qroqqa

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qroqqa		 I love language. This does not mean words. I quite like a lot of words. I don't much like funny, quirky, or just plain made-up words; I infinitely prefer wind, water, west, wild, wise, window, woodbank, wood anemone to a bunch of fake phobias. By 'word' here I will always mean "lexical item"; these sometimes contain spaces in the spelling or are syntactically composite.

When I give citations I like to use the complete sentence, for context and out of respect for the author's style.

My phonetic transcriptions are in IPA. (They were in SAMPA at first but I've now written a SAMPA-to-IPA macro.)

Other abbreviations or symbols used:
BNC = British National Corpus
BrE = British English (in the sense of a written form; it is meaningless to apply this term to speech varieties)
CGEL = The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language—if you're not using this, your understanding of grammar is out of date. (The same authors' A Student's Guide to English Grammar is smaller, cheaper, and will do for starters.)
Gh = ghit = Google hit (and thus also kGh, MGh)
OED = Oxford English Dictionary – I always use the full on-line one, via UK public library subscription. Learn how the OED find out the meaning of words.

Cited words are in 'single quotes', meanings in "double quotes", letters in <a>ngle brackets.

Qroqqa is the Maltese word for "brooding hen". The <q> is a glottal stop. (Ack! I've just discovered the Hawaiian for "ooaa" has more glottal stops in it than my username!)

Comments for qroqqa

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  • about 1 months ago, gangerh said: I played with your name. 
  • about 8 months ago, rolig said: Thanks for your suggestion (a week and a half ago!) regarding my question about how to refer the "singular" of a pluralis tantem. I think I understand the notion of a "bound base", but I am not sure that applies to units like *scissor, *hijink, and *trouser, since the -s in the pluralis tantum is not really an affix in the way that dis- is in discombobulate, but a grammatical ending (or perhaps this distinction is irrelevant?). In other words, when we remove the ending from scissors, we still have a hypothetical noun that acts like real nouns in certain ways, notably, it can serve as a verb ("She scissored her way through the crowd") or a modifier ("The scissor pieces lay on the table, waiting to be assembled"). Would lexeme work in such cases?
  • about 9 months ago, rolig said: Hi, Qroqqa! I am looking for a way to refer to the hypothetical singular form of a pluralis tantem, e.g. *scissor, *underpant, *hijink. Are these lexemes? I figured that you would be the Wordie to ask about this.
  • about 10 months ago, Prolagus said: Happy New Year qroqqa, there's only us on Wordie!
  • about 1 year, 3 months ago, whichbe said: I just wanted to say that I really appreciate your citations and contributions to this site and I'm glad you're here.
  • about 1 year, 3 months ago, qroqqa said: For the record, qroqqa is about the only Maltese word I know.
  • about 1 year, 3 months ago, bilby said: Time for a cookie! Perhaps a Maltese treat for us here?
  • about 1 year, 4 months ago, bilby said: Hi qroqqa. I'd appreciate a Maltese miaow here.
  • about 1 year, 4 months ago, Prolagus said: qroqqa, thank you for your help on the braggadocio recipe. Can I just ask you to use a narrower definition of "English word"? Risotto and espresso are Italian, Morocco is a country, and Lobelia is borrowed from the scientific name.
    I can't believe no wasn't there yet!
    Thank you!
  • about 1 year, 4 months ago, Prolagus said: Yay! You know, there is a secret subgroup of biologists here on Wordie. But it's so secret that I can't talk about it.

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