607: Future Tense Aug 6, 2016

English has no future tense marker, or any other way to (morphologically) alter the form of a verb, opposite to the conjugation in Latin, French, and many other languages. To get around this, English speakers use a range of different constructions. Most often the usage of 'will' or 'shall' would be called the "future tense", but it is not that simple. Generally, there are 6 ways of expressing future-action. The first, like mentioned is with 'will' or 'shall' and a verb in base-form. The next is with "be going to" and a corresponding infinitive verb. Another way is to use phrases such as "be to"," be about to", "have to" etc. In addition to that, the present progressive can be used to emphasize future planned events, but usually only for the near future. Also the simple present tense can be employed for this purpose but more definitely, for example: "he is going to bed at 11pm" versus "he goes to bed at 11pm". Finally, other modal verbs, including 'may' 'might' 'could' and 'should' can convey future time, even though they can also be used to convey past time in different contexts.

606: thesaurus Aug 5, 2016

Even kids would mostly likely would know what a thesaurus is, but it used to have a more general, all encompassing meaning that was then it was refined. In the late 16th century, English took on the word ultimately from the Greek 'thēsauros' which means ‘storehouse, treasure’, in this case for words. The original meaning was a both a ‘dictionary' or 'encyclopedia’, as both were and are still a storehouse for information. Only was the meaning narrowed to what it is today when Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases was published in 1852, as a model for what we know thesauri to be now.

605: pedagogue and synagogue Aug 4, 2016

A lot of the time it is possible to see if words are related by just looking at the similarities in spelling or pronunciation. 'Pedagogue' comes ultimately from the Greek 'paidagōgos' which was a slave who accompanied a child to school. This was already covered on November 8, 2015, but now it should be noted that 'agōgos' meaning ‘guide’ comes from 'again' meaning 'lead'. 'Synagogue' as well comes the Greek, 'sun-' meaning ‘together’ and 'agein'. Although sometimes a connection in the meaning can be made words ending in '-logue' like 'catalogue' and 'prologue' do not fit into the aforesaid model for the creation of words, as they come from 'logos' which means 'saying'.

604: transylvania and pennsylvania Aug 3, 2016

Romanian in a Romance language, so it should be no surprise that the name for the region 'Transylvania' comes from Latin, even though it's true that Hungary and then the Ottoman Empire controlled the area for century. The name comes from 'trans' meaning 'across' and 'silvia' which means 'forest', and the suffix '-(n)ia' is a common way to make something a noun which would otherwise, in this case, be a phrase. Once that had been created, words like Pennsylvania could be formed with ease and understanding, even though 'Penn' is not Latin or Latinate, but Welsh in origin.

603: greece Aug 2, 2016

Greeks call Greece Hellas or the Hellenic Republic, so why do we have a different name for the country than its own? It isn't as though we have no connection to the Greek words, 'Hellenic' is the name for the language family that is comprised of Ancient and Modern Greek, and a 'Hellene' is the name for a person of ancient Greece. The English word, much like many other place names that differ from the native one is from Latin. The Old English word 'Grēcas' was adopted for ‘the Greeks,’ when the Romans invaded, and brought their word, 'Graeci'. The Latin name was used because the Romans in fact referred to themselves as the Hellenes. 'Greek' then comes from 'Graikoi', which was the prehistoric name of the Hellenes according to Aristotle.

602: veterinarian Aug 1, 2016

Should people need, they could bring any animal or pet into a veterinary practice. As words go 'veterinarian' is rather new, emerging in English only in the late 18th century. The word itself was created from the Latin word 'veterinarius', which comes from the root, 'veterinae' meaning specifically 'cattle' because farm-animals would have been the majority in what was being looked after medically.

600: consonants and vowels Jul 30, 2016

The opposite of a vowel, in a sense, would be a consonant, in that if a letter is not one, it must by default be the other. The words used to be more related to each other. 'Vowel' now comes from the Latin, 'vocalis (littera)' which means 'vocal (letter)'. 'Consonants' on the other hand, are go with vowels, and even the word itself is derived from the Latin parts 'con-' meaning ‘with’ and 'sonare' which means ‘to sound’, because almost all syllables in English are made up of vowel-consonant clusters.
I hope that you've enjoyed all of these, now 600, posts.

601: Lax Vowel Endings Jul 31, 2016

There are very few words in English that end in lax vowels, including 'meh', 'eh', and 'nah'. 'Meh' was coined by the Simpsons tv-show which often does experiment with language. All of them will be found in everyday speech, but tends to not be included in the rest of a clause. To try to fit 'eh' in the middle of a sentence without being separated with punctuation would be difficult, and if you listen, there is almost always a long break between the expressions and the rest of the sentence like 'eh, I don't really like it".

599: sino and china Jul 29, 2016

Some names for areas have combining forms, such as 'Afro-' for such as in Afroasiatic, or 'Indo-' as in 'Indo-European'. The combining form for 'China', however, is 'Sino' as in 'Sino-tibetan'. The form itself does not come from the word 'China' but instead the Latin 'Sinae' meaning "the Chinese". Many other languages including Greek, Arabic, and Sanskrit had words for "China," beginning with 'sin-', probably from the Ch'in dynasty. Not all of those languages had the English 'ch' sound, but English does, so it was possible to take the word from 'Ch'in' or 'Qin' (the exact dynasty that gave the name is the subject of debate), but other languages has to assimilate the sound to make it pronounceable.

