Newsgroup: it.cultura.linguistica.inglese
Titolo: More problem words

Ciao a tutti,
"emmigrant" versus "immigrant"
--emmigrant:  a person who leaves his country, to emmigrate from
--immigrant:  a person who becomes a resident of another country, to
immigrate to
--migrant:  a person who moves from place to place within a country or
between countries, migrant workers (typically from Mexico) do most of the
farm work in California.
"ingenious" versus "ingenuous"
--ingenious: inventive, resourceful
--ingenuous:  innocent or unsophisticated
"adept" versus "adapt"
--adept: highly skilled
--adapt: to modify for a new purpose
"hopefully" versus "let us hope"
--hopefully: in a hopeful mood or manner
correct: I search the newsgroup hopefully for interesting information.
incorrect: Hopefully, I'll identify people by the right gender.
correct: Let us hope I'll identify people by the right gender.
The word "hopefully" is misused so frequently as in the above example that
it is accepted as correct by less careful writers than myself.
Ciao,
Ron
USA

I hope you like this longish quote from Mary-Claire van
Leunen, author of "A Handbook for Scholars," a delighting
book about English usage in scientifical literature.
Mary-Claire van Leunen on "hopefully"
6 Aug 1984
Q: I have often heard that it is incorrect to use
"hopefully" to mean "it is hoped". But the Random House
dictionary lists that as definition number two and gives no
warnings of any kind. Is this usage standard?
A: The story of "hopefully" is one of the strangest in
modern English.
"Hopeful" has had two senses ever since it first appeared in
the language late in the 16th century. A person could be
hopeful (expectant, eager, desirous); or a situation could
be hopeful (promising, auspicious, bright).
As with most adjectives, both of these "hopeful"s regularly
produced "-ly" adverbial forms, but the kind of hopefulness
that meant expectant and eager produced adverbs more readily
than the kind that means promising and bright. There's
nothing mysterious about that difference in frequency. A
person can carry himself hopefully or eye a desirable object
hopefully or prepare himself hopefully for a possible
future. Impersonal substantives, on the other hand, serve
less often than personal ones at the head of the kind of
active verbs we modify with adverbs of manner. Nonetheless,
a wager can be shaping up hopefully, a day can begin
hopefully, the omens can augur hopefully. All perfectly
straightforward and normal. The fitrst OED citation for
"hopefully" in this second sense is from 1637.
Early in the 1930s, this second sense of "hopefully" began
to appear in a different kind of construction, as what's
called a sentence adverb. Sentence adverbs are part of a
class of expressions that can modify whole clauses; such
expressions are called absolutes. Look at some sentence
adverbs at work:
Interestingly, most mathematicians failed to notice the
correspondence.
Presumably he knows what he's doing.
Regrettably there's no remedy for this kind of infection.
Fortunately we managed to get out before he noticed us.
Hopefully the weather will clear up before it's time to
leave.
Then in the early 1960s attacks against "hopefully" began to
appear in print. That's about the right lag time for usage
controversies, and I looked forward to figuring out how to
wield my cudgel. I believe, by the way, that if rational
debate had ensued I would have been against "hopefully" as a
sentence adverb. Unfortunately, reason never entered into
it.
The attacks were by and large astoundingly ill-informed.
Some managed to convey that it was "hopefully" as a sentence
adverb to which they were opposed but lacked the technical
vocabulary with which to express the idea. Some opposed both
"hopeful" and "hopefully" in the sense promising(ly),
auspicious(ly), bright(ly). Most bizarre of all, some took
it upon themselves to oppose all sentence adverbs.
The authors of these attacks presented themselves as
defenders of the purity of the language against the
onslaught of wicked barbarians. They asserted (apparently
without ever feeling the need to check the evidence) that
the objects of their attack were very recent additions to
the language -- true in the case of "hopefully" as a
sentence adverb, but not true at all of impersonal "hopeful"
and "hopefully," and completely zany when it comes to
sentence adverbs in general. (In five minutes with the OED I
was able to find "certainly" being used as a sentence adverb
in 1300.) One came to see that these self-proclaimed
language defenders knew nothing of even the most elementary
tools of the trade.
So. What should we do? Ignore the ignorant bully-boys or
knuckle under?
When I was young I once attended a school at which one group
of girls declared that anyone who wore yellow on Thursdays
was a freak. The rest of us recognized the iterdict as
arbitrary, irrational, and mean. Its only purpose was to
wound. We talked about it among ourselves, and we tried to
fire ourselves up to wear yellow on the fatal day. But there
were sixteen lonely hours between last study hall on
Wednesday and getting dressed Thursday morning. Nobody owned
very many items of yellow clothing anyway; quite likely they
were already in the laundry. And yellow's not a flattering
color in the morning light. Not at all flattering. Tends to
make the wearer look green.
I moved in the middle of the year, so I have no idea whether
some brave child eventually wore a yellow blouse, or yellow
socks, or a yellow hankerchief to that school on a Thursday.
Hopefully there was more than one; hopefully the girls who
laid down the original rule saw how jaunty the rebels looked
in their yellow outfits; hopefully -- oh, devoutly to be
hoped -- they all became best friends and behaved
beautifully to one another and never did anything petty or
malicious again as long as they lived.
--
Riccardo Distasi, 
ric...@dia.elimina_questo.unisa.it
[eliminare l'ovvio per avere il mio indirizzo]
[snip out the underscored token for my real address]

