In my considered opinion, Portuguese sounds like a drowsy headcold.
I randomly surveyed a representative sample of objective language critics (my wife), and have the additional answer “tongue-twisted”.
In my considered opinion, Portuguese sounds like a drowsy headcold.
I randomly surveyed a representative sample of objective language critics (my wife), and have the additional answer “tongue-twisted”.
Courtesy Wikipedia: Columbo
Columbo’s unsettling, uneven-eyed stare was due to Falk’s glass eye in the right eye socket. It remained a mystery for 25 years whether the character had one as well, until 1997’s “Columbo: A Trace of Murder”, whereupon asking another character to revisit the crime scene with him he jokes: “You know, three eyes are better than one.”
As other respondents have said, we do in word boundaries. I don’t do morpheme boundaries myself (I pronounce wholly and holy the same).
We *used* to have geminates, of course, which is why we have them still in spelling. That’s why -d- between two vowels only survives in native English words if it was a geminate, like ladder. If it was a single -d-, it turned into -th- : father, weather < Old English fæder, weder.
To add to Achilleas Vortselas’ answer for Greek,
The prefix παν- “all” is another intensifier, which was also in use in Ancient Greek. So πάμμαυρος “all-black” (which is not ancient), παμμάταιος “all-vain” (which is).
Greek also has superlative adjectives (so μαυρότατος “blackest”).
And a colloquial (negative) intensifying prefix is in fact… καρα-, which is Turkish kara– in OP’s question. This is mostly used with nouns, e.g. καράβλαχος (not “black Wallachian”, but “damn hillbilly”), but it does extend to verbs (καρατσεκάρω “black + English check: “I’ll damn well check”), and occasionally adjectives: Google has 673 instances of καραάσχετο, Internet Greek for “damned irrelevant” (i.e. “this is irrelevant to the thread, but…”)
Rather than join the United States of Mexico in adopting a name that won’t make a difference, the easier way for Australia to subvert chants of “USA! USA!” is through appropriate use of Syncopation. As follows:
A US!A US!A US!A US!
This is not to be confused with German “Aus! Aus! Aus! Das Spiel ist Aus!”, for when Germany won the World Cup in 1954.
…
Really, Quora. My answer needs to be longer. OK, I tried it out on an American friend living here, and she was suitably annoyed. (The A-U-S version, not the Aus! Aus! version.) Does that help?