I love playing with words. Even made up words (or should I say especially made up words? :P) I love finding out the Greek and Latin roots of words and finding out what words belong to the same families and I like fiddling with prefixes and suffixes to figure out how to change a root word to different parts of speech. For example:
Ambulo is Latin for "I walk" From that word, we get the English words ambulance, amble, ambulatory, somnambulism, ambulation, etc.
If you take another word (say, love) you can change it to:
A noun - love A verb - loves An adjective - loving An adverb - lovingly You get the gist. We had a funny conversation tonight about a word that we kept changing. I recorded it for you. :)
Jess: Joy keeps saying
“uniformitarianiamistic.” I tried to
tell her that the word would be “uniformitarianistic” but she just grinned and
said “uniformitarianiamisticly”
Mum: * laughs* An adverb!
Elise: *intrigued by word * uniformitarianiamistic! Uniformitarianiamistic!
Uniformitarianiamistic!
*We all stand around trying to say it more than three times
in a row without getting tongue-tied*
Jess: You know, we are wasting time just standing here
trying to prononunce something that isn’t even a word.
Me: Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious!
*Jess walks away *
Elise: Uniformitarianiamisticly! Uniformitarianiamisticly! Uniformitarianiamisticly!
Me: What’s not? Un…
Elise: Un-uniformitarianiamisticly.
Me: *grinning* Anti-un-
uniformitarianiamisticly.
Elise: But that’s the same as uniformitarianiamisticly!
(And in case you were wondering, that makes a high record of thirteen syllables!) :D
And in case you were wondering even more, the longest English word (according to the Oxford Dictionary) is... * drum roll!*
Words are so fun! But can you actually pronounce that longgggg word! It just looks like a lot of letters randomly strung together, but hey all words are just letters put together.
ReplyDeleteIf you break that long word into syllables, they do actually mean things. (Pneum is 'lung', ultra is "more" micro is "small", etc...) And, yes, if I broke it into syllables, I could say it! :D
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