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The longest word in the Infoplease Dictionary is pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis

In a field of over 122,000 headwords, pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis beats out its closest competitor (supercalifragilisticexpialidocious) by 11 letters. Both have objections to them; the former was deliberately invented to be the longest word in the language, and has never been used in any other context, while the latter is an invented nonsense word.

Read more: The Longest English Word — Infoplease.com http://www.infoplease.com/askeds/longest-english-word.html#ixzz1t4gmWtyG

Tongue Twisters

Betty Bought some bitter butter, but the bitter butter was so bitter that Betty had to buy some more better butter to make the bitter butter better!

She sells sea-shells on the sea shore!

The Sixth sheikh's sixth sheep's sick!

Spectroscopic ken!

One-word substitute and suffixes

Sometimes a phrase or a sentence can be replaced by just one word. This substitution facilitates clarity and comprehension. It serves as a great tool in Precis writing as long paragraphs can be condensed into shorter ones while keeping the gist intact.

1.One who is easily deceived: gullible

Remember Gulliver's Travels!

2.Favour granted to lose relatives regardless of merit: nepotism

Catholic practice!

NB: when you see suffixes like 'archy', 'cracy' -think of systems of governance.
when you see the suffix '-cide' think of elimination
when you see 'loquism' or 'logos' think of speech
when you see '-logy' think of study
when you see '-phile' think of affinity or love
when you see 'sophia' think of knowledge
when you see '-graphy' think of writing
when you see 'auto' think of self
when you see '-ism' think of some ideology
when you see 'anthro' think of humanity


NB: Try some precis writing with the help of one-word substitutes.

A ship- a whaling vessel

Columbus discovered America at the end of a voyage sponsored by the Spanish royals.This was in 1492. Above is a  comic diagrammatic rendering of a ship.

Tolstoy :Quotes from Brainy Quotes

All happy families resemble one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
Leo Tolstoy

Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.
Leo Tolstoy

He never chooses an opinion; he just wears whatever happens to be in style.
Leo Tolstoy

Historians are like deaf people who go on answering questions that no one has asked them.
Leo Tolstoy

I sit on a man's back, choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am very sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by all possible means - except by getting off his back.
Leo Tolstoy

If so many men, so many minds, certainly so many hearts, so many kinds of love.
Leo Tolstoy

If you want to be happy, be.
Leo Tolstoy

In all history there is no war which was not hatched by the governments, the governments alone, independent of the interests of the people, to whom war is always pernicious even when successful.
Leo Tolstoy

In the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you.
Leo Tolstoy

It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness.
Leo Tolstoy
Read more athttp://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/l/leo_tolstoy.html#ajyLo5f1Yv4V4Fby.99

Leo Tolstoy: biography ref wikipedia

Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy (Russian: Лев Никола́евич Толсто́й, pronounced [lʲev nʲɪkɐˈlaɪvʲɪtɕ tɐlˈstoj] ( listen); known in the West as Leo Tolstoy) (September 9, 1828 – November 20, 1910) was a Russian writer who primarily wrote novels and short stories. Later in life, he also wrote plays and essays. His two most famous works, the novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina, are acknowledged as two of the greatest novels of all time and a pinnacle of realist fiction. Many consider Tolstoy to have been one of the world's greatest novelists.^[2][3] Tolstoy is equally known for his complicated and paradoxical persona and for his extreme moralistic and ascetic views, which he adopted after a moral crisis and spiritual awakening in the 1870s, after which he also became noted as a moral thinker and social reformer.

His literal interpretation of the ethical teachings of Jesus, centering on the Sermon on the Mount, caused him in later life to become a fervent Christian anarchist andanarcho-pacifist. His ideas on nonviolent resistance, expressed in such works as The Kingdom of God Is Within You, were to have a profound impact on such pivotal twentieth-century figures as Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. 

Science Fiction: Discussion II

Cyberpunk

Cyberpunk is a portmanteau word formed from ‘cybernetics’ and ‘pun’ coined by author Bruce Bethke in 1980 in his 1980 short story ‘cyberpunk’. It is usually dystopian and makes use of themes inspired by cyberspace, IT, internet, AI.

Time Travel

This subgenre was popularized by HG Wells ‘s novel The Time Machine. It is riddled by logical problems like grandfather paradox.

Alternate History stories are based on the premise that historical events might have turned out differently.

Think: What could have happened if Germany and Japan won the Second World War?

Well, this in fact, is the theme of Philip K Dicks’s The Man in the High Castle.

Also reflect on telling titles like Murray Leinster’s story Sidewise in Time.

Isaac Asimov (January 2, 1920-April 6, 1992) was a Russian-born American author and professor of biochemistry best known for his works of science fiction. Asimov is considered a master of the genre along with Robert A. Heinlein and Arthur C Clarke. Together they are known as the ‘Big Three’. Asimov’s most famous works are the Foundation Series, Galactic Empire series and Robot series.

Think:  Back to Future

Interesting Quotes:

Rod Serling: ‘Fantasy is the impossible made probable. Science Fiction is the improbable made possible’.

Science Fiction has antecedents back to mythology- Wikipedia.

Science Fiction: Discussion I

Science Fiction is usually hinged on space travel, time travel or alien invasions.

The setting could be future or historical past. It could also be outer space with alien inhabitants. It includes application of scientific principles and tests their application and strength in extraordinary conditions. It could also test hypothetical conditions like ‘faster-than-light –travel’ or a world with super-intelligent robots. Wikipedia associates science fiction with ‘speculative fiction’. It is the writing about alternative possibilities

Earliest examples of science fiction could be Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. With the onset of comparatively new technologies like ‘electricity’, ‘telegraph’ and powered transportation Jules Verne and HG Wells became popular.

In the early twentieth century, pulp magazines helped develop a new generation of American writers. The tone was set by the magazine Amazing Stories founded by Hugo Gernsback. Writers called Futurians included Isaac Asimov and Damon Knight.

Nomenclature

Forrest J Ackerman publicly used the term ‘sci-fi’ at UCLA in 1954, though Robert A Heinlein had used it in private correspondence six years earlier.

By the 1970s, critics such as Terry Carr and Damon Knight used ‘sci-fi’ to distinguish hack-work from serious science fiction and around 1978, Susan Wood introduced the pronunciation ‘skiffy’.

Peter Nicholls writes that SF is the preferred abbreviation within the community of SF writers and readers.

Soft and Social SF

The description soft SF includes works based on social sciences such as psychology, economics, political science, sociology and anthropology. Authors include, Ursula K Le Guin and Philip K Dick. The stories focus on character and emotion. It branches off into Utopian and Dystopian stories.

Hard SF

Hard Science fiction is characterized by rigorous attention to detail in quantitative sciences especially physics, astrophysics and chemistry. In fact, Arthur C Clarke accurately predicted geostationary communication satellites.

Phonetics: Phonemes and Syllables

The English alphabet has 26 letters but they are used to produce 44 sounds. 

The English speech sounds are divided into two categories: Vowels and Consonants.

British Received Pronunciation has 20 distinct vowel sounds and 24 consonants.

There are 12 pure vowels and 8 dipthongs. The pure vowels involve one movement of the jaw but the dipthongs involve a glide from one vowel to another and are represented by double symbols. Dipthongs are vowels which begin as one vowel and end as another. For example consider:  aim, page and stay or ice, hide and fly.

Consonants are classified on the basis of place and manner of articulation; organs of speech and the way in which passage of air is restricted.

Phonemes and Syllables

English uses 44 sounds or phonemes. The unit that is next in hierarchy to the speech sound is the syllable.

In each syllable there is one sound that is more prominent than the rest.

Usually it is a vowel (or a dipthong).

The vowel is called the nucleus of a syllable.

The consonant that begins a syllable is called a releasing consonant and the one that comes at the end of a syllable is called the arresting consonant.

The nucleus is symbolized as V and the marginal elements are symbolized C.

A syllable which ends in a consonant is called a closed syllable, while one that ends in vowel is called an open syllable.

bad, good, camp are examples of closed syllables.

go, tea, crow are examples of open syllables.

Word Accent: In words of more than one syllable not all the syllables are equally prominent. Those that are more prominent than the others are said to receive the accent.

Tip: Find Pronunciation Key from Encarta Dictionary: English ( North America) in your Windows 7. Research Pane at the top by putting pronunciation key and phonetics as search trms.

Phonetics and Phonetic Transcription(IPA)

Phonetics

Phonetics :  'Phonetics' has been derived from the Greek 'from the Greek word  for phōnē , that is  "sound, voice".

