I am doing good or I am doing well?
MBALOVER
if someone asks me: How are you doing?
Can I answer I am doing good? Or I have to say: I am doing well?
Thanks
tony cooper
It's a casual, and often rhetorical, question. The obvious answer to
"How are you doing?" is "Doing what?".
When someone asks you a casual question, then your reply can be as
casual as theirs. Either of the above would suffice.
--
Tony Cooper - Orlando, Florida
R H Draney
>
>if someone asks me: How are you doing?
>
>Can I answer I am doing good? Or I have to say: I am doing well?
"Doing good" means "performing good acts" such as helping the poor, saving the
environment, etc..."doing well" means "having success", such as enjoying good
health or earning lots of money....
The expression "doing well by doing good" is a cliche that means you are making
your own lot in life better as a result of your benevolent deeds...Tom Lehrer
made ironic use of this phrase to describe the character in his song "The Old
Dope Peddler"....r
--
A pessimist sees the glass as half empty.
An optometrist asks whether you see the glass
more full like this?...or like this?
Steve Hayes
wrote:
>Hi all,
>
>if someone asks me: How are you doing?
>
>Can I answer I am doing good? Or I have to say: I am doing well?
"Well" if you are a member of hoi polloi. "Good" if you are a radio or TV
announcer.
--
Steve Hayes from Tshwane, South Africa
Web: http://hayesfam.bravehost.com/stevesig.htm
Blog: http://methodius.blogspot.com
E-mail - see web page, or parse: shayes at dunelm full stop org full stop uk
Garrett Wollman
Leave out the "doing"; it sounds stilted. You can say "I'm good" if
you mean you are contented, or "I'm well" if you mean you are hale;
"Fine" can encompass both, although for many it carries a connotation
of slightly less than perfect happiness. Any other one- or
two-syllable responses of an equally casual nature would also be
appropriate.
-GAWollman
--
Garrett A. Wollman | What intellectual phenomenon can be older, or more oft
wol...@bimajority.org| repeated, than the story of a large research program
Opinions not shared by| that impaled itself upon a false central assumption
my employers. | accepted by all practitioners? - S.J. Gould, 1993
HVS
The acceptability of "I'm good" as a response to a casual "And how
are you today?" is -- or at least was -- very pondial.
Although I obviously knew the difference between "well" and "good",
the colloquial use of "I'm good" as a response was entirely
idiomatic to me when I moved here in the early 1980s. My
colleagues immediately picked me up on it, though: it clearly
struck them as an odd and very wrong usage, even when the
conversation was completely casual in tone.
I'll leave it to other BrE users to comment on wheether it's become
more acceptable since then; it's still an entirely natural and
idiomatic to my ear.
--
Cheers, Harvey
CanEng and BrEng, indiscriminately mixed
Steve Hayes
wrote:
>On Sun, 17 Jan 2010 21:15:48 -0800 (PST), MBALOVER
><mbal...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>Hi all,
>>
>>if someone asks me: How are you doing?
>>
>>Can I answer I am doing good? Or I have to say: I am doing well?
>>
>It's a casual, and often rhetorical, question. The obvious answer to
>"How are you doing?" is "Doing what?".
That's an answer (or response) to the question "What are you doing?" shirley?
"How are you doing?" is usually an enquiry about the state of one's health,
often about one's progress in recovery from an illness or operation.
Possible answers might be "Poorly", or "As well as can be expected", "Well" or
"Splendidly". "Good" would sound odd.
"I'm doing good" might mean I'm knitting sockls for Haiti earthquake survivors
or something like that.
the Omrud
It has become assimilated by the under 30s - both my children use it.
It still makes me scream inside.
--
David
Tasha Miller
I invariably hear the "How are you?" version and I respond with "Good,
thanks!", Well, thanks, and you?" or "I'm very well, thank you, and how are
you?" depending on the formality of the situation and how much breath I have
at the time. (I'm most likely to one of the short versions if I meet someone
as I'm ascending the stairs.)
The short answer is yes to both, but drop the "doing". "Good" is very
informal, though, and I suggest you stick with "well" because you can't go
wrong with that.
Athel Cornish-Bowden
> On Sun, 17 Jan 2010 21:15:48 -0800 (PST), MBALOVER <mbal...@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> if someone asks me: How are you doing?
>>
>> Can I answer I am doing good? Or I have to say: I am doing well?
>
> "Well" if you are a member of
the
> hoi polloi.
I'm aware that "hoi" is Greek for "the", but we're dealing with English
here, and you can't analyse a phrase like "hoi polloi" into its
component parts. You can't use "hoi" in English without the "polloi",
and you can't use "polloi" in English without the "hoi". By omitting
the "the" you're advertising that you are one of the elite that know
what the Greek phrase means. The SOED says "freq. w. 'the'", but I
would say "always w. 'the'".
--
athel
Athel Cornish-Bowden
I think of "I'm good", or, more often, just plain "Good", as AusE
rather than AmE. Anyway, I wouldn't say it.
--
athel
Eric Walker
> if someone asks me: How are you doing?
>
> Can I answer I am doing good? Or I have to say: I am doing well?
If you are answering with the verb--"doing"-then you need the adverbial
form: "I am doing well." Or, by elision, simply "Well." (Which is
rather brusque: "Well, thanks" is better.)
(Note that "I am doing good" would mean that you are performing deeds of
merit, "good works".)
If you choose to omit that "doing" and answer "I am [well/good]" then the
form can be either, with slightly different shades of meaning. The verb
"be" is always copulative, so what follows is a predicate adjective
describing the subject (you, in this case). If you say "I am well," you
are describing the state of your health; that is an appropriate answer if
the context of the question suggests that it is indeed your health that
is being inquired about, as, for example, if you have been ill, or seem
as if you might be falling ill. Otherwise, you would say "I'm good,"
though that has the demerit of sounding like a play in draw poker rather
than a conversational answer, and is best avoided.
Since "Well" can be elliptical both for "I am doing well" and for "I am
well," it is probably the simplest answer (again, with "thanks"
appended). Moreover, "I'm well" has, by use in just such castings,
acquired an extended sense beyond simple health to overall well-being,
another reason to prefer it as an answer.
--
Cordially,
Eric Walker, Owlcroft House
http://owlcroft.com/english/
James Hogg
Not even a pedant would talk about "members of hoi unwashed polloi".
--
James
Leslie Danks
All very well, but since I became aware at this fount of learning
that "hoi" is a definite article, "the hoi polloi" always strikes me as a
kind of bilingual stuttering.
--
Les (BrE)
Steve Hayes
If I were advertising that I know what the Greek phrase means I would have
transliterated it "i polli", rather than using the anglicised form "hoi
polloi". As you say, the dictionary allows it with or with out the (redundant)
the.
Chuck Riggs
(Garrett Wollman) wrote:
>In article <70ba2949-65f1-4cb2...@l19g2000yqb.googlegroups.com>,
>MBALOVER <mbal...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>Hi all,
>>
>>if someone asks me: How are you doing?
>>
>>Can I answer I am doing good? Or I have to say: I am doing well?
>
>Leave out the "doing"; it sounds stilted. You can say "I'm good" if
>you mean you are contented, or "I'm well" if you mean you are hale;
>"Fine" can encompass both, although for many it carries a connotation
>of slightly less than perfect happiness. Any other one- or
>two-syllable responses of an equally casual nature would also be
>appropriate.
Yes. In response to "How are you doing?", I generally say "Fine, thank
you".
--
Regards,
Chuck Riggs,
An American who lives near Dublin, Ireland and usually spells in BrE
Chuck Riggs
By saying "How are you?" most people, I think, expect a short answer,
followed by "How are you?", in return.
Pat Durkin
"R H Draney" <dado...@spamcop.net> wrote in message
news:hj122...@drn.newsguy.com...
> MBALOVER filted:
>>
>>if someone asks me: How are you doing?
>>
>>Can I answer I am doing good? Or I have to say: I am doing well?
>
> "Doing good" means "performing good acts" such as helping the poor,
> saving the
> environment, etc..."doing well" means "having success", such as
> enjoying good
> health or earning lots of money....
>
> The expression "doing well by doing good" is a cliche that means you
> are making
> your own lot in life better as a result of your benevolent
> deeds...Tom Lehrer
> made ironic use of this phrase to describe the character in his song
> "The Old
> Dope Peddler"....r
>
I seem to recall Michener making the ironic point in "Hawaii", but
don't know whom he was quoting: The missionaries went out (to the
Islands) to do good, and they did very well, indeed.
Athel Cornish-Bowden
> On Mon, 18 Jan 2010 12:35:13 +0100, Athel Cornish-Bowden
> <athe...@yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
>
>> On 2010-01-18 08:41:35 +0100, Steve Hayes <haye...@telkomsa.net> said:
>>
>>> On Sun, 17 Jan 2010 21:15:48 -0800 (PST), MBALOVER <mbal...@gmail.com>
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Hi all,
>>>>
>>>> if someone asks me: How are you doing?
>>>>
>>>> Can I answer I am doing good? Or I have to say: I am doing well?
>>>
>>> "Well" if you are a member of
>>
>> the
>>
>>> hoi polloi.
