917: de- Jun 13, 2017

English is a Germanic language but takes a lot of the vocabulary from Romance languages due to its somewhat complicated history. This lexicon is not only appears in whole words but many times from affixes as well. There are plenty of words that historically had Latinate prefixes that are now not removable, but plenty still operate as prefixes. Either as a prefix, like with the word 'decry' but also just as part of the word, such as with 'descend' and 'decline', 'de-' appears in a lot of different terms but does not have the same function for each. In these and other words with 'de-', either as a historical prefix or as a current prefix, it does not always indicate the same thing; there are some examples that relate in some way to going down and others meaning 'removal of'. In Latin this difference would have been very clear, as there was a prefix 'des-' which usually appears in English as 'dis-' as in 'disrespect' denoting 'lack of' while there was a separate preposition 'de' that could mean 'from', giving English all of the words now indicating a downwards direction.

916: honky and hungarian Jun 12, 2017

Unfortunately, there are a lot of racial slurs used in English and pretty much every other language, though according the the anti-discrimination paradigm this won't change until people's views change, or until the particular word changes meaning. We see this with the word 'honky' and its predecessor 'Hunky' which referred to white people, specifically from Central or Eastern Europe. Now the word is much less common than it used to be, as opinions have shifted, but it still appears in word 'honky-tonk' which is at most a distant relation in terms of its current meaning. Similar to how the opinion of Slavs by Western Europeans was pretty bad as indicated by the name (learn more by clicking the link), 'Hunky' came from an alteration of the word 'Hungarian'. The word 'Hungarian' isn't even what the Hungarians call themselves either; the word for Hungary in Hungarian is 'Magyar'. Like many names for European countries in English, the reason for the difference between the native name for the area and the English ones is from Latin. Just like how the name for the Belgian Walloons came from the name for a single Gaulish tribe in the region whom the Romans encountered, 'Hungary' comes from the word 'hun' ruled by Attila in the 5th century.

915: Dialects and Languages Jun 11, 2017

The sociolinguist Max Weinreich popularized the phrase, "a language is a dialect with an army and navy" and people have been quoting it ever since. Other than that, there is not much of any consensus about what makes a dialect and what makes a language; maybe there will be one day, but it can take a long time to definitively pin down ideas that seem quite simple, much like how the form for a syllable, in any scientific way, was only defined in the 1980's. In general, dialects of a language tend to be considered anything with mostly similar grammar and vocabulary, that may have different pronