So this will should be a relatively short post. We’ve all been occasionally (or frequently as the case may be) come across words and been struck by how amazing words, languages and the human mind are. Every time I end up talking about this topic with DH, I end up sounding like an overenthusiastic loony. Yet I can’t help marvelling at how big a part words and languages play in development of cultures. The languages and words used by a culture and its people can tell one so much about what is important to them, how they think, their way of living, religion, philosophy etc. So many times a word from one language has no equivalent in another and this is most often true in case of words codifying a concept, an idea or a way of life.
See, I got all loony again 😛 Anyway, I’ll be adding random language and word related short posts focusing on one word/idea at a time. The word/idea need not be unique or amazing in any way, just something that triggered generic feeling of ‘words are so amazing!’ and ‘languages are so damn cool!’
So after all this context, the word for today is (definition courtesy dictionary.reference.com)
PARSE [pahrz, pahrz]
verb (used with object), parsed, parsing.
- to analyse (a sentence) in terms of grammatical constituents, identifying the parts of speech, syntactic relations, etc.
- to describe (a word in a sentence) grammatically, identifying the part of speech, inflectional form, syntactic function, etc.
- to analyse (something, as a speech or behaviour) to discover its implications or uncover a deeper meaning: Political columnists were in their glory, parsing the president’s speech on economy in minute detail.
- Computers. to analyse (a string of characters) in order to associate groups of characters with the syntactic units of the underlying grammar.
verb (used without object), parsed, parsing.
- to be able to be parsed; lend itself to parsing: Sorry, but your concluding paragraph simply doesn’t parse.
Coffee, Spice & Ink 