>>
>> I'm aware that "hoi" is Greek for "the", but we're dealing with English
>> here, and you can't analyse a phrase like "hoi polloi" into its
>> component parts. You can't use "hoi" in English without the "polloi",
>> and you can't use "polloi" in English without the "hoi". By omitting
>> the "the" you're advertising that you are one of the elite that know
>> what the Greek phrase means. The SOED says "freq. w. 'the'", but I
>> would say "always w. 'the'".
>
> If I were advertising that I know what the Greek phrase means I would have
> transliterated it "i polli",
That would be modern Greek, but the phrase certainly comes to us from
Classical Greek, which had diphthongs and aspirated vowels that have
disappeared from the modern language.
> rather than using the anglicised form "hoi
> polloi". As you say, the dictionary allows it with or with out the (redundant)
> the.
It's only redundant if you analyse it into its separate components,
but, as I said (and James seems to agree) you can't do that.
--
athel
James Hogg
The entry in the OED has the note:
"In English use normally preceded by the definite article even though
hoi means 'the'."
All the early examples have "the hoi polloi". The first is from Dryden,
who certainly belonged to the elite who knew the meaning of the Greek.
He even has "hoi polloi" in Greek characters.
"If by the people you understand the multitude, the hoi polloi, 'tis no
matter what they think, They are sometimes in the right and sometimes in
the wrong; their judgement is a mere lottery."
Ironic that a man pronouncing this elitist judgement uses the form
condemned by the modern elite.
--
James
Jerry Friedman
> Thus spake MBALOVER (mbalov...@gmail.com) unto the assembled multitudes:
>
> > if someone asks me: How are you doing?
> > Can I answer I am doing good? Or I have to say: I am doing well?
>
>
> In the US, people tend to answer "I'm good" or "I'm doing good" to the above
> question.
Although some of us never say either.
> In the UK, people usually answer "I'm well" or "I'm doing well".
>
> There is a big difference between "being good" and "being well", and "doing
> good" and "doing well", which is why I think the increasing use of the
> US-style "good" in UK conversation (especially on the radio, it seems) should
> be resisted at all costs.
That's also why I like the one-word "Good" better than "I'm good" or
"I'm doing good". But I still don't like it all that much. I agree
with Chuck's implication that in American English, the unobjectionable
answer is "Fine" (or "Just fine"). Also with his statement that if
the other person was the first to ask, you should ask in return.
--
Jerry Friedman
Wood Avens
<jerry_f...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>On Jan 18, 4:43�am, A.Cl...@DENTURESsussex.ac.uk wrote:
>> Thus spake MBALOVER (mbalov...@gmail.com) unto the assembled multitudes:
>>
>> > if someone asks me: How are you doing?
>> > Can I answer I am doing good? Or I have to say: I am doing well?
>> In the US, people tend to answer "I'm good" or "I'm doing good" to the above
>> question.
>
>Although some of us never say either.
>
>> In the UK, people usually answer "I'm well" or "I'm doing well".
>>
>> There is a big difference between "being good" and "being well", and "doing
>> good" and "doing well", which is why I think the increasing use of the
>> US-style "good" in UK conversation (especially on the radio, it seems) should
>> be resisted at all costs.
>
>That's also why I like the one-word "Good" better than "I'm good" or
>"I'm doing good". But I still don't like it all that much.
I confess that this difference is one of the markers of my
now-automatic switch from BrE to AmE when I'm in the US: I hear myself
replying "I'm good", which I wouldn't ever catch myself saying in the
UK.
--
Katy Jennison
spamtrap: remove the first two letters after the @
R H Draney
>
>All very well, but since I became aware at this fount of learning
>that "hoi" is a definite article, "the hoi polloi" always strikes me as a
>kind of bilingual stuttering.
Have you ever visited the La Brea tar pits?...r
James Silverton
>> On Jan 18, 4:43 am, A.Cl...@DENTURESsussex.ac.uk wrote:
>>> Thus spake MBALOVER (mbalov...@gmail.com) unto the assembled
>>> multitudes:
>>>
>> >> if someone asks me: How are you doing?
>> >> Can I answer I am doing good? Or I have to say: I am doing
>> >> well?
>>> In the US, people tend to answer "I'm good" or "I'm doing
>>> good" to the above question.
>>
>> Although some of us never say either.
>>
>>> In the UK, people usually answer "I'm well" or "I'm doing
>>> well".
>>>
>>> There is a big difference between "being good" and "being
>>> well", and "doing good" and "doing well", which is why I
>>> think the increasing use of the US-style "good" in UK
>>> conversation (especially on the radio, it seems) should be
>>> resisted at all costs.
>>
>> That's also why I like the one-word "Good" better than "I'm
>> good" or "I'm doing good". But I still don't like it all
>> that much.
> I confess that this difference is one of the markers of my
> now-automatic switch from BrE to AmE when I'm in the US: I hear
> myself replying "I'm good", which I wouldn't ever catch myself
> saying in the UK.
Mind you, a recent thread reminded me that a respectable 19th century
English clergyman wrote in King Wenceslas, "Mark my footsteps good, my
Page". I guess it depends on punctuation.
--
James Silverton
Potomac, Maryland
Email, with obvious alterations: not.jim.silverton.at.verizon.not
Adam Funk
> Not even a pedant would talk about "members of hoi unwashed polloi".
I don't remember: do adjective generally precede or follow the nouns
in Greek NPs?
--
hmmmm: sounds like the same DLL hell problem my cousin had. try
deleting all DLLs in your Windows/system32 directory and see what
happens. (Bryce Utting)
James Hogg
> On 2010-01-18, James Hogg wrote:
>
>> Not even a pedant would talk about "members of hoi unwashed polloi".
>
> I don't remember: do adjective generally precede or follow the nouns
> in Greek NPs?
It could vary; "the young horse" could be either
ho neos hippos
or
ho hippos ho neos
--
James
Steve Hayes
<athe...@yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
>On 2010-01-18 12:23:38 +0100, Steve Hayes <haye...@telkomsa.net> said:
>> If I were advertising that I know what the Greek phrase means I would have
>> transliterated it "i polli",
>
>That would be modern Greek, but the phrase certainly comes to us from
>Classical Greek, which had diphthongs and aspirated vowels that have
>disappeared from the modern language.
I wonder how we know how they pronounced them, since they didn't have digital
recorders, or even tape recorders back then
James Hogg
> On Mon, 18 Jan 2010 16:34:37 +0100, Athel Cornish-Bowden
> <athe...@yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
>
>> On 2010-01-18 12:23:38 +0100, Steve Hayes <haye...@telkomsa.net>
>> said:
>>> If I were advertising that I know what the Greek phrase means I
>>> would have transliterated it "i polli",
>> That would be modern Greek, but the phrase certainly comes to us
>> from Classical Greek, which had diphthongs and aspirated vowels
>> that have disappeared from the modern language.
>
> I wonder how we know how they pronounced them, since they didn't have
> digital recorders, or even tape recorders back then
We have to use whatever clues we have. Spelling (or misspelling) gives
plenty of hints. When people start writing the diphthong "ai" as "e"
it's a good indication that the sound had become a monophthong. That
change happened a long time ago, before the Byzantine period.
--
James
Athel Cornish-Bowden
> On Mon, 18 Jan 2010 16:34:37 +0100, Athel Cornish-Bowden
> <athe...@yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
>
>> On 2010-01-18 12:23:38 +0100, Steve Hayes <haye...@telkomsa.net> said:
>>> If I were advertising that I know what the Greek phrase means I would have
>>> transliterated it "i polli",
>>
>> That would be modern Greek, but the phrase certainly comes to us from
>> Classical Greek, which had diphthongs and aspirated vowels that have
>> disappeared from the modern language.
>
> I wonder how we know how they pronounced them, since they didn't have digital
> recorders, or even tape recorders back then
That's the sort of argument that creationists use. How do we know that
humans and dinosaurs (apart from birds) never lived together? No one
today was around then to see. How do we know that the atmosphere of
Jupiter consists mainly of hydrogen? No one has been there to have a
look. Etc. Surely you can accept that experts have ways of establishing
knowledge that go beyond obvious observation? In the case of changes in
pronunciation the basic methods are quite straightforward, as James has
indicated.
--
athel
Eric Walker
[...]
> I'm aware that "hoi" is Greek for "the", but we're dealing with English
> here, and you can't analyse a phrase like "hoi polloi" into its
> component parts. You can't use "hoi" in English without the "polloi",
> and you can't use "polloi" in English without the "hoi". By omitting the
> "the" you're advertising that you are one of the elite that know what
> the Greek phrase means. The SOED says "freq. w. 'the'", but I would say
> "always w. 'the'".
Perhaps best of all is to avoid the phrase altogether. I cannot imagine
a single person whose written or spoken prose would be lacerated by the
unavailability of this useless bit of rococo.
Where non-English terms including an article are unavoidable, as in such
names as La Brea (as someone has mentioned), the wise choice is to
present a casting that does not call for a duplicated article: "I
recently went to L.A. and had a chance to visit the famous tar pits at La
Brea." Whatever the common ear may or may not pick out, there are always
going to be at least some listeners or readers who will be either amused
or disgruntled by such forms as "pizza pie" or "Mt. Fujiyama"; it is as
well to try to please all when doing so displeases none.
James Hogg
> On Mon, 18 Jan 2010 12:35:13 +0100, Athel Cornish-Bowden wrote:
>
> [...]
