Friday, August 10, 2007

tale of two meanings

My students and I were working through a problem the other day in class - one where a sign is hanging on a building - and an interesting question came up.

"Mr. Nomad - did you mean SIGN or SINE in your last sentence?"
"SIGN. While we have to take the sine of the number, we are looking for the tension of the wire on the sign."
"OK, just wanted to make sure we were talking about the same thing."

English just happens to be a language where one pronunciation can have more than one spelling. Like their, there, and they're; read and red; and as noted above - sign and sine.

So I turned the question to my group of expert Spanish speakers and asked, "Are there any words like that in Spanish?" I got a response that is quite intriguing.

The verbs casar and cazar in Spanish sound virtually the same but have interesting differences in meanings. Casar is "to marry" while cazar is "to hunt". Now there is one to ponder! Is it pure coincidence or is there a reason why the two words sound extremely similar?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

LOVE the new banner!

Benjamin Curry said...

Glad ya like it chica. :-) I figured I would do something with that tech degree we got...