598: Comparative Adjectives Jul 28, 2016

Every language has a set of rules that are second-nature to native speakers, subconsciously followed, such as how in English no one would add an attributive adjective before a noun, since "the pencil yellow" makes little sense. When people are creating the comparative form of an adjectives, there are rules governing whether people say 'more...' or add an '-er' suffix. For one-syllable words, the convention is to add '-er', with exception to words that end in nasal sounds. For two-syllable words, people use 'more...' unless the word ends in a 'y', 'er', 'le' or ow', in which case the word would take a '-er'. For all three-syllable or longer words, people say 'more...". Of course, like everything in English there may be exceptions, but that is a fair rule of thumb.

597: bunkum Jul 27, 2016

An older term for nonsense, less used today, is 'bunkum', and much like nonsense in politics still, it originated within the House of Representatives. In the early 19th Century, it was unclear whether Missouri was going to be annexed as a slave- or free-state, so a debate was held. As a representative from Missouri, Felix Walker, spoke, rather than addressing the issue at hand, he reportedly talked of local issues from his county, Buncombe County in order solely to make his constituents happy.

596: sign and design Jul 26, 2016

As nouns, 'design' and 'sign' are not necessarily vastly different, but as verbs, the meaning of the words were originally much more similar. In late Middle English the verbal form meant what can now only be expressed with the word 'designate’. 'Sign' however, in Middle English, had a similar meaning to what is has today: 'to mark'.

595: name, noun, and nominative Jul 25, 2016

The Latin word for 'name' gave many English words the names that they have now. 'Name' itself has Germanic roots, but is connected by an Indo-European root with Latin's 'nomen', which can be seen letter-for letter in the word 'nomenclature', a word to describe the act of naming something (in scientific fields). More interesting perhaps is that 'noun' also comes from this Latin word, since nouns are words to identify things and people (and concepts etc.) by name. Finally, in grammar the word 'nominative' is used to describe the syntax of a word when it is the subject of a sentence, and it shares the same root.

594: bridegroom Jul 24, 2016

Marriage has led to the creation of many words. 'Bridegroom' comes from the Old English, 'brȳdguma', which itself can be broken into the parts 'brȳd' meaning ‘bride’ as it does today, and 'guma' which meant ‘man’, separate from the Old English 'mann' which meant 'person'. The change from ''brȳdguma' to 'bridegroom' occurred in Middle English due to association with the word, 'groom' which meant ‘boy', since 'guma' had become an obsolete word.

593: -ceive and -ception Jul 23, 2016

In romance languages, it is possible to create multiple verbs from a single root by adding prepositions as prefixes. Words such as 'receive', 'deceive' 'conceive' and 'perceive' all come from the same Latin word, 'capere' meaning 'to take', but with different prepositions. The nounal form of all of those words ends in '-ception'. Excluding all of the newly created words to describe the metaphysical based off of the Christopher Nolan movie, Inception, there are a slew of words that only exist in this nounal form, including 'contraception' and 'inception', which all come from the participial form of 'capere' which is 'captus'.

592: slav and slave Jul 22, 2016

The word 'Slav' comes from the Byzantine Greek word 'Sklabos', from the Old Church Slavonic 'Sloveninu' and is probably related to the word for "word, speech", since the name was used to describe a member of a community of speakers. The word 'Slav' itself gave English another word. Through the Old French word 'esclave' meaning ‘Slavic', Middle English gained the word, 'slave'. The reason is that some South Slavic people had been conquered in the 9th century, and the connection between the those Eastern Europeans and servitude lasted in the minds of the English.

591: -esque Jul 21, 2016

Much like the endings, '-like' or '-ish', '-esque' is added onto the end of nouns like 'carnival' as used in translations of Mikhail Bakhtin's work or 'Kafka' in order to create the adjectival form. The word 'grotesque', however, is somewhat different (or differentish, I could say), because while the ending was added onto a noun the same as any other, it was added in Italian so people don't have the same connection. A 'grotto' is a structure resembling a cave, and in ancient Rome, these would often be painted with obscene imagery. When excavators found these paintings, they felt the images were repulsive, and so called them 'grottesca' ('grotto-esque') and the word became a synonym for ugly or repulsive. 
See more of the '-ish' suffix here.

590: -ish Jul 20, 2016

The suffix '-ish' has a variety of different uses as a tool to form new words. As a Germanic equivalent to '-esque' (more on that tomorrow), '-ish' can be added to create adjectives from both nouns and other adjectives. Many nationalities from Northern Europe such as English, Welsh, Danish, Swedish, Flemish etc–as well as some religious groups–end with the 'sh', which goes back to the form for adjectives from Old English. In Modern German, the '-isch' suffix is one of the most common ways to create the adjectival form for a given word. In addition to many adjectives created from nouns such as 'boyish', the suffix also has diminutive properties for adjectives themselves, so that something clearly defined word like 'tall' can become more loosely defined like 'tallish'. Nevertheless, when the suffix is attached to verbs such as 'establish', that ending is not the same, and it is in fact of Romantic origins. 

589: Balcony Jul 19, 2016

Many times when new words enter a language, they are met with dislike and argumentation. A word that most of us regard as perfectly normal now was once thought of as wrong. 'Balcony' is from Italian, and when people began to use it more often in English with the pronunciation that is used, sticklers didn't like it. Those people referee the original Italian in which the final vowel was accented, not the 'a' which is accented in English.

588: State versus Province Jul 18, 2016

The difference between a state and a province can seem arbitrary, especially to people from the USA and Canada. Both words are used to describe a large regional division of a country, but the two have different governing-rights. The governments of the USA and Canada follow a federal system, so all of the states or provinces still are constituent members under the federal government, blurring the distinction. Provinces do not necessarily have to be part of a constituent member of a federation such as in China. That country has provinces, but China has a unitary government, not a federal system.