>
>> I'm aware that "hoi" is Greek for "the", but we're dealing with
>> English here, and you can't analyse a phrase like "hoi polloi" into
>> its component parts. You can't use "hoi" in English without the
>> "polloi", and you can't use "polloi" in English without the "hoi".
>> By omitting the "the" you're advertising that you are one of the
>> elite that know what the Greek phrase means. The SOED says "freq.
>> w. 'the'", but I would say "always w. 'the'".
>
> Perhaps best of all is to avoid the phrase altogether. I cannot
> imagine a single person whose written or spoken prose would be
> lacerated by the unavailability of this useless bit of rococo.
Another reason for avoiding it is that some people interpret it to mean
exactly the opposite of the original sense: they think that mixing with
the hoi polloi means rubbing shoulders with the hoity-toity or the high
and mighty.
--
James
Steve Hayes
Ah, of course. The "experts".
But I suspect that the spectrographs etc that tell you about the composition
of the atmosphere of Jupiter will tell you less than nothing about the way
people pronounced words 500, 1000, 1500, 2000, 2500 years ago. The way people
know one thing is not necessarily the same as the way they know another thing,
and those seem very strange analogies to me.
Perhaps fossilised dinosaur laryxes will tell you something about how they
pronounced ancient Greek, or whatever languages they spoke, but the ancient
Greeks were moderrn humans, and their larynxes probably did not differ all
that much from ours, so finding their fossilised remains won't tell us much
about their pronunciation.
Western notions of ancient Greek pronunciation have varied according to the
native languages of the countries concerned, and have changed in accordance
with the native languages of the teachers of Greek in various countries.
Do we know how Chaucer pronouced English? Do we know how Shakespeare did?
Do performers of Shakespeare's plays use the pronunciation that was inuse in
Shakespeare's time, or that experts THINK may have been in use in
Shakespeare's time?
The English borrowed "hoi polloi" (or "the hoi polloi" if you prefer), and
pronounced it to rhyme with the English "oi" in "boil". But other Greek words
were transcribed into the Latin alphabet using the ligature oe for the Greek
ommicron iota, and are not necessarily pronounced with the "oi" in "boil".
If this pronunciation is pre-Byzantine, then saying "Ah, but it is modern" is
a bit silly, because it predates ANY kind of English, anicent, middle, or
modern.
Stan Brown
<haye...@telkomsa.net>:
> If I were advertising that I know what the Greek phrase means I would have
> transliterated it "i polli"
HUH?? The plural definite article is "oi" with a rough breathing,
pronounced and transliterated "hoi". And the ending is -oi. Where
do you get "i polli"?
--
Stan Brown, Oak Road Systems, Tompkins County, New York, USA
http://OakRoadSystems.com
Shikata ga nai...
Stan Brown
<acor...@ibsm.cnrs-mrs.fr>:
> That's the sort of argument that creationists use. How do we know
> that humans and dinosaurs (apart from birds) never lived together?
A creationist would not say "dinosaurs (apart from birds)" because a
creationist would deny that birds are (descended from) dinosaurs.
:-)
Stan Brown
<Jas....@gOUTmail.com>:
> Not even a pedant would talk about "members of hoi unwashed polloi".
But it's such a lovely turn of phrase! Now that you've put it in my
head it seems a pity that I can't use it.
Stan Brown
>
> Leslie Danks filted:
> >
> >All very well, but since I became aware at this fount of learning
> >that "hoi" is a definite article, "the hoi polloi" always strikes me as a
> >kind of bilingual stuttering.
>
> Have you ever visited the La Brea tar pits?...r
They're near the Los Angeles airport, aren't they?
And wasn't the burning of the La Paloma an important plot point in
/The Maltese Falcon/?
HVS
> 18 Jan 2010 13:05:54 -0800 from R H Draney
> <dado...@spamcop.net>:
>>
>> Leslie Danks filted:
>>>
>>> All very well, but since I became aware at this fount of
>>> learning that "hoi" is a definite article, "the hoi polloi"
>>> always strikes me as a kind of bilingual stuttering.
>>
>> Have you ever visited the La Brea tar pits?...r
>
> They're near the Los Angeles airport, aren't they?
Is that anywhwere near the Sierra Nevada mountains?
--
Cheers, Harvey
CanEng and BrEng, indiscriminately mixed
James Hogg
> Mon, 18 Jan 2010 13:23:38 +0200 from Steve Hayes
> <haye...@telkomsa.net>:
>> If I were advertising that I know what the Greek phrase means I would have
>> transliterated it "i polli"
>
> HUH?? The plural definite article is "oi" with a rough breathing,
> pronounced and transliterated "hoi". And the ending is -oi. Where
> do you get "i polli"?
Byzantine Greek onwards.
--
James
James Hogg
> Mon, 18 Jan 2010 13:30:50 +0100 from James Hogg
> <Jas....@gOUTmail.com>:
>
>> Not even a pedant would talk about "members of hoi unwashed polloi".
>
> But it's such a lovely turn of phrase! Now that you've put it in my
> head it seems a pity that I can't use it.
Feel free, I won't stop you. It's in the public domain.
--
James
James Hogg
> On 19 Jan 2010, Stan Brown wrote
>
>> 18 Jan 2010 13:05:54 -0800 from R H Draney
>> <dado...@spamcop.net>:
>>> Leslie Danks filted:
>>>> All very well, but since I became aware at this fount of
>>>> learning that "hoi" is a definite article, "the hoi polloi"
>>>> always strikes me as a kind of bilingual stuttering.
>>> Have you ever visited the La Brea tar pits?...r
>> They're near the Los Angeles airport, aren't they?
>
> Is that anywhwere near the Sierra Nevada mountains?
That's not quite so tautological. The name means "snowy saw".
--
James
Peter Duncanson (BrE)
wrote:
Or even in the hoi polloi domain.
--
Peter Duncanson, UK
(in alt.usage.english)
Athel Cornish-Bowden
> On Tue, 19 Jan 2010 09:00:12 +0100, Athel Cornish-Bowden
> <acor...@ibsm.cnrs-mrs.fr> wrote:
>
>> On 2010-01-19 05:42:42 +0100, Steve Hayes <haye...@telkomsa.net> said:
>>
>>> On Mon, 18 Jan 2010 16:34:37 +0100, Athel Cornish-Bowden
>>> <athe...@yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
>>>
>>>> On 2010-01-18 12:23:38 +0100, Steve Hayes <haye...@telkomsa.net> said:
>>>>> If I were advertising that I know what the Greek phrase means I would have
>>>>> transliterated it "i polli",
>>>>
>>>> That would be modern Greek, but the phrase certainly comes to us from
>>>> Classical Greek, which had diphthongs and aspirated vowels that have
>>>> disappeared from the modern language.
>>>
>>> I wonder how we know how they pronounced them, since they didn't have digital
>>> recorders, or even tape recorders back then
>>
>> That's the sort of argument that creationists use. How do we know that
>> humans and dinosaurs (apart from birds) never lived together? No one
>> today was around then to see. How do we know that the atmosphere of
>> Jupiter consists mainly of hydrogen? No one has been there to have a
>> look. Etc. Surely you can accept that experts have ways of establishing
>> knowledge that go beyond obvious observation? In the case of changes in
>> pronunciation the basic methods are quite straightforward, as James has
>> indicated.
>
> Ah, of course. The "experts".
Hmm. Maybe you really are a creationist. Until now I've tended to feel
that Rey's opinion verged on the exaggerated, but now I wonder.
>
> But I suspect that the spectrographs etc that tell you about the composition
> of the atmosphere of Jupiter will tell you less than nothing about the way
> people pronounced words 500, 1000, 1500, 2000, 2500 years ago. The way people
> know one thing is not necessarily the same as the way they know another thing,
> and those seem very strange analogies to me.
Is this supposed to be sarcastic or even, god help us, amusing? It isn't.
>
> Perhaps fossilised dinosaur laryxes will tell you something about how they
> pronounced ancient Greek, or whatever languages they spoke, but the ancient
> Greeks were moderrn humans, and their larynxes probably did not differ all
> that much from ours, so finding their fossilised remains won't tell us much
> about their pronunciation.
Ditto.
>
> Western notions of ancient Greek pronunciation have varied according to the
> native languages of the countries concerned, and have changed in accordance
> with the native languages of the teachers of Greek in various countries.
Who said otherwise?
>
> Do we know how Chaucer pronouced English? Do we know how Shakespeare did?
Personally, no, I don't (though I'm not wholly ignorant about it
either), but there are certainly people who have a very good idea, and
have a good basis for it.
>
> Do performers of Shakespeare's plays use the pronunciation that was inuse in
> Shakespeare's time, or that experts THINK may have been in use in
> Shakespeare's time?
>
> The English borrowed "hoi polloi" (or "the hoi polloi" if you prefer), and
> pronounced it to rhyme with the English "oi" in "boil". But other Greek words
> were transcribed into the Latin alphabet using the ligature oe for the Greek
> ommicron iota, and are not necessarily pronounced with the "oi" in "boil".
So?