book about English usage in scientifical literature.
I received my information about the substandard use of "hopefully" from one of
several texts used by professional copyeditiors.
As I've said before, what is correct and incorrect is very much a matter of
opinion. I have been corrected on the misuse of "hopefully" by several
professional editors, so I tend to follow their guide.
Ciao,
Ron
USA
principiante in italiano

 USA
  Saluti
  Gigi
-- 
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Luigi Mancinelli
Lab. Didattici
Fac. Scienze
Universita` di Trento
38050 POVO(TN)
ITALY
ma...@science.unitn.it
  Cercare di semplificare i problemi e` l'obiettivo,
 pensare che siano semplici e` la strada sbagliata (Gigi Mancinelli)

 non c'e' problema (se conosce l'italiano)
  Mentre premevo il tasto send e rileggevo mi sono accorto di questa
sciocchezza, che certamente poteva dar adito a molti dubbi circa la
mia dimestichezza con la mia madrelingua...
  Ovviamente e' "emigrante"-"immigrato".
  A questo punto e' a mio parere interessante notare come l'importa-
zione dal latino abbia dato luogo a due differenti esiti in inglese
ed in italiano.
  Emigrante e' colui che parte, ovvero che sta compiendo un'azione
nel presente, coerentemente con la forma del participio presente.
  Immigrato e' colui che e' gia' arrivato, che dunque ha gia' com-
piuto l'azione di immigrare, anche qui coerentemente con la forma
del participio passato.
  Non c'e' traccia di questa distinzione nell'inglese (che ovvia-
mente sente la parola immigrant come parola priva del suo senso
di azione presente), sembrerebbe...
  Noi infatti abbiamo emigrante-emigrato, ma solo immigrato (immi-
grante potrebbe essere solo al cancello dell'aereoporto) e gli
inglesi?  Dopo trent'anni e piu' che vivo in Trentino sto ancora
immigrando?


Avevo spedito questo messaggio, ma non vedendolo nel gruppo
lo rispedisco:


immigrando?
She is an Italian emmigrant.
She emmigrated from Italy.
She is an Italian immigrant
She immigrated to the US.
We speak of emmigration from one country and immigration into another.
She hopes to emmigrate from Italy.
She hopes to immigrate to the US.
She is emmigrating from Italy.
She is immigrating to the US.
After some time, she assimilated into Amercian culture and no longer considered
herself an immigrant.
Ciao,
Ron
USA