Mark Twain passage of boat, was a measure on the sounding line. Twain is an archaic term for "two", as in "The veil of the temple was rent in twain." The riverboatman's cry was "mark twain" or, more fully, "by the mark twain", meaning "according to the mark [on the line], [the depth is] two [fathoms]", that is, "The water is deep and it is safe to pass." Twain said that his famous pen name was not entirely his invention. In "Life on the Mississippi", he wrote: Captain Isaiah Sellers was not of literary turn or capacity, but he used to jot
Old English grammar verb-second word order). The equivalents of "who, when, where" were used only as interrogative pronouns and indefinite pronouns, as in Ancient Greek and Sanskrit. Besides "þā ... þā ...", other correlative conjunctions occurred, often in pairs of identical words, e.g.: The phonology of Old English is necessarily somewhat speculative, since it is preserved purely as a written language. Nevertheless, there is a very large corpus of Old English, and the written language apparently indicates phonological alternations quite faithfully, so it is not difficult to draw certain conclusions about the nature of Old English phonology. Old English grammar The grammar of