The argument is not over whether classical οι had the same sound as
"oi" in "boil", but over whether it was a diphthong, or a monophthong
as in Modern Greek. Would anyone who is not a complete idiot maintain
that all of the five ways of representing the sound of οι in modern
Greek (or a lot more than five if we take account of accents and
breathings) have always represented exactly the same monophthong? In
other words, we assume that when the spelling system was adopted its
originators just thought it would be fun to have lots of different ways
of representing the same sound?
Basically the same applies to breathings: why bother with both ὁ and ὀ
if they always represented exactly the same sound, as they do in Modern
Greek (which has within living memory stopped writing them differently)?
>
> If this pronunciation is pre-Byzantine, then saying "Ah, but it is modern" is
> a bit silly, because it predates ANY kind of English, anicent, middle, or
> modern.
Did anyone say that?
--
athel
Adam Funk
> Leslie Danks filted:
>>
>>All very well, but since I became aware at this fount of learning
>>that "hoi" is a definite article, "the hoi polloi" always strikes me as a
>>kind of bilingual stuttering.
>
> Have you ever visited the La Brea tar pits?...r
No, but I've been to a restaurant called "La Alhambra".
--
And remember, while you're out there risking your life and limb
through shot and shell, we'll be in be in here thinking what a
sucker you are. [Rufus T. Firefly]
Adam Funk
Well then, "hoi unwashed polloi" is OK ... as is "hoi polloi the
unwashed".
--
Steve: Now, okay. I did say that monkeys could program Visual Basic.
Leo: But not that all Visual Basic programmers are monkeys.
Steve: Exactly. [Security Now 194]
Evan Kirshenbaum
> On Mon, 18 Jan 2010 16:34:37 +0100, Athel Cornish-Bowden
> <athe...@yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
>
>>On 2010-01-18 12:23:38 +0100, Steve Hayes <haye...@telkomsa.net> said:
>>> If I were advertising that I know what the Greek phrase means I
>>> would have transliterated it "i polli",
>>
>>That would be modern Greek, but the phrase certainly comes to us
>>from Classical Greek, which had diphthongs and aspirated vowels that
>>have disappeared from the modern language.
>
> I wonder how we know how they pronounced them, since they didn't
> have digital recorders, or even tape recorders back then
There are actually quite a number of tools available. Poetry, you a
lot about phonology through rhyme, alliteration, and stress patterns.
Common misspelling cue you in to homonyms. Puns can do likewise.
Representations of people speaking in non-standard dialects can tell
you the differences that standard-dialect people noticed (and thus
ruling those pronunciations out for the standard). You have
contemporaneous descriptions of the language or words from it in other
languages. And you may have slightly later usage commentators
complaining about how the language is going to hell and noting how
words used to be pronounced.
With enough of that, you can get a pretty clear picture of how a
language was pronounced. Even without it, there's a lot you can do if
you have a set of dialects that are posited to all have the dialect
you're concerned with as an ancestor. This is because there appear to
be rules for the way systemmatic phonetic shifts happen. Except,
perhaps, in sufficiently common words, all instances of the same
phoneme in the same context will move at the same time. And changes
tend to happen a feature at a time (e.g., gaining or losing voicing or
nasality, or moving from one place to another without changing those
attributes) rather than jumping around the phonemic inventory. Given
a set of eight or ten modern languages/dialects that derived from a
common ancestor, it's usually pretty straightforward to derive a
"most-parsimonious" tree of single changes and branches that get you
there from the ancestor and, thereby, tell you what the ancestor most
probably sounded like.
For a language as well-studied as Greek (and one with as much written
legacy), I would be very surprised if there wasn't good reason for
experts to confidently assert that they knew how the language
sounded. And for them to be almost entirely correct.
--
Evan Kirshenbaum +------------------------------------
HP Laboratories |Society in every state is a blessing,
1501 Page Mill Road, 1U, MS 1141 |but government, even in its best
Palo Alto, CA 94304 |state is but a necessary evil; in its
|worst state, an intolerable one.
kirsh...@hpl.hp.com | Thomas Paine
(650)857-7572
Steve Hayes
wrote:
>Mon, 18 Jan 2010 13:23:38 +0200 from Steve Hayes
><haye...@telkomsa.net>:
>> If I were advertising that I know what the Greek phrase means I would have
>> transliterated it "i polli"
>
>HUH?? The plural definite article is "oi" with a rough breathing,
>pronounced and transliterated "hoi". And the ending is -oi. Where
>do you get "i polli"?
From Greek.
Ever heard of economics?
Comes from Greek "oikos" hour and "nomos", law.
oikos transcribed oekos, and pronounced ikos.
Or do you say "oyconomics"?
The rough breathing got dropped way back, as it did with Americans when they
say "herbs".
Steve Hayes
wrote:
>Mon, 18 Jan 2010 13:30:50 +0100 from James Hogg
><Jas....@gOUTmail.com>:
>
>> Not even a pedant would talk about "members of hoi unwashed polloi".
>
>But it's such a lovely turn of phrase! Now that you've put it in my
>head it seems a pity that I can't use it.
Nothing stopping you, is there?
You could even substitute aplenete, or whatever it is in Greek.
James Hogg
> On Tue, 19 Jan 2010 06:25:55 -0500, Stan Brown
> <the_sta...@fastmail.fm> wrote:
>
>> Mon, 18 Jan 2010 13:23:38 +0200 from Steve Hayes
>> <haye...@telkomsa.net>:
>>> If I were advertising that I know what the Greek phrase means I
>>> would have transliterated it "i polli"
>> HUH?? The plural definite article is "oi" with a rough breathing,
>> pronounced and transliterated "hoi". And the ending is -oi. Where
>> do you get "i polli"?
>
> From Greek.
>
> Ever heard of economics?
>
> Comes from Greek "oikos" hour and "nomos", law.
>
> oikos transcribed oekos, and pronounced ikos.
>
> Or do you say "oyconomics"?
Nobody says that because we didn't get the word directly from the
ancient Greek. It entered English via Middle French forms spelt in
various ways ("yconomique, iconomique, oecunomique") but never prononced
with a diphthong /oi/. Latin "oe" had ceased to be a diphthong long
before it developed into French.
> The rough breathing got dropped way back, as it did with Americans
> when they say "herbs".
The Americans didn't drop the "h" in "herb" because it was never there
for them to drop. It's the British who started to pronounce the "h"
because it was in the written form of the word that became standard.
John Donne still wrote "an Hearb"; before him Caxton wrote "an erbe".
--
James
Jerry Friedman
> HVS wrote:
> > On 19 Jan 2010, Stan Brown wrote
>
> >> 18 Jan 2010 13:05:54 -0800 from R H Draney
> >>> Leslie Danks filted:
> >>>> All very well, but since I became aware at this fount of
> >>>> learning that "hoi" is a definite article, "the hoi polloi"
> >>>> always strikes me as a kind of bilingual stuttering.
> >>> Have you ever visited the La Brea tar pits?...r
> >> They're near the Los Angeles airport, aren't they?
>
> > Is that anywhwere near the Sierra Nevada mountains?
>
> That's not quite so tautological. The name means "snowy saw".
But also "snowy mountain range".
--
Jerry Friedman
Athel Cornish-Bowden
> [ ...]
> The rough breathing got dropped way back,
1982 (officially, or 1970s in everyday practice). That's not what I'd
call way back, especially for a language with written records going
back millennia.
--
athel
James Hogg
Steve is talking about pronunciation whereas you are talking about spelling.
--
James
Mike Lyle
> On 2010-01-18 10:36:19 +0100, the Omrud
> <usenet...@gEXPUNGEmail.com> said:
>> On 18/01/2010 08:54, HVS wrote:
>>> On 18 Jan 2010, tony cooper wrote
>>>
>>>> On Sun, 17 Jan 2010 21:15:48 -0800 (PST), MBALOVER
>>>> <mbal...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> Hi all,
>>>>>
>>>>> if someone asks me: How are you doing?
>>>>>
>>>>> Can I answer I am doing good? Or I have to say: I am doing
>>>>> well?
>>>>>
>>>> It's a casual, and often rhetorical, question. The obvious
>>>> answer to "How are you doing?" is "Doing what?".
>>>>
>>>> When someone asks you a casual question, then your reply can be
>>>> as casual as theirs. Either of the above would suffice.
>>>
>>> The acceptability of "I'm good" as a response to a casual "And how
>>> are you today?" is -- or at least was -- very pondial.
>>>
>>> Although I obviously knew the difference between "well" and "good",
>>> the colloquial use of "I'm good" as a response was entirely
>>> idiomatic to me when I moved here in the early 1980s. My
>>> colleagues immediately picked me up on it, though: it clearly
>>> struck them as an odd and very wrong usage, even when the
>>> conversation was completely casual in tone.
>>>
>>> I'll leave it to other BrE users to comment on wheether it's become
>>> more acceptable since then; it's still an entirely natural and
>>> idiomatic to my ear.
>>
>> It has become assimilated by the under 30s - both my children use it.
>> It still makes me scream inside.
>
> I think of "I'm good", or, more often, just plain "Good", as AusE
> rather than AmE. Anyway, I wouldn't say it.
It's horrible: to my mind it belongs with that other wince-maker, "Can I
get..?" meaning "May I have..?" And of course somebody has already
pointed out that "to do good" is a mile away from "to do well" in
standard English.
--
Mike.
Mike Lyle
[...]
>
> Not even a pedant would talk about "members of hoi unwashed polloi".
