The other day we were talking about pronunciation, rhythm and intonation and we saw how a sound can completely change the meaning of a word: these words are called “minimal pairs”, and here you have many good examples.
http://www.shiporsheep.com/page1.html
Coincidentally, Anna (4C) sent me a link to a funny story about an Italian who went to Malta to a bigg-a hotel-a, based on these minimal pairs. It contains dirty words that somebody might consider offensive, so I’m not going to put it in this blog ... but ...you can always ask Anna.
............. (Oct 9th)
...Ok, she's sent me another better version in which you can perfectly see the minimal pairs so I'm finally posting it. Just don't look if you don't want to see any dirty words.
6 comments:
just testing
Mariona, it's done, every body would read that italian in Malta story and be extremely affected for those horribles words, I'm a teaser, in the worst way!!!
anna miquel
My English is so (elementary) polite that I had to look up in the dictionary (not a monolingual yet - sorry Mariona) all those 'horrible words' that hurt me terribly.But to split hairs...why Malta?
Maite
It's so funny!I am still laughing. It is also very helpful to remember the pronunciation of these words. I am sure I will never forget.
If hair splitting is your only problem, your English may be polite but not so elementary! Why, probably because Malta is close to Italy, and the poor man didn't have enough money to go to England -the 2 official languages in Malta are Maltese and English.
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