SOME UNRELATED ‘LOOK ALIKES’

SOME UNRELATED ‘LOOK ALIKES’

As had been frequently suggested in our blog write-ups, English as a language is quite fascinating for some while ‘frustrating’ to an equal number or more. What makes our brethren get frustrated is their inability to grasp the nuances of pronunciation of words; most of us tend to pronounce every letter in a word -much the same way as we would do in Indian languages. But ‘language traditions’ in English are far different from what are familiar with and to make things complicated, we are oblivious of such lingual traditions; this can be largely ascribed to our native teachers who venture into English teaching without a specific orientation to the domain of ‘phonetics’ in that language.

Try pronouncing the words Superfluous, Restaurant, Colonel, cadet corps, Corpse, Rapprochement and verify them with a standard dictionary to find out that our utterances would not pass for English with any native speaker of that language.  It would be a ‘kill’ for them, even as we are delighted of our vocabulary!

LOOK AT THESE

These are seemingly related, but are disparate

FEEL, FELL, FELLED, FELT

Feel = recognize by contact or touch, At times it may also mean a mental judgment

Fell is not only the past tense o the act of falling or Fall; Fell also means ‘cut down’   Felled is of course the past tense of fell. ‘Felt’ is the past participle of ‘Feel’. He felt insulted when shoes were hurled at him; when he had done the same  to someone else, he was more ‘insulated’ from any feeling.

‘BUILD,BILL, BILLED , BULLIED

BUILD = To construct or progressively develop in an organized sequence          

Bill -a legislative motion that attempts to make a law or modification thereof.                BILLED= To give a bill for payment to a product or service; it may also mean a bird with a bill; the bill is a ‘beak’ of some typical form or shape.                              BULLIED = To forcibly impose some idea by use of pressure or muscle power to make someone obey a particular order or guideline.[Past tense of bully]    

FISH, PHISH, FISHING, PHISHING              

FISH                                                                                                                             ‘Fish’ is too common a term to cause any discomfort for its meaning and despite the precise names for several varieties thereof, we use the generic term ‘Fish’.                        Fine, now look at ‘Phish’                                                                                                 ‘Phish’ is a sneaky or fraudulent approach of collecting sensitive information about a person from sources like the internet.  

‘Fishing’ = act of catching fish in singles or in herds using devices like net.

‘Phishing’ = the act of ‘employing tricky tools like fake addresses to cheat a person to share critical data that may be used to ‘rob’ him /her of possessions in bank.

SLOT,SLAUGHT                                                                                                                  The two words sound alike but have no relationship between them.                               SLOT= A vertical or horizontal opening in a machine to accept coin/Currency or a chip card for carrying out a command placed to the system. Another meaning is to provide a time schedule by which some work may have to be performed.

SLAUGHT = To kill; the act is slaughter and the allotted place is the slaughter house. Other derived words are   Manslaught, Onslaught . Often Slaughter is used in speech/ writing.

BUST, BURST   Their pronunciation is not identical as Burst is pronounced BUST with stress on U for a slightly longer duration;   and it means a quick enthusiastic activity / sudden explosion as in a gas balloon. BUST= To break something to unusable state / arrest someone for bad acts. Another meaning is the area of torso around the chest and back as in a statue or a photograph of a person.

SLIT, SPLIT   Obviously, the words are quite different by phonetic value.               SLIT= make a straight narrow cut /opening                                                                              

SPLIT = To make or cause something to divide into 2 or more parts or units in a line. Political parties get split on dissent.

There are several such ‘look alikes’. But they may be completely unrelated.

Prof. K. Raman