But you have to admit, it's tempting... Maybe I'll one day have an
excuse to ask some unfortunate the way to the exeo, or, if not alone,
then the eximus.
--
Mike.
Steve Hayes
<athe...@yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
I was just wondering aloud what your analogies were supposed to be - how can
we use the same means that we use to discover the atmosphere of Jupiter in
order to determine the way people pronounced ancient languages 2000 years ago?
What were you thinking of when you said that?
It sounded like something out of one of those "theatre of the absurd" plays
But never mind. It's neither well nor good, just incomprehensible.
Mike Lyle
Sadly, from an a.u.e. point of view, Torpenhow isn't as good as it used
to be.
--
Mike.
Steve Hayes
wrote:
Well yes, but none of those methods bear any resemblance to those used to
dertermine the composition of the atmosphere of Jupiter.
And in spite of what some say about the evils of Wikipedia there are some
quite informative articles here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pronunciation_of_Ancient_Greek_in_teaching
and here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Greek_phonology
Steve Hayes
Along with katherevousa (which departed with the Colonels, I believe)?
John Varela
wrote:
> In the US, people tend to answer "I'm good" or "I'm doing good" to the above
> question.
Today I heard my wife on the telephone respond "I'm good."
--
John Varela
Trade NEWlamps for OLDlamps for email
Steve Hayes
This discussion really has taken a bizarre turn.
Athel calls me a "creationist" because I think that chemistry, paleontology
and phonology are separate disciplines, and that chemistry and paleontology
cannot tell us how ancient languages are pronounced.
I noted that in this country radio and TV announcers tend to respond to the
question "How are you doing?" with "good", while ordinary people say "well"
(or "OK" or "fine"). I used the term "hoi polloi", which was a bit of a dig at
the radio and TV announcers thinking themselves a bit above the common herd.
I said "hoi polloi" not "the hoi polloi". I also tend to say "PIN" rather than
"PIN number" and "ATM" rather than "ATM machine". We've discussed those things
often enough here in the past.
And suddenly there is this demand that we pronounce Greek words according to
some hypothetical pronunciation of thousands of years ago. Why?
How do you pronounce the English word "knight"? Should we pronounce it along
the lines of the German "knecht", just because the English pronunciation may
have been closer to that a thousand years ago?
The Greeks pronounce "hoi polloi" as "i polli" and they've done so for
hundreds of years. Objecting that that is "modern Greek" is as silly as
objecting that pronouncing "knight" like "nite" is "modern English". Of course
it is. Perhaps we should be pronouncing "light" like the Dutch "licht",
because that might be closer to ancient English -- but what would be the
point, in English or in Greek?
One thing that we do know is that there were different dialects of ancient
Greek, and that they had different pronunciations, perhaps as different as
Geordie, Alabama and New South Wales varieties of English. Much of the
surviving literature from earliest periods is in the Attic dialect, but the
spoken language as we have it today probably came from one of the other
dialects, or a mixture of them, when, as is the case today, it was the lingua
franca of the Near East, and there werre many non-native speakers.
Arbitrarily insisting on using a hypothetical reconstruction of the
pronunciation of one dialect in one period -- about 2500 years ago -- seems
very strange to me.
Skitt
> A.C...@DENTURESsussex.ac.uk wrote:
>> In the US, people tend to answer "I'm good" or "I'm doing good" to
>> the above question.
>
> Today I heard my wife on the telephone respond "I'm good."
Well, she might be. You should know.
--
Skitt (AmE)
James Hogg
All well and good, but the fact is that the "hoi polloi" we are
discussing here is not the Ancient Greek or the Modern Greek phrase but
the English idiom. You can pronounce it "i polli" if you like, but at
the risk that only speakers of Modern Greek will understand you.
--
James
Skitt
> Steve Hayes wrote:
I'm at a loss here. How is Steve pronouncing the "i"? The Greek way or the
English way. There is a vast difference between the English way (diphthong,
like in the word "I") and that of most other languages (like in "pit"), you
know.
--
Skitt (AmE)
Athel Cornish-Bowden
> On Tue, 19 Jan 2010 19:20:35 +0100, James Hogg <Jas....@gOUTmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Athel Cornish-Bowden wrote:
>>> On 2010-01-19 17:42:18 +0100, Steve Hayes <haye...@telkomsa.net> said:
>>>
>>>> [ ...]
>>>
>>>> The rough breathing got dropped way back,
>>>
>>> 1982 (officially, or 1970s in everyday practice). That's not what I'd
>>> call way back, especially for a language with written records going back
>>> millennia.
>>
>> Steve is talking about pronunciation whereas you are talking about spelling.
>
> This discussion really has taken a bizarre turn.
>
> Athel calls me a "creationist"
I called you no such thing. I said that you were using the sort of
argument that creationists use.
> because I think that chemistry, paleontology
> and phonology are separate disciplines, and that chemistry and paleontology
> cannot tell us how ancient languages are pronounced.
No one said they could. Have you never come across the notion of an analogy?
>
> I noted that in this country radio and TV announcers tend to respond to the
> question "How are you doing?" with "good", while ordinary people say "well"
> (or "OK" or "fine"). I used the term "hoi polloi", which was a bit of a dig at
> the radio and TV announcers thinking themselves a bit above the common herd.
>
> I said "hoi polloi" not "the hoi polloi". I also tend to say "PIN" rather than
> "PIN number" and "ATM" rather than "ATM machine". We've discussed those things
> often enough here in the past.
>
> And suddenly there is this demand that we pronounce Greek words according to
> some hypothetical pronunciation of thousands of years ago. Why?
Again, you are totally distorting. No one said you should pronounce
Greek in the way it was pronounced 2000 years ago. The point was
whether you should treat the English phrase "hoi polloi" as if it were
being uttered by a modern Greek.
>
> How do you pronounce the English word "knight"? Should we pronounce it along
> the lines of the German "knecht", just because the English pronunciation may
> have been closer to that a thousand years ago?
No one said otherwise.
>
> The Greeks pronounce "hoi polloi" as "i polli" and they've done so for
> hundreds of years.
Right, but we didn't get the phrase from your friends in the Greek
Orthodox Church. It was invented in the 19th century by people who had
a classical education, and who certainly pronounced the h as an h and
the oi as a diphthong. Try to get it into your head that it's an
_English_ phrase and that this is a group where we discuss English
usage.
> Objecting that that is "modern Greek" is as silly as
> objecting that pronouncing "knight" like "nite" is "modern English". Of course
> it is. Perhaps we should be pronouncing "light" like the Dutch "licht",
> because that might be closer to ancient English -- but what would be the
> point, in English or in Greek?
>
> One thing that we do know is that there were different dialects of ancient
> Greek, and that they had different pronunciations, perhaps as different as
> Geordie, Alabama and New South Wales varieties of English. Much of the
> surviving literature from earliest periods is in the Attic dialect, but the
> spoken language as we have it today probably came from one of the other
> dialects, or a mixture of them, when, as is the case today, it was the lingua
> franca of the Near East, and there werre many non-native speakers.
>
> Arbitrarily insisting on using a hypothetical reconstruction of the
> pronunciation of one dialect in one period -- about 2500 years ago -- seems
> very strange to me.
Nobody except you is pretending that anyone is insisting on this.
--
athel
James Hogg
The Modern Greek sounds like "ee polEE".
--
James
Athel Cornish-Bowden
> On Tue, 19 Jan 2010 19:15:04 +0100, Athel Cornish-Bowden
> <athe...@yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
>
>> On 2010-01-19 17:42:18 +0100, Steve Hayes <haye...@telkomsa.net> said:
>>
>>> [ ...]
>>
>>> The rough breathing got dropped way back,
>>
>> 1982 (officially, or 1970s in everyday practice). That's not what I'd
>> call way back, especially for a language with written records going
>> back millennia.
>
> Along with katherevousa (which departed with the Colonels, I believe)?
And your point is...? Does establishing your liberal credentials mean
that you can call 1982 "way back"? In any case, if memory serves the
colonels departed around 1974, well before the breathings were
officially dropped. Anyway, isn't it "katharevousa"? Although lots of
vowels share the same sound alpha and epsilon are not among them.
--
athel
James Hogg
He's not a purist when it comes to spelling.
--
James
HVS
> Jerry Friedman wrote:
>> On Jan 19, 4:58 am, James Hogg <Jas.H...@gOUTmail.com> wrote:
>>> HVS wrote:
>>>> On 19 Jan 2010, Stan Brown wrote
>>>>> 18 Jan 2010 13:05:54 -0800 from R H Draney
>>>>>> Have you ever visited the La Brea tar pits?...r
>>>>> They're near the Los Angeles airport, aren't they?
>>>
>>>> Is that anywhwere near the Sierra Nevada mountains?
>>>
>>> That's not quite so tautological. The name means "snowy saw".
>>
>> But also "snowy mountain range".
>
> Sadly, from an a.u.e. point of view, Torpenhow isn't as good as
> it used to be.
Perhaps we could rename it as the "Torpenhow Sierra Hills"?
--
Cheers, Harvey
CanEng and BrEng, indiscriminately mixed
HVS
>> I think of "I'm good", or, more often, just plain "Good", as
>> AusE rather than AmE. Anyway, I wouldn't say it.
