The One Big Happy from 8/30, in which Ruthie hopes for semantic transparency in morphology:
Ruthie’s reading from a book, so she can see the LAND in IRELAND (in pronunciation, it’s reduced to unaccented /lǝnd/ and might not be so easily identifiable). So she hopes the IRE part will be another word she knows that will make sense in combination with LAND in the way that the first elements in, say, ICELAND and WOODLAND do.
And her dad helpfully explains IRE.
September 26, 2018 at 10:34 am |
It’s not just in English. As a child in Germany I thought it a hoot that Irland obviously meant Land der Irren (crazy/bewildered).