Word Finder - vernacular

definition

The language of a people or a national language.

example

A vernacular of the United States is English.

definition

Everyday speech or dialect, including colloquialisms, as opposed to standard, literary, liturgical, or scientific idiom.

example

Street vernacular can be quite different from what is heard elsewhere.

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Language unique to a particular group of people; jargon, argot.

example

For those of a certain age, hiphop vernacular might just as well be a foreign language.

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A language lacking standardization or a written form.

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Indigenous spoken language, as distinct from a literary or liturgical language such as Ecclesiastical Latin.

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Vatican II allowed the celebration of the mass in the vernacular.

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Of or pertaining to everyday language, as opposed to standard, literary, liturgical, or scientific idiom.

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Belonging to the country of one's birth; one's own by birth or nature; native; indigenous.

example

a vernacular disease

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Of or related to local building materials and styles; not imported.

definition

Connected to a collective memory; not imported.

He loved using the vernacular, although it never sounded quite right coming from him.

In Scotland the word "slug" is absent from the vernacular vocabulary, both shell-bearing and shell-less inland molluscs being known as snails.

He uses the vernacular with an economy which no other English writer has rivalled.

To use the vernacular, he was " sent to Coventry ".

Excuse me; if you do n't understand the vernacular, let me translate.

In catalogues and bibliographies, however, the expression is now generally used, conveniently if incorrectly, as synonymous with Jewish literature, including all works written by Jews in Hebrew characters, whether the language be Aramaic, Arabic or even some vernacular not related to Hebrew.

Both the government and private enterprise maintain vernacular schools.

In today 's popular vernacular, it 's a task they must be up for !

In my vernacular, your pages with the highest Dollar Index are where hinge events occur.

The gradual replacement of Syriac by Arabic as the vernacular language of Mesopotamia by degrees transformed the Syriac from a living to a dead language.

Sir Sayad Ahmad Khan, K.C.S.I., who died in 1898, founded in 1864 the Aligarh Institute and Scientific Society for the translation into the vernacular of western literature; and afterwards the Mahommedan Anglo-Oriental college, under English professors, with an English school attached.

In and after the middle of the 16th century a correct and pure Latinity was promoted by the educational system of the Jesuits; but with the growth of the vernacular literatures Latin became more and more exclusively the language of the learned.

The 13th century, from the point of view of Biblical renderings into the vernacular, is an absolute blank.

The vernacular language is not Bengali, but a dialect of Hindi; and the people likewise resemble those of Upper India.

The first royal edict written in Danish is dated 1386; and the Act of Union at Kalmar, written in 1397, is the most important piece of the vernacular of the 14th century.

Vernacular prose was, as might be expected, and especially in Scotland, late in its appearance.

It may be said generally that while Luther insisted on a service in the vernacular, including the singing of German hymns, he considered it best to retain most of the ceremonies, the vestments and the uses of lights on the altar, which had existed in the unreformed church, while he was careful to explain that their retention might be dispensed with if thought necessary.

Persian is the vernacular of a large part of the non-Afghan population, and is familiar to all educated Afghans; it is the language of the court and of literature.

In Sanskrit, it would be called " Bharata-varsha," from Bharata, a legendary monarch of the Lunar line; but Sanskrit is no more the vernacular of India than Latin is of Europe.

They studied the vernacular, in order to reach the people by their preaching and to translate the Bible; and they taught English, as the channel of non-sectarian learning.

At last the government awoke to its own responsibility in the matter of education, after the long and acrimonious controversy between the advocates of English and vernacular teaching had worn itself out.

To this day their vernacular language is Gujarati, which they have cultivated in literature and journalism.

His style was much simpler and more vernacular than his son's.

He was a supporter of the principles of Abraham Geiger, and while still in`Germany advocated the introduction of prayers in the vernacular, the exclusion of nationalistic hopes from the synagogue service, and other ritual modifications.

In today's popular vernacular, it's a task " they must be up for!

Later writers to a large extent used over again the materials of their predecessors, while secular works tend to be influenced by the surrounding civilization, or even are composed in the vernacular languages.

In today's vernacular, it also refers to a picture or image displayed on a computer desktop or cell phone.

But the persecution of the clergy led him to seek an antidote for what he regarded as the corruption of the Church, and he resolved to translate the New Testament into the vernacular.

Majestie to stablysh Christen quietness " (1536), together with the " Injunctions " of 1536 and 1538, are chiefly noteworthy for their affirmation of almost all the current doctrines of the Catholic Church, except those relating to the papal supremacy, purgatory, images, relics and pilgrimages, and the old rooted distrust of the Bible in the vernacular.

