Back in the Day
About ten years ago, I was trying to come up with a name for a hypothetical band that I'd start. I narrowed down the choices to "Aloe Vera" (a nice country rock vibe, I thought) and "Teh" (because people would have trouble spelling it with their spell-checkers on).
Little did I know that "teh" was entering the English language as slang:
Grammatical properties:
As slang, grammatical usage of the word teh is somewhat fluid. Besides being an alternate spelling of the, teh also has grammatical properties not generally applied to the; in general, it is used somewhat like an intensified "the". It can be used with proper names, as in "teh John"; compare the usage of the definite article in Greek: ο Ιωαννης (o Ioannes), literally "the John". A similar usage comes from colloquial German, where the definite article is used as a specifier to modify the noun: "Der Johann", again literally, "the John", could be used to identify John, and not Phil, as the subject performing a certain action. In Latin, the similar word ille and its declensions, which was at first an intensified article usually translated as "that", is the source of the derivations of the simple word for "the" and the personal pronouns (he, etc.) in the languages derived from Latin.
Little did I know that "teh" was entering the English language as slang:
Grammatical properties:
As slang, grammatical usage of the word teh is somewhat fluid. Besides being an alternate spelling of the, teh also has grammatical properties not generally applied to the; in general, it is used somewhat like an intensified "the". It can be used with proper names, as in "teh John"; compare the usage of the definite article in Greek: ο Ιωαννης (o Ioannes), literally "the John". A similar usage comes from colloquial German, where the definite article is used as a specifier to modify the noun: "Der Johann", again literally, "the John", could be used to identify John, and not Phil, as the subject performing a certain action. In Latin, the similar word ille and its declensions, which was at first an intensified article usually translated as "that", is the source of the derivations of the simple word for "the" and the personal pronouns (he, etc.) in the languages derived from Latin.
Comments
Post a Comment