Product Description
In 1993, as part of a computer project I was working on, I found myself reading an English dictionary and dividing all the words into prefixes, suffixes and roots. I had read studies in linguists which suggested that the initial consonants of a word had a set of meanings, and the remaining rhyming part also had a set of meanings. One 'sense' of 'str-' is linearity: string, strip, stripe, street, etc. And one sense of '-ap' is flat: cap, flap, lap, map, etc. If you put them together, you get a flat line: 'strap'. The idea fascinated me, and since I was marking all these words anyway, I decided to keep an eye out for these classes which have similar meaning and pronunciation both. It turns out that it is possible by means of a series of repeatable experiments to show that certain meanings hang out with certain phonemes and others do not.
I have been working on a dictionary which outlines this data for English in much more detail rather formally and scientifically. But I also have many thoughts which I seem to express more openly and cheerfully when I voice them in a separate book. My purpose here is therefore not to prove anything, but to summarize my most important findings in plain English and to philosophize freely and naively on their significance.
About the Author
Margaret Magnus is a freelance writer and researcher. She grew up in Boulder, CO and Trondheim, Norway, and is fluent in English, Norwegian and Russian. Magnus studied Russian at the University of Leningrad, and holds a degree in German with a minor in mathematics from Colorado State University as well as a degree in linguistics from the University of Oslo. She was a PhD candidate in formal theoretical linguistics at MIT, from where she went on to co-found and serve for 10 years as CEO in a business, Circle Noetics, which develops natural language software, such as search engines, spelling checkers and hyphenation subroutines. She enjoys playing the piano and raising her two children.
