief
often serve as assumptions and sometimes as evidence, but they
are not arguable and so cannot serve as the thesis in an argument. (See pp. 14445.)
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From UseE :
A bilingual dictionary gives words in two languages. Each language is grouped
alphabetically in separate halves of the book, with translations into the other
language.
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From LBH :
In a piece of writing, the large central part where ideas supporting
the thesis are presented and developed.
See also conclusion introduction.
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From LBH :
In Internet use, an electronic address you save for later reference. (See p. 656.)
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From LBH :
A technique for generating ideas about a topic: concentrating on the topic for a
fixed time (say, fifteen minutes), you list every idea and detail that comes to
mind. (See pp. 2425.)
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From: Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head-final 080621
In linguistics, branching is the general tendency towards a given
order of words within sentences and smaller grammatical units within sentences
(such as subordinate propositions, prepositional phrases, etc.). Such ordering
and nesting of phrases can be represented as a tree where branches can be
divided into other minor branches, which may also branch in turn.
Languages typically construct phrases with a head (or nucleus) and
zero or more dependents (modifiers). For example, in English a noun phrase can
be constructed as follows:
noun (e.g. "people")
article + noun (e.g., "the man")
numeral + noun (e.g., "ten geographers")
article + adjective + noun (e.g., "the beautiful trees")
noun phrase + 's + noun (e.g., "the woman's eyes")
article + noun + relative clause (e.g., "the house that the crane demolished")
etc.
In a noun phrase, the head is the main noun, and the dependents are
the article, the adjective, the numeral, the genitive (-'s) noun
and the relative clause.
There are also verb phrases, prepositional phrases, etc. In
every case, the constituents are placed in a given order, which is more or less
fixed according to the language in question. Also in some cases, the dependents
can in turn be the heads of inner phrases (as in "the black cat's paws", "an
awfully messy room", etc.).
Branching is typically ordered. In English, an article can usually
only be added to a bare noun by placing it before the noun. An adjective can
usually only be added to an article-noun phrase between the article and the
noun, whereas a relative clause can only be added after the noun. The direct
object of a sentence is usually found after the verb, while the subject comes
before the verb.
UKT: A simple sentence in English has the form SVO (subject-verb-object).
E.g. Dog bites man. This should be compared to Burmese-Myanmar SOV: {hkwι:ka.
lu-ko keik-thζΡ}. -- 080621
The rules exemplified above constitute the branching tendency of the
language, which can be predominantly left-branching or right-branching.
Left-branching languages, such as Turkish, Japanese, Tamil, and
Basque tend to place dependents before heads. Adjectives precede nouns, direct
objects come before verbs, and there are postpositions. In less formal
terminology, this ordering is called head-last.
UKT: The above English sentence of the form SVO (subject-verb-object) can
be expanded into: Vicious dog bites short man. This should be compared
to Burmese-Myanmar : {hkwι-hso:ka. lu-pu.ko keik-thζΡ}. -- 080621
http://www.let.rug.nl/~zwart/docs/lin2005.pdf 080621
The sample used for this survey is a 162 language variety sample, intended to
obtain with minimal means maximal coverage of the morphosyntactic variation
across the world's languages. The data are taken from published reference
grammars. The sample includes the following languages, listed alphabetically
...: Breton, Burmese, ... Cantonese, ... Dutch, ... Japanese, ... Portuguese,
... Russian, ... Tamil.
[I am concluding from this article that Burmese is a head-final language.]
An example from Basque:
[1]Hillary Clinton [2]izan da, [3]inkestek [4]aurreikusten zutenaren
[5]kontra, [6]New Hampshireko (AEB) [7]primarioetan [8]boto-emaile
[9]demokrata [10]gehien [11]bereganatu duen [12]hautagaia.
[1]
[1]Hillary Clinton [2]was [12]the candidate who [11]got [10]the most
[9]Democratic [8]voters [7]in the primaries [6]of New Hampshire (USA),
[5]contrary [4]to what was forecast in the [3]polls.
Right-branching languages, such as Spanish, Arabic and Khmer,
tend to place dependents after heads. Adjectives follow nouns, direct objects
follow verbs, and adpositions are prepositional. This is also known as
head-first order.
For most languages, the main branching tendency is just a tendency and it
often shows exceptions. Spanish, for example, while overwhelmingly
right-branching, puts numerals before nouns and, in certain cases, objects
before verbs. Languages like English and German, though regarded as
right-branching because verbs precede direct objects and there are prepositions,
place adjectives and numerals before their nouns. Japanese and most other
languages of northeastern Asia and the Indian subcontinent, on the other
hand, are practically a model for rigidly left-branching languages. The
Mon-Khmer and Austronesian languages of southeast Asia and many African
languages come close to rigidly right-branching, with numerals as well as
adjectives following their nouns and degree words like "very", "too",
"extremely", "quite" following the adjectives they modify.
Wikipedia references
Haspelmath, Martin; Dryer, Matthew S.; Gil, David and Comrie, Bernard (eds.)
The World Atlas of Language Structures; pp . Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2005. ISBN 0-19-925591-1
Comrie, Bernard; Language universals and linguistic typology : syntax and
morphology (2nd edition): published 1989 by Basil Blackwell, Oxford,
England. ISBN 0631129715
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From LBH :
A computer program that makes it possible to search the World Wide Web. (See p. 198.)
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End of TIL file