Thatās a fitting name!
It sounds very Swedish. So much so, I had to look it up. Her father was born in Poland to a Jewish family, her mother in New York to Irish-American parents. But the name doesnāt sound Polish nor Irish to me?
Aha! Was it a stage name, perchance?
Usually with Hollywood it is but not this time. Her Dad was Jewish and his name (this is from Wiki) was Bluestein but he gave himself the stage name of Blondell.
Joan Blondell is my top fave Hollywood blonde!
In Swedish: pƤrlemorartad.
English never seizes to amaze me with its sheer wealth of words! Stephen Fry once said that Great Britainās tradition of writing dictionaries is responsible for this. I donāt know how accurate that is, but I think it makes sense.
I don't understand Stephen Fry's point. Wot's he on about? The sheer number of other languages incorporated into English, the diversity of it, that seems much more likely to me. I would go and look for comments on this by David Crystal but am too tired and need to flee quite soon.
What have we got? French, Sanskrit, Latin, Greek, Spanish, Hindi, Arabic, German, Dutch, Yiddish. Those are the main ones I can remember, there might be more. I think the Norse invaders are in the story, also, but history is not my strong point, lol. The colonial aspect of British history has to be in there, surely? I mean, English is an Indo-European language but we have so many words that we have lifted directly from Hindi so the empire thing must have something to do with it, I would think, plus those early invasions by the Vikings, Angles, Saxons not to mention the Romans and the French.
Celtic I'm not sure about. It might be in there but I don't know of any actual words that we have from Celtic languages. But I don't really know. Aeons ago, I used to have a mini library on all of this - a few David Crystal books plus others - but I never really looked into it properly and it fizzled out. The books went to the charity shop, lol.
The English dictionary activity is interesting, sure, and Samuel Johnson was a cool dude but I don't see dictionaries as the
reason English is so diverse and rich. Samuel Johnson published his dictionary in the 1750's (I think). The diversity in English was already up and running long before that. I'm no Johnsonian but didn't he write his dictionary bc he was interested in the pronunciation of English? god, I can't remember any of this. A bunch of booksellers asked him to write it bc the existing dictionaries of the time were crap, in their estimation, but I'm sure Johnson's thing was pronunciation more than illustrating the diversity of the language.
I give up! My brain is hurting. But, anyway, I disagree with Mr Fry.