 It is a branch of linguistics that comprises the study of the sounds of human speech, or—in the case of sign languages—the equivalent aspects of sign.

 It is concerned with the physical properties of speech sounds or signs (phones): their physiological production, acoustic properties, auditory perception, and neurophysiological status.

Phonetic Transcription

Phonetic transcription (or phonetic notation) is the visual representation of speech sounds (or phones). The most common type of phonetic transcription uses a phonetic alphabet, e.g., the International Phonetic Alphabet.

The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is one of the most popular and well-known phonetic alphabets. It was originally created by primarily British language teachers, with later efforts from European phoneticians and linguists

.

The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is an alphabetic system of phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin alphabet. It was devised by theInternational Phonetic Association as a standardized representation of the sounds of spoken language.

The International Phonetic Alphabet(IPA) is used as the basis for the phonetic transcription of speech. It is based on the Latin alphabet and is able to transcribe most features of speech such as consonants, vowels, and suprasegmental features. Every documented phoneme available within the known languages in the world is assigned its own corresponding symbol.

IPA uses a one-to-one mapping between phones and written symbols

Did you know?

Phonetics was studied as early as 500 BC in ancient India, with Pāṇini's account of the place and manner of articulation of consonants in his 5th century BC treatise onSanskrit. The major Indic alphabets today order their consonants according to Pāṇini's classification. The Ancient Greeks are credited as the first to base a writing system on a phonetic alphabet. Modern phonetics began with Alexander Melville Bell, whose Visible Speech (1867) introduced a system of precise notation for writing down speech sounds.^[2]

Phonetics: Applications (ref: Wikipedia)

Application of phonetics include:

§  forensic phonetics: the use of phonetics (the science of speech) for forensic (legal) purposes.

§  Speech Recognition: the analysis and transcription of recorded speech by a computer system.

.

NB: It may be of interest to Engineering students that ASCII and keyboard transliterations are available:

• Several systems have been developed that map the IPA symbols to ASCII characters. Notable systems include Kirshenbaum, Arpabet, SAMPA, and X-SAMPA. The usage of mapping systems in on-line text has to some extent been adopted in the context input methods, allowing convenient keying of IPA characters that would be otherwise unavailable on standard keyboard layouts.

Dictionaries

Many British dictionaries, including learner's dictionaries such as the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary and the Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary, now use the International Phonetic Alphabet to represent the pronunciation of words.

Did you know?

Using an Edison phonograph, Ludimar Hermann investigated the spectral properties of vowels and consonants.

Idioms and Translations: language across culturesIII

There can hardly be a literal idiomatic translation, though analogies are possible.Observe the examples that follow:

1.Icing on the cake: "sone pe suhaga!"

2.You can't unring the bell: "ab pacchtaye hot kiya"(proverb)

Now think of these and find their parallels:

3.Give someone an inch and they will take a mile/yard

4.Empty vessels make the most noise

5.A new broom sweeps clean

6. A bad workman blames his tools

7. An idle brain is a devil's workshop

8. A leopard cannot change its spots

9.It's Greek to me

10.A drop in the bucket

11. It never rains but it pours

12.Saved by a hair's breadth

13.It takes two to tango

14. Fall between two stools

15. Once bitten, twice shy

16. Once in a blue moon

17.Cry over spilt milk!

18.Champagne on a Beer budget

19.Mountain of a molehill

20. paddle your own canoe

21, Blow your own trumpet

The Play " Discovery" by Herman Ould and Columbus Day

Complete this rhyme:

Columbus sailed the oceans blue,

in fourteen hundred and ninety .......

Dear Students

Can you guess why America has been named after Amerigo Vespucci rather than Columbus?This is even though Americans greatly respect Columbus.

Columbus Day

A national holiday in the US on the second Monday in October when people celebrate the discovery of America by Christopher Columbus.


Many countries in the New World and elsewhere celebrate the anniversary of Christopher Columbus's arrival in the Americas, which occurred on October 12, 1492, as an official holiday. The event is celebrated as Columbus Day in the United States, as Día de la Raza in many countries in Latin America, as Discovery Day in the Bahamas, as Día de la Hispanidad and Fiesta Nacional in Spain, as Día del Respeto a la Diversidad Cultural (Day of Respect for Cultural Diversity) in Argentina and as Día de las Américas (Day of the Americas) in Uruguay. These holidays have been celebrated unofficially since the late 18th century, and officially in various areas since the early 20th century.




