Re: Word count of minimum vocabulary

"me" == me <noreply@xxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

>> What makes you think a word containing roots 'horse', 'river',
>> 'monster', '1.5', and 'foot' means 'fear of long words'?

me> I read it. Try looking it up with a search engine.

me> A claimed etymology:
me> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliaphobia
me> * Hippopoto- is claimed to mean "big" due to its allusion to
me> the Greek-derived word hippopotamus (though this is derived as
me> hippo- "horse" compounded with potamos "river", so originally
me> meaning "river horse").
me> * -monstr- is from Latin words
me> meaning "monstrous".
me> * -o- is a Greek noun-compounding vowel
me> (whose presence is highly anomalous between two Latin elements
me> here).
me> * -sesquippedali- is a misspelt and mistaken form
me> taken from "sesquipedalian" (meaning a long word, literally "a
me> foot and a half long" in Latin).
me> * -o- is a Greek
me> noun-compounding vowel (whose presence is highly anomalous
me> after another vowel here).
me> * -phobia is from the Greek for "fear".

Thank's for decoding those non-Anglo-Saxon roots for me. (Studying
medicine and biology must be very very difficult for an English
speaker -- the need to learn and memorize so many Greek and Latin word
roots!)

So, the Chinese translation would be 尺半河馬怪獸恐懼症.
A B C D E F G H I
The characters means:
A: foot (as a measurement unit)
B: half
C: river
D: horse
E: strange
F: animal (usually mammal that runs on the ground)
G: fear
H: afraid
I: symptom/disease

compounds:
AB: 1 foot and a half (as a length)
CD: hippo (yes, we call hippo "river horse", probably a translation
from the Greek/Latin roots)
EF: monster
GH: fear





--
Lee Sau Dan 李守敦 ~{@nJX6X~}

E-mail: danlee@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Home page: http://www.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/~danlee
.

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