Small and Little

[Lynne Murphy]

Since I get the digest, I may be repeating what someone else has said, but
Swedish has 'den lilla människor', and Ben Zimmer on Language Log and the
new Economist blog, Johnson, have covered this already.

More than the translation, I'm interested in what a big difference there is
between 'people' and 'guy' in this context.  Is it just the registral
difference between the two that encourages interpretation of 'the little
guy' as an affectionate term, or is it also the singular vs plural?

I'm working on starting a corpus project on the use of 'people' and its
synonyms.  (I'm admiring my phrasing 'working on starting' there...yep,
that about sums it up.)  If anyone has any thoughts on 'people'
(interesting source material, etc.), please send me an off-list message!

Lynne of the people

--On den 17 juni 2010 09:20 -0500 "Cohen, Gerald Leonard" <gcohen at MST.EDU>
wrote:

> I assume Swedish has the same use of "the little/small people" that
> German does, where the term ("die kleinen Leute") means roughly "the
> little guy" (i.e., those who are not the big bosses, wealthy/influential
> tycoons, etc.).  If so, I'm sure we deal here merely with the BP board
> chairman translating a Swedish phrase literally into English without
> being aware that its nuance is different in English.
> So his English is excellent but not perfect. And those of us who deal
> with foreign languages can empathize with that.
> Gerald Cohen
>
> ________________________________
>
> Original message from Bill Palmer, Thu 6/17/2010 7:09 AM:
>
> These two words are nominal synonyms,  but definitely not
> interchangeable.
>
> If the BP board chairman had referred to the *little people*, it would
> have just been patronizing, but *small people* is not only that, but
> weird, too.  Surprisingly inartful word choice for a Swede, most of whom
> speak English more precisely than native speakers.
>
> Bill Palmer



Dr M Lynne Murphy
Senior Lecturer in Linguistics
Arts B357
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QN

phone: +44-(0)1273-678844
http://separatedbyacommonlanguage.blogspot.com

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