>
> It's horrible: to my mind it belongs with that other
> wince-maker, "Can I get..?" meaning "May I have..?"
One NA/BrE difference I always have to catch myself on is when
ordering a number of drinks at the bar, and saying "I need a pint of
X, a pint of Y, and a half of Z".
AFAICT, the "I need..." rather than "I would like..." construction is
still alien in standard BrE; it's entirely idiomatic to me, though.
R H Draney
>
>On 2010-01-18, R H Draney wrote:
>
>> Leslie Danks filted:
>>>
>>>All very well, but since I became aware at this fount of learning
>>>that "hoi" is a definite article, "the hoi polloi" always strikes me as a
>>>kind of bilingual stuttering.
>>
>
Moor's the pity....r
--
A pessimist sees the glass as half empty.
An optometrist asks whether you see the glass
more full like this?...or like this?
D. Stussy
news:hj1hga$f3i$1...@south.jnrs.ja.net...
> Thus spake MBALOVER (mbal...@gmail.com) unto the assembled multitudes:
>
> > if someone asks me: How are you doing?
>
> > Can I answer I am doing good? Or I have to say: I am doing well?
>
>
> In the US, people tend to answer "I'm good" or "I'm doing good" to the
above
> question.
Which is completely wrong, and I'm in The States.
"Doing good" is WHAT one is doing.
"Doing well" is HOW one is doing - especially one's health. As this is
what was asked, "doing well" is the only appropriate answer.
I wonder how much of this was from the influence of German-speaking
immigrants to the U.S. from the 1850's onward. In German, there is no
inflection spelling difference between adjectival and adverbial forms -
thus leading to the substitution of adverbial forms by adjectival forms
(usually seen by dropping -ly for regular adverbs).
> In the UK, people usually answer "I'm well" or "I'm doing well".
>
> There is a big difference between "being good" and "being well", and
"doing
> good" and "doing well", which is why I think the increasing use of the
> US-style "good" in UK conversation (especially on the radio, it seems)
should
> be resisted at all costs.
It should be resisted in the U.S. also. For me, it is a sign of ignorance.
Mark Brader
> One NA/BrE difference I always have to catch myself on is when
> ordering a number of drinks at the bar, and saying "I need a pint of
> X, a pint of Y, and a half of Z".
>
> AFAICT, the "I need..." rather than "I would like..." construction is
> still alien in standard BrE; it's entirely idiomatic to me, though.
Really! To me it's only something that one staff member would say
to another.
--
Mark Brader | "To call the characters cardboard is
Toronto | to insult a useful packing material."
m...@vex.net | --Roger Ebert
Eric Walker
> <A.C...@DENTURESsussex.ac.uk> wrote in message
> news:hj1hga$f3i$1...@south.jnrs.ja.net...
[...]
>> In the US, people tend to answer "I'm good" or "I'm doing good" to the
>> above question.
>
> Which is completely wrong, and I'm in The States.
>
> "Doing good" is WHAT one is doing.
>
> "Doing well" is HOW one is doing - especially one's health. As this is
> what was asked, "doing well" is the only appropriate answer. . . .
Have a care as to the actual answer being offered: there is a world of
difference between "I'm doing good" and the simple "I'm good." Since
"be" is copulative, the "good" in "I'm good" is simply an adjective. As
the AHD notes, "well" as an adjective applied to people "usually refers
to a state of health." Thus, one would only answer "I'm well" if the
inquiry was, or would reasonably be interpreted as being, about the
subject's health.
The exact question the OP put forth for response was "How are you
doing?" That does not sound much like an inquiry after the subject's
state of health. ("How are you?" could be so taken, but even then is not
likely to be unless the subject is known to have been ailing recently.)
Of course, it remains so that "I'm doing good" is defective except in
certain rare (and contextually obvious) situations.
--
Cordially,
Eric Walker, Owlcroft House
http://owlcroft.com/english/
Stan Brown
<haye...@telkomsa.net>:> > [quoted text muted]
> >
> >HUH?? The plural definite article is "oi" with a rough breathing,
> >pronounced and transliterated "hoi". And the ending is -oi. Where
> >do you get "i polli"?
>
> From Greek.
Not the Greek I studied, which was Attic. Did you study some odd
dialect, or are you talking about modern Greek, about which I know
next to nothing?
--
Stan Brown, Oak Road Systems, Tompkins County, New York, USA
http://OakRoadSystems.com
Shikata ga nai...
Steve Hayes
>I'm at a loss here. How is Steve pronouncing the "i"? The Greek way or the
>English way. There is a vast difference between the English way (diphthong,
>like in the word "I") and that of most other languages (like in "pit"), you
>know.
"i polli" represents the Greek pronunciation.
Like the "i" in machine.
Steve Hayes
<acor...@ibsm.cnrs-mrs.fr> wrote:
>On 2010-01-19 22:10:22 +0100, Steve Hayes <haye...@telkomsa.net> said:
>
>> On Tue, 19 Jan 2010 19:20:35 +0100, James Hogg <Jas....@gOUTmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Athel Cornish-Bowden wrote:
>>>> On 2010-01-19 17:42:18 +0100, Steve Hayes <haye...@telkomsa.net> said:
>>>>
>>>>> [ ...]
>>>>
>>>>> The rough breathing got dropped way back,
>>>>
>>>> 1982 (officially, or 1970s in everyday practice). That's not what I'd
>>>> call way back, especially for a language with written records going back
>>>> millennia.
>>>
>>> Steve is talking about pronunciation whereas you are talking about spelling.
>>
>> This discussion really has taken a bizarre turn.
>>
>> Athel calls me a "creationist"
>
>I called you no such thing. I said that you were using the sort of
>argument that creationists use.
>
>> because I think that chemistry, paleontology
>> and phonology are separate disciplines, and that chemistry and paleontology
>> cannot tell us how ancient languages are pronounced.
>
>No one said they could. Have you never come across the notion of an analogy?
If you read what I had written, you would known that I had said that I thought
those were bad analogies. Does that give you a clue about whether I have come
across the notion of an analogy? Why would I use the word if I hadn't?
A better analogy might be that we know the pronunciation of ancient Greek as
we know the colour of dinosaur skins.
>> I noted that in this country radio and TV announcers tend to respond to the
>> question "How are you doing?" with "good", while ordinary people say "well"
>> (or "OK" or "fine"). I used the term "hoi polloi", which was a bit of a dig at
>> the radio and TV announcers thinking themselves a bit above the common herd.
>>
>> I said "hoi polloi" not "the hoi polloi". I also tend to say "PIN" rather than
>> "PIN number" and "ATM" rather than "ATM machine". We've discussed those things
>> often enough here in the past.
>>
>> And suddenly there is this demand that we pronounce Greek words according to
>> some hypothetical pronunciation of thousands of years ago. Why?
>
>Again, you are totally distorting. No one said you should pronounce
>Greek in the way it was pronounced 2000 years ago. The point was
>whether you should treat the English phrase "hoi polloi" as if it were
>being uttered by a modern Greek.
Oh, was that point in dispute?
Did anyone say that it SHOULD be pronounced the Greek way?
>> How do you pronounce the English word "knight"? Should we pronounce it along
>> the lines of the German "knecht", just because the English pronunciation may
>> have been closer to that a thousand years ago?
>
>No one said otherwise.
>>
>> The Greeks pronounce "hoi polloi" as "i polli" and they've done so for
>> hundreds of years.
>
>Right, but we didn't get the phrase from your friends in the Greek
>Orthodox Church. It was invented in the 19th century by people who had
>a classical education, and who certainly pronounced the h as an h and
>the oi as a diphthong. Try to get it into your head that it's an
>_English_ phrase and that this is a group where we discuss English
>usage.
Did anyone say that it wasn't?
I said that if I were trying to show that I knew the Greek origin of the
phrase, I would have written it "i polli" to represent the way that the Greeks
say it. But I wrote "hoi polloi" as an English phrase, to indicate which group
of people did not say "good" in response to the question "How are you doing?"
Steve Hayes
My point is that I don't understand your point.
I haven't a clue when the Greeks stopped pronouncing the `, roughly equivalent
to the English letter h, though I'm sure it was longer ago than 1982.
Steve Hayes
wrote:
>Tue, 19 Jan 2010 18:42:18 +0200 from Steve Hayes
><haye...@telkomsa.net>:
>> On Tue, 19 Jan 2010 06:25:55 -0500, Stan Brown <the_sta...@fastmail.fm>
>> wrote:
>>
>> > [quoted text muted]
>> >
>> >HUH?? The plural definite article is "oi" with a rough breathing,
>> >pronounced and transliterated "hoi". And the ending is -oi. Where
>> >do you get "i polli"?
>>
>> From Greek.
>
>Not the Greek I studied, which was Attic. Did you study some odd
>dialect, or are you talking about modern Greek, about which I know
>next to nothing?
I can't speak Greek, though I know some Greek words and phrases, and I know
some Greek people and I know how they speak. My daughter speaks Greek, and is
studying in Greece at the moment. I've tried to learn Greek of various periods
but I can't say I can speak, read or write any variety fluently.
I know that some words have changed, and no doubt pronunciation has changed
over the years, but Greek seems to have changed less than English. Bread, for
example, used to be "artos", but now the common word for it is "psomi"; water
used to be "hyder" (from which we get English words like "hydraulics"), but
now the common word is "nero".
