Lest anyone take this article at face value, please note that it was published in _Speculative Grammarian_, “the premier scholarly journal featuring research in the neglected field of satirical linguistics.”<p>The range of meanings for the Greek <i>entautha</i>, <i>gar</i>, and <i>de</i> are all well-understood.
Editing audio interviews for podcast I sometimes remove lots of
"particles" as the author calls them (I just call them "ums and ahs"),
TFA poses a question. Do particles have "meaning"? Don't think I ever
heard a discussion of that in any linguistics class, but they do have
an effect. Working in radio/podcast you get quite a deep feel for
speech as more than just words.<p>I've heard there are effective "de-um" plugins, but I prefer to work
with them by hand because they create non-verbal signals, mood,
excitement, confidence or lack of confidence about a statement. So
often I decide to leave them in. They can signal relations between
multiple interviewees, like deference or conversational
leadership. Some speakers are impossible to 'de-um' as it's so woven
into their speech.
Unrelated but somewhat funny:<p>I read someone jokingly proposing we pronunciate "particles" and "molecules" like we do for greek nouns (think "hercules").<p>And now with these "articles", I'm going to do this in my head for one more day.
A.k.A hesitation markers, non-lexical vocables, disfluence or nonfluence, filler..<p>It's entertaining how many different labels uh, well kinda um.. names I guess, er, anyway how many er ways to say these thingamabobs there, er, well are.<p>Wikipedia posits that even neanderthals might have said Ummm.
When translating ancient Greek in class, one often slips into a weird translation-ese that would be pretty funny if you didn't know what was going on. You end up saying things like: "The going-into-the-temple men were on the one hand brave and on the other hand afraid."
Apparently Tai uses quite a bit of infix (not prefixes, or suffixes, but infixes). In in English we have infixes, but they are all expletives of the Nixon style: "Kings-bloody-cross" (a railway station in Sydney), "absa-f..king-luteley" ...
Strange article.<p>Pretty sure the ancient greek translation is wrong in part too.<p>They say: 'theōrhiā' means 'review', whereas it is obvious to me that it means 'theory'.