Amerigo Vespucci (Italian pronunciation: [ameˈriɡo vesˈputtʃi]) (March 9, 1454 – February 22, 1512) was an Italian explorer, financier, navigator and cartographer who first demonstrated that Brazil and the West Indies did not represent Asia's eastern outskirts as initially conjectured from Columbus' voyages, but instead constituted an entirely separate landmass hitherto unknown to Afro-Eurasians. Colloquially referred to as the New World, this second super continent came to be termed "America", probably deriving its name from the feminized Latin version of Vespucci's first name.


 Brief Story of Discovery of America:

Columbus discovered America in 1492 and Vespucci landed there in 1499. However, Columbus never admitted that he had found a new land by a stroke of luck or by sheer chance. In fact, he kept persisting that he had not taken a wrong course to India. The royal sovereigns of Spain had commissioned him to chart a new sea-route to India, but he was destined to find this new continent unknown to the rest of the world. He had great trouble with a protesting crew towards the end of the voyage as they ran out of patience.

Think time-travel!

Cosmologist Stephen Hawking believes that time travel is not possible by " the fact that we have not been invaded by hoards of tourists from the future".

Recasting the rhymes: twinkle, twinkle...

Cosmologist Stephen Hawking believes that time travel is not possible by " the fact that we have not been invaded by hoards of tourists from the future".

Read John Updike's poem on Neutrinos

Dear students

Take a look at the poem by John Updike. It is about Neutrinos.

In 1930, physicist Wolfgang Pauli hypothesized a new, unseen particle called the neutrino in order to account for the missing component of energy in certain experiments on radioactivity that seemed to violate the conservation of matter and energy.

Pauli admitted, " I have committed the ultimate sin, I have predicted the existence of a particle that can never be observed".

The poem 'Cosmic Gall' by John Updike(adapted to suit Indian students)

Neutrinos, they are very small.

They have no charge and have no mass

And do not interact at all.

The earth is just a silly ball

To them, through which they simply pass,

Like dustmaids down a drafty hall

Or photons through a sheet of glass.

They snub the most exquisite gas,

Ignore the most substantial wall,

Cold-shoulder steel and sounding brass,

Insult the stallion in his stall,

And scoring barriers of class,

Infiltrate you and me! Like tall

And painless guillotines, they fall

Down through our heads into the grass.

At night, they enter the library door

And pierce the chair with the scholar in its arms

With your nose inside the books-you call

It wonderful; I call it crass.

Metamorphosis by Franz KafkaII

Outside his room, Gregor Samsa’s family waits anxiously for him. Gregor is getting late for the office and the chief clerk has arrived to inquire into the delay in reporting for work. In fact, Gregor wakes up from a dream to find himself transformed into a gigantic dung beetle. He is taking time to adjust to this sudden change. He does not know how long he will remain in his present strange state, but he is sure that he does not want to offend his boss. 

As the chief clerk chastises him, Gregor tries to shout out an explanation. He manages only a squeak that makes everybody outside quite suspicious. As the change is only physical, Gregor still thinks like humans. His ability to act like humans, however, is severely compromised. Actually, Gregor finds it difficult to unbolt the door as the transformed physique makes the simple manoeuver of opening the door a staggering task for him. He is so anxious to salvage his loyalty to his firm that forgetful of his sudden and surreal transformation, he manages to come out and scare everybody present in the house. 

Gregor is a commercial traveller and his one aim in life is to provide for his family and to send his sister to an arts academy is his only wish. The irreversibility of change dawns on him slowly. His earlier social and professional concerns start appearing ridiculous as the human readers also understand the utter absurdity of human thoughts in a dung beetle.

Gregor comes to term with his new life as a lower animal- his appetite, his wishes and his idea of threats change: losing a job is not more crushing than his father’s stomping foot. The routine life of his family is disrupted and they have to adapt to a changed financial condition. They also have to struggle with keeping this strange happening a secret. 

Initially, Gregor’s sister with her youthful enthusiasm readily serves the dung beetle but as the novelty wanes, she loses interest and finds Gregor to be a hindrance to a more fulfilling life. However, only after his metamorphosis into a dung beetle does this traveling salesman find some leisure and attention. He also discovers a latent passion for music that was suppressed in his human life but surges forth in his insect spirits.