Hence an important form of literary activity came to be the translation of the homilies approved by the church into the vernacular.

Latterly the word fuero came to be used in Castile in a wider sense than before, as meaning a general code of laws; thus about the time of Saint Ferdinand the old Lex Visigothorum, then translated for the first time into the vernacular, was called the Fuero Juzgo, a name which was soon retranslated into the barbarous Latin of the period as Forum Judicum; 4 and among the compilations of Alphonso the Learned in like manner were an Espejo de Fueros and also the Fuero de las leyes, better known perhaps as the Fuero Real.

No other vernacular (except, of course, Aramaic) ever had the same influence upon Hebrew, largely because no other bears so close a relation to it.

Side by side with these literary organs there exists a vernacular press largely devoted to nationalist propaganda.

Captain John Smith, in his History of Virginia (1626), at p. 27 speaks of "Martins, Powlecats, Weesels and Minkes," showing that the animal must at that time have been distinguished by a vernacular appellation from its congeners.

Although the British representatives of this group should undoubtedly retain their vernacular designations of water-rat and short-tailed field-mouse, the term "vole" is one of great convenience in zoology as a general one for all the members of the group. Systematically voles are classed in the mammalian order Rodentia, in which they constitute the typical section of the subfamily Microtinae in the Muridae, or mouse-group. As a group, voles are characterized by being more heavily built than rats and mice, and by their less brisk movements.

The town has long been known as a Welsh publishing centre, the vernacular newspaper, Baner, being edited and printed here.

Hutchinson, David Hume, Home and Robertson were assiduous in avoiding Scotticisms as far as they might; even Burns, who summed up the popular past of Scotland in his vernacular poetry, as a rule wrote English in his letters, and when he wrote English verse he often followed the artificial style of the 18th century.

In a survey of the vernacular literature of Scotland it is advantageous to keep in mind that there are two main streams or threads running throughout, the one literary in the higher sense, expressing itself in " schools " of a more artificial or academic type; the other popular, also in the better sense of that term, more native, more rooted in national tradition, more persistent and conversely less bookish in fashion.

We are attracted to Beltrees and his kinsmen less by their craftsmanship than by the fact that they supplied the leaders of the vernacular revival of the 18th century with many subjects and versemodels, and that by their treatment of these subjects and models, based on the practice of an earlier day, they complete the evidence of the continuity of the domestic popular type of Scots verse.

If the work begun by Allan Ramsay, continued by Fergusson and completed by Burns, were matter for separate treatment, it would be necessary to show not only that the editorial zeal which turned these writers to the forgotten vernacular and to " popular " themes was inspired by the general conditions of reaction against the artificiality of the century; but that it was because these poets were Scots, and in Scotland, that they chose this line of return to nature and naturalness, and did honour, partly by protest, to the slighted efforts of the " vulgar " muse.

The initiative was taken by the French in the 12th and 13th centuries, and the Germans followed in the 14th and 15th; while the Book of Wa y es to Jerusalem of John de Maundeville (c. 1336) attained extreme popularity, and was translated into almost all the vernacular languages.

According to the linguistic survey of India no fewer than 147 distinct languages are recorded as vernacular in India.

Through all changes, of government vernacular instruction in its simplest form has always been given, at least to the children of respectable classes, in every large village.

Meanwhile the missionaries made the field of vernacular education their own.

Discouraged by the official authorities, and ever liable to banishment or deportation, they not only devoted themselves with courage to their special work of evangelization, but were also the first to study the vernacular dialects spoken by the common people.

At that time the three universities were founded at Calcutta, Madras and Bombay; English-teaching schools were established in every district; the benefit of grants-in-aid was extended to the lower vernacular institutions and to girls' schools; and public instruction was erected into a department of the administration in every province, under a director, with a staff of inspectors.

In the primary schools, however, which provide vernacular teaching for the masses, there were only 4 million pupils to the 300 millions of India.

The Kanishka commentaries were written in the Sanskrit language, perhaps because the Kashmir and northern priests who formed his council belonged to isolated Aryan colonies, which had been little influenced by the growth of the Indian vernacular dialects.

This class also exercised a wide influence through the press, printed both in the vernacular languages and in English, especially among young students.

He developed four well-defined characters in the process - a country farmer, Ezekiel Biglow, and his son Hosea; the Rev. Homer Wilbur, a shrewd old-fashioned country minister; and Birdofredum Sawin, a Northern renegade who enters the army, together with one or two subordinate characters; and his stinging satire and sly humour are so set forth in the vernacular of New England as to give at once a historic dignity to this form of speech.