I find this quite interesting, because in other languages it seems to me that
the words for common things persist, while words for less common things
change. But in Greek it is words for common things -- bread, fish, house and
water -- that have changed. Perhaps it was the influence of Turkish rule,
though I don't know what the Turkish words for any of these things are.
D. Stussy
news:hj5s4o$nfp$1...@news.eternal-september.org...
> On Tue, 19 Jan 2010 16:33:33 -0800, D. Stussy wrote:
> > <A.C...@DENTURESsussex.ac.uk> wrote in message
> > news:hj1hga$f3i$1...@south.jnrs.ja.net...
>
> [...]
>
> >> In the US, people tend to answer "I'm good" or "I'm doing good" to the
> >> above question.
> >
> > Which is completely wrong, and I'm in The States.
> >
> > "Doing good" is WHAT one is doing.
> >
> > "Doing well" is HOW one is doing - especially one's health. As this is
> > what was asked, "doing well" is the only appropriate answer. . . .
>
> Have a care as to the actual answer being offered: there is a world of
> difference between "I'm doing good" and the simple "I'm good." Since
> "be" is copulative, the "good" in "I'm good" is simply an adjective. As
> the AHD notes, "well" as an adjective applied to people "usually refers
> to a state of health." Thus, one would only answer "I'm well" if the
> inquiry was, or would reasonably be interpreted as being, about the
> subject's health.
Get a clue. First, the answer should be a valid response to the question
asked, else it is non-sequitur nonsense. Neither "I'm good" nor "I'm doing
good" are valid answers to the question.
> The exact question the OP put forth for response was "How are you
> doing?" That does not sound much like an inquiry after the subject's
> state of health. ("How are you?" could be so taken, but even then is not
> likely to be unless the subject is known to have been ailing recently.)
>
> Of course, it remains so that "I'm doing good" is defective except in
> certain rare (and contextually obvious) situations.
I disagree. It's a perfectly valid response to, "What are you doing?"
James Hogg
I think those were all popular words in Greek long before the Turks came
along. The word for house, for example, "spiti", comes from Latin
"hospitium". The word for water, "nero", is just the adjective meaning
"fresh" as used in the phrase "nearon hydor". The modern word for bread
meant "morsel" in Ancient Greek.
--
James
James Hogg
Steve Hayes wrote:
> I find this quite interesting, because in other languages it seems to
> me that the words for common things persist, while words for less
> common things change. But in Greek it is words for common things --
> bread, fish, house and water -- that have changed. Perhaps it was the
> influence of Turkish rule, though I don't know what the Turkish words
> for any of these things are.
The modern word for fish, "psari", is also a native word, from Ancient
Greek "opsarion", diminutive of "opson", which meant the cooked savoury
food eaten to accompany bread. Fish was the delicacy par excellence,
hence the subsequent restriction in meaning.
This root will be familiar to English speakers in such everyday words as:
"opsomania" (an excessive craving for a particular food, esp. a delicacy)
"opsonation" (catering, provision of food)
"opsony" (any food eaten along with bread)
"opsophagy" (the eating of delicacies, esp. of fish)
--
James
Steve Hayes
>> I find this quite interesting, because in other languages it seems to
>> me that the words for common things persist, while words for less
>> common things change. But in Greek it is words for common things --
>> bread, fish, house and water -- that have changed. Perhaps it was the
>> influence of Turkish rule, though I don't know what the Turkish
>> words for any of these things are.
>
>I think those were all popular words in Greek long before the Turks came
>along. The word for house, for example, "spiti", comes from Latin
>"hospitium". The word for water, "nero", is just the adjective meaning
>"fresh" as used in the phrase "nearon hydor". The modern word for bread
>meant "morsel" in Ancient Greek.
Interesting - I wonder if "spiti" came in after the Roman conquest, then.
Garrett Wollman
D. Stussy <rep...@newsgroups.kd6lvw.ampr.org> wrote:
>Get a clue. First, the answer should be a valid response to the question
>asked, else it is non-sequitur nonsense. Neither "I'm good" nor "I'm doing
>good" are valid answers to the question.
Bullshit.
-GAWollman
--
Garrett A. Wollman | What intellectual phenomenon can be older, or more oft
wol...@bimajority.org| repeated, than the story of a large research program
Opinions not shared by| that impaled itself upon a false central assumption
my employers. | accepted by all practitioners? - S.J. Gould, 1993
James Hogg
> On Jan 19, 4:58 am, James Hogg <Jas.H...@gOUTmail.com> wrote:
>> HVS wrote:
>>> On 19 Jan 2010, Stan Brown wrote
>>>> 18 Jan 2010 13:05:54 -0800 from R H Draney
>>>>> Leslie Danks filted:
>>>>>> All very well, but since I became aware at this fount of
>>>>>> learning that "hoi" is a definite article, "the hoi polloi"
>>>>>> always strikes me as a kind of bilingual stuttering.
>>>>> Have you ever visited the La Brea tar pits?...r
>>> Is that anywhwere near the Sierra Nevada mountains?
>> That's not quite so tautological. The name means "snowy saw".
>
> But also "snowy mountain range".
It's not like you take the poetry out of things...
Anyway, today I bought a bottle of Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, imported all
the way from Chico, California. I look forward to sampling it this evening.
Alc. 5.6% vol. A large warning on the label says "Contains barley".
--
James
Jerry Friedman
> Jerry Friedman wrote:
> > On Jan 19, 4:58 am, James Hogg <Jas.H...@gOUTmail.com> wrote:
> >> HVS wrote:
> >>> On 19 Jan 2010, Stan Brown wrote
> >>>> 18 Jan 2010 13:05:54 -0800 from R H Draney
> >>>> <dadoc...@spamcop.net>:
> >>>>> Leslie Danks filted:
> >>>>>> All very well, but since I became aware at this fount of
> >>>>>> learning that "hoi" is a definite article, "the hoi polloi"
> >>>>>> always strikes me as a kind of bilingual stuttering.
> >>>>> Have you ever visited the La Brea tar pits?...r
> >>>> They're near the Los Angeles airport, aren't they?
> >>> Is that anywhwere near the Sierra Nevada mountains?
> >> That's not quite so tautological. The name means "snowy saw".
>
> > But also "snowy mountain range".
>
> It's not like you take the poetry out of things...
Obaue: Verbal irony, or is "to" missing?
But if you like, I'll tell you that I'm about to drive from my home in
Spanish Woman through Holy Rock, past the turnoff to Little Shade and
The Little Table, through Dry Gulch and Water-Drinking Place and
Cottonwood Place, to Holy Faith.
(Thanks to /The Place Names of New Mexico/, by Robert Hixson Julyan,
and to GB.)
--
Jerry Friedman
James Hogg
> On Jan 20, 7:37 am, James Hogg <Jas.H...@gOUTmail.com> wrote:
>> Jerry Friedman wrote:
>>> On Jan 19, 4:58 am, James Hogg <Jas.H...@gOUTmail.com> wrote:
>>>> HVS wrote:
>>>>> On 19 Jan 2010, Stan Brown wrote
>>>>>> 18 Jan 2010 13:05:54 -0800 from R H Draney
>>>>>> <dadoc...@spamcop.net>:
>>>>>>> Leslie Danks filted:
>>>>>>>> All very well, but since I became aware at this fount
>>>>>>>> of learning that "hoi" is a definite article, "the hoi
>>>>>>>> polloi" always strikes me as a kind of bilingual
>>>>>>>> stuttering.
>>>>>>> Have you ever visited the La Brea tar pits?...r
>>>>>> They're near the Los Angeles airport, aren't they?
>>>>> Is that anywhwere near the Sierra Nevada mountains?
>>>> That's not quite so tautological. The name means "snowy saw".
>>> But also "snowy mountain range".
>> It's not like you take the poetry out of things...
>
> Obaue: Verbal irony, or is "to" missing?
The "to" was inadvertently omitted.
> But if you like, I'll tell you that I'm about to drive from my home
> in Spanish Woman through Holy Rock, past the turnoff to Little Shade
> and The Little Table, through Dry Gulch and Water-Drinking Place and
> Cottonwood Place, to Holy Faith.
Reminds me of the old Pete Atkin/Clive James song, "Tenderfoot", which
starts like this:
Beyond the border town they call Contrition
The badlands are just boulders and mesquite
A school of Spanish friars built the mission
But left because they couldn't take the heat
And further on the road to Absolution
The mesas turn to mountains capped with snow
And the way becomes a form of execution
That only hardened travellers can go
--
James
Athel Cornish-Bowden
It's very good (at least by the standards of American beer) though
whether it will stand being transported from Chico to wherever you live
is another matter. Let us know...
>
> Alc. 5.6% vol. A large warning on the label says "Contains barley".
Well at least it soesn't say "contains rice" or "contains corn".
--
athel
Athel Cornish-Bowden
> On Mon, 18 Jan 2010 12:35:13 +0100, Athel Cornish-Bowden wrote:
>
> [...]
>
>> I'm aware that "hoi" is Greek for "the", but we're dealing with English
>> here, and you can't analyse a phrase like "hoi polloi" into its
>> component parts. You can't use "hoi" in English without the "polloi",
>> and you can't use "polloi" in English without the "hoi". By omitting the
>> "the" you're advertising that you are one of the elite that know what
>> the Greek phrase means. The SOED says "freq. w. 'the'", but I would say
>> "always w. 'the'".
