On Tue, 19 Aug 2003, Philip Hart wrote: # # #On Tue, 19 Aug 2003, Matthew Hunter wrote: # #> On Tue, Aug 19, 2003 at 11:35:12AM -0700, Philip Hart <philiph at SLAC.Stanford.EDU> wrote: #> > Latin, gibberish, ... - I miss the good old days when this list used #> > English. #> #> Who are you kidding? English IS latin gibberish. # G G G/L G G G/L L ? G G L G* Where G = Germanic -- i.e., in all these cases, original English origin. Of "gibberish", OED Online says that it's from "gibber" + "-ish" (as a language name suffix, as in "English" ['of the Angles'], "Danish" and "Swedish"; it's G.), and that "gibber" is onomatopoeic, which means we can count it as G also. In other words, the only Latin word of Matthew's eight words is "latin" itself. He has created a self-disproving assertion. -- Dr. Whom, Consulting Linguist, Grammarian, Orthoepist, and Philological Busybody a.k.a. Mark A. Mandel