Forgetting public shame and caring nothing for the family embarrassment, he makes an unabashed social appearance as his sister plays the violin in the living room. But this soulful enjoyment of life, even as an insect, is brief as society abhors the repulsive creature and the family gears up to discard this unbearable burden. In fact he is prompted to a suicide and voluntary renunciation of life by his sister. 

The charwoman entrusted with cleaning the secret room soon discovers the lifeless body of the giant dung beetle. She pokes it with her broom and disposes it off, ridding the family of the ignominy, forever. The family rediscovers the lost rhythm of their life. 

Humans have an anthropocentric outlook, that is, we think that man is the centre of universe. Things and events are perceived from an intellectual and social point of view shared by humans. Metamorphosis, however, is a story is written from an alternative perspective. The story is radical as it revolves around the thoughts and perceptions of a disadvantaged creature, a human turned into a dung beetle and the author invites the reader to empathize with this insect. It is special also in its expression of the subjectivity representative of what may be called a ‘subaltern’ and hounded community in the War period.

Metamorphosis by Franz KafkaI

A review of an acclaimed story by Franz Kafka (1883-1924) - a Czech Jew author writing in the times when Nazism was an emergent movement.

Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka:

Franz Kafka (1883-1924) was a Czech Jew writing in German. He wrote his stories and novels in the period around the First World War and his writing reflects an acute apprehension of his position as a person belonging to a minority community and a persecuted race in the menacing socio-political situation prevalent in those times. S Grant Duff in Europe and the Czechs (1938) informs us that in the nineteenth century the Czechs ‘were fighting on two fronts- against the Austrian imperial system and against the Germans. Delving further into the history of Nazism Duff draws attention to the fact that the ‘excesses and racial hatred of Nazism is native to Bohemia, as is the movement itself. Long before Adolf Hitler and his friends collected in the beer hall in Munich after the war, Nazism had become a flourishing concern among the Sudeten Germans’ (38). The movement was directed both against the Czechs and Jews and in this way Kafka must have been doubly disadvantaged.

In Kafka’s story The Metamorphosis the protagonist Gregor Samsa eventually gives in after a prolong struggle with his subhuman existence. The story acquires surreal dimensions as the boundaries between dream and reality are disturbed and awakening of Gregor Samsa from his sleep is followed by a situation that has nightmarish elements rather than the consolation of routine. The 'matter- of- fact' tone of Kafka’s narrative jangles with the incomprehensible happenings that occur in the story. Kafka was noted for making use of realism to articulate absurd situations.

Eugene Ionesco, a renowned playwright and doyen of the Theatre of Absurd says, ‘Everything, as I see it, is an aberration’. He articulates his disenchantment with the world in these words: ‘I have tried to deal… with emptiness, with frustration, with this world, at once fleeting and crushing. The characters I have used are not fully conscious of their spiritual rootlessness, but they feel it instinctively and emotionally’. There are perceptible affinities in the writings of Kafka. Kafka, in fact, was a pre-cursor to the Absurd writers like Eugene Ionesco and Samuel Beckett. These writers convey through their writings a tangible sense of ‘rootlessness’ and ‘meaninglessness’ of the modern existence. But Kafka must have had the racial context in perspective that allowed a quantum of meaningful protest against crushing forces. It was strange and morbid experience though not utterly lacking in significance though it reached a point of absurdity.

It seems that Gregor’s physical transformation into a repulsive insect renders form to his undermined subjectivity or using a critical phrase offers an ‘objective corelative’ to his position in the social pyramid. Duff claims that the Czechs were then ‘invading the German districts in response to the demand for labour’(38). He asserts that the ‘German bourgeois treated the Czechs as underlings’ and the German workers ‘found racial grounds for their antagonism,’ and put up their notices saying: Jews, Czechs and Dogs not admitted (38). Gruff further informs the reader that they were ‘organized at first in the German workers’ Party which was formed in 1908, and in 1917 they even took the name which Hitler afterwards borrowed for his party-The German National socialist Workers’ Party’(38). Activities and groups of this kind must have evoked a fear of the fast emerging totalitarian state and an apprehension of oneself as a threatened individual. In other words, Gregor’s perception is so acute that he is literally transformed into a dungbeetle perhaps as a result of being treated like one. There is a correspondence between the historical author’s identity and the chief character portrayed in the The Metamorphosis. Certainly, there is a cue to this effect but no overt statement is made in this way.