>
> Perhaps best of all is to avoid the phrase altogether. I cannot imagine
> a single person whose written or spoken prose would be lacerated by the
> unavailability of this useless bit of rococo.
I agree. I would never use it unless being flippant. I wasn't the one
who introduced it into this thread.
>
> Where non-English terms including an article are unavoidable, as in such
> names as La Brea (as someone has mentioned), the wise choice is to
> present a casting that does not call for a duplicated article: "I
> recently went to L.A. and had a chance to visit the famous tar pits at La
> Brea." Whatever the common ear may or may not pick out, there are always
> going to be at least some listeners or readers who will be either amused
> or disgruntled by such forms as "pizza pie" or "Mt. Fujiyama"; it is as
> well to try to please all when doing so displeases none.
For "pizza pie", I agree, as you don't have to be particularly highly
educated to know a bit of Italian, and even without that to be able to
guess that the two words might be related. However, it's a much bigger
step to expect people to know enough Japanese to detect the redundancy
in "Mt. Fujiyama".
As for trying to please all, I suppose that there is no harming in
trying, as long as one realizes that success is impossible to achieve.
--
athel
Athel Cornish-Bowden
> In article <hj686i$8s8$1...@snarked.org>,
> D. Stussy <rep...@newsgroups.kd6lvw.ampr.org> wrote:
>
>> Get a clue. First, the answer should be a valid response to the question
>> asked, else it is non-sequitur nonsense. Neither "I'm good" nor "I'm doing
>> good" are valid answers to the question.
>
> Bullshit.
Par for the course, though.
--
athel
Ian Noble
<mbal...@gmail.com> wrote:
>Hi all,
>
>if someone asks me: How are you doing?
>
>Can I answer I am doing good? Or I have to say: I am doing well?
>
As other people have already said - "good" is *what* you are doing;
"well" is *how* you are doing.
"When the shades of night are falling,
Comes a fellow ev'ryone knows,
It's the old dope peddler,
Spreading joy wherever he goes.
Ev'ry evening you will find him,
Around our neighborhood.
It's the old dope peddler
Doing WELL by doing GOOD."
- Tom Lehrer
Cheers - Ian
Adam Funk
> Adam Funk filted:
>>
>>On 2010-01-18, R H Draney wrote:
>>> Have you ever visited the La Brea tar pits?...r
>>
>>No, but I've been to a restaurant called "La Alhambra".
>
> Moor's the pity....r
Aaaaah! I wish I'd though of that at the time.
--
Take it? I can't even parse it! [Kibo]
James Hogg
> On 2010-01-19, R H Draney wrote:
>
>> Adam Funk filted:
>>> On 2010-01-18, R H Draney wrote:
>
>>>> Have you ever visited the La Brea tar pits?...r
>>> No, but I've been to a restaurant called "La Alhambra".
>> Moor's the pity....r
>
> Aaaaah! I wish I'd though of that at the time.
And when day is done and the sun starts to set in Granada,
I envy the blush of the snow-clad Sierra Nevada.
--
James
Pat Durkin
"Ian Noble" <ipn...@offspam.o2.co.uk> wrote in message
news:5rfel5hh067lt632p...@4ax.com...
I can hear the tune (I think, if it is from "The Old Lamplighter")
from longer ago. But I don't know the date on this. Do you think it
was before Michener's "Hawaii"?
Hawaii is a novel by James Michener published in 1959. I see the Tom
Lehrer lyrics and think the original album on which it appears is 1959
(or 1960...things get confusing with all the ads on the pages I
searched. And I can't abide trying to hear anything, because there
are "push" ads that want to download ringtones. Like I need those!)
Oh, well, not an earthshaking issue.
R H Draney
>
>But if you like, I'll tell you that I'm about to drive from my home in
>Spanish Woman through Holy Rock, past the turnoff to Little Shade and
>The Little Table, through Dry Gulch and Water-Drinking Place and
>Cottonwood Place, to Holy Faith.
>
>(Thanks to /The Place Names of New Mexico/, by Robert Hixson Julyan,
>and to GB.)
Whenever I visit Dave Hatunen's stomping grounds in Black Foothill, I prefer to
skip the main highway and go by way of Oh My God....r
Leslie Danks
1
[...]
> And I can't abide trying to hear anything, because there
> are "push" ads that want to download ringtones. Like I need those!)
Here's one you certainly don't need:
<http://www.nachrichten.at/nachrichten/fotogalerien/haderer/>
Caption:
"Hunters watch out! The rutting call of the red deer is now available as a
ringtone for mobile phones."
>
> Oh, well, not an earthshaking issue.
--
Les (BrE)
Leslie Danks
Oh dear. You have to go back (zur�ck) 34 times to get to right cartoon.
Probably a way of trying to stop people doing things like this.
--
Les (BrE)
James Hogg
> Pat Durkin wrote: 1 [...]
>
>> And I can't abide trying to hear anything, because there are "push"
>> ads that want to download ringtones. Like I need those!)
>
> Here's one you certainly don't need:
>
> <http://www.nachrichten.at/nachrichten/fotogalerien/haderer/>
>
> Caption: "Hunters watch out! The rutting call of the red deer is now
> available as a ringtone for mobile phones."
I just got a cartoon of a man forgetting that you can now open car doors by
remote control, and no ad for rutting ringtones.
I suppose everyone has seen the video advertising the Toot Tone:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_6g_Xx3Eew
--
James
James Hogg
Jerry Friedman
> Jerry Friedman wrote:
> > On Jan 20, 7:37 am, James Hogg <Jas.H...@gOUTmail.com> wrote:
> >> Jerry Friedman wrote:
> >>> On Jan 19, 4:58 am, James Hogg <Jas.H...@gOUTmail.com> wrote:
> >>>> HVS wrote:
> >>>>> Is that anywhwere near the Sierra Nevada mountains?
> >>>> That's not quite so tautological. The name means "snowy saw".
> >>> But also "snowy mountain range".
> >> It's not like you take the poetry out of things...
>
> > Obaue: Verbal irony, or is "to" missing?
>
> The "to" was inadvertently omitted.
Okay, I'll put the poetry back in.
Did the northern hawk-owl break the law
By taking the mouse the snowy saw?
Incidentally, I've been told that the British, or maybe the educated
British, make a stronger distinction between "poetry" and "verse" than
Americans do, and would never call what I just wrote "poetry". Any
truth to that?
> > But if you like, I'll tell you that I'm about to drive from my home
> > in Spanish Woman through Holy Rock, past the turnoff to Little Shade
> > and The Little Table, through Dry Gulch and Water-Drinking Place and
> > Cottonwood Place, to Holy Faith.
>
> Reminds me of the old Pete Atkin/Clive James song, "Tenderfoot", which
> starts like this:
>
> Beyond the border town they call Contrition
> The badlands are just boulders and mesquite
> A school of Spanish friars built the mission
> But left because they couldn't take the heat
> And further on the road to Absolution
> The mesas turn to mountains capped with snow
> And the way becomes a form of execution
> That only hardened travellers can go
I think that Clive James fellow has some potential. (Incidentally,
DC, if you gotcher ears on, Wikipedia says James changed his name from
Vivian to Clive because after /Gone with the Wind/, "Vivian" was
irrevocably a female name.)
--
Jerry Friedman
John Varela
wrote:
>
> "Ian Noble" <ipn...@offspam.o2.co.uk> wrote in message
> news:5rfel5hh067lt632p...@4ax.com...
> > On Sun, 17 Jan 2010 21:15:48 -0800 (PST), MBALOVER
> > <mbal...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >>Hi all,
> >>
> >>if someone asks me: How are you doing?
> >>
> >>Can I answer I am doing good? Or I have to say: I am doing well?
> >>
> > As other people have already said - "good" is *what* you are doing;
> > "well" is *how* you are doing.
> >
> > "When the shades of night are falling,
> > Comes a fellow ev'ryone knows,
> > It's the old dope peddler,
> > Spreading joy wherever he goes.
> > Ev'ry evening you will find him,
> > Around our neighborhood.
> > It's the old dope peddler
> > Doing WELL by doing GOOD."
> >
> > - Tom Lehrer
>
> I can hear the tune (I think, if it is from "The Old Lamplighter")
> from longer ago. But I don't know the date on this. Do you think it
> was before Michener's "Hawaii"?
It's from the original LP album, "Songs by Tom Lehrer", which came
out in the middle 50s when I was still in college. If I had to put a
date on it, I'd guess 1954.
WikiP says "Songs by Tom Lehrer was recorded in a single one hour
session on January 22, 1953 at the TransRadio studio in Boston for
the total studio cost of $15." Earlier than I thought. Since we were
in Boston, we were close to the source.
> Hawaii is a novel by James Michener published in 1959. I see the Tom
> Lehrer lyrics and think the original album on which it appears is 1959
> (or 1960...things get confusing with all the ads on the pages I
> searched. And I can't abide trying to hear anything, because there
> are "push" ads that want to download ringtones. Like I need those!)
>
> Oh, well, not an earthshaking issue.
--
John Varela
Trade NEWlamps for OLDlamps for email