Название: A Dictionary of Foreign Words and PhrasesАвтор: A.J. Bliss
Издательство: Philosophical Library/Open Road Integrated Media
Год: 2022
Страниц: 624
Язык: английский
Формат: epub (true)
Размер: 10.2 MB
A fascinating A-to-Z reference to foreign words and phrases that have become part of contemporary English usage.
The English language has been greatly enriched by a vast array of words and phrases imported from other tongues, such as comrade, chateau, wunderkind, and vox populi. For the average English speaker, many are bound to be familiar. Some may even appear to be standard English, while others may seem, well, foreign. A Dictionary of Foreign Words and Phrases presents a comprehensive list of such terms, with entries that reveal their meanings and etymologies.
The number of foreign words and phrases used in current English, both written and spoken, is very large. To the ordinary cultivated man many of these will already be familiar, but there will be others of whose precise meaning he is ignorant or uncertain; and in these cases it is not always easy for him to discover the meaning unless he has access to a well-stocked reference library. The smaller English dictionaries, with their limited vocabulary, naturally tend to include relatively few foreign words, and list only those which have entered the language of everyday intercourse and occur with great frequency; most of these will already be known to the inquirer. The larger dictionaries, like the New English Dictionary and the American Webster, aim at completeness, and include a great many terms used only by specialists in some art or science, who already know their meaning; not only are the foreign words as a whole lost among the much more numerous native words, but the more widely current foreign words are lost among a mass of highly technical terms rarely encountered in general reading.
The New English Dictionary has the additional disadvantage (from this special point of view) that it is a historical dictionary, and therefore of set purpose includes a very large number of words which have long been obsolete. Moreover, these dictionaries include very few phrases. Naturally enough, an English dictionary will not list many English phrases, since the meaning of the vast majority of these can be deduced from the meanings of the words of which they consist, all of which will be entered separately. But foreign phrases used in English have a different status: they are indivisible units, corresponding in this respect to English words rather than to English phrases; the words of which they are composed are not normally used except in the one set context, and will not therefore be individually entered in any English dictionary.
Скачать A Dictionary of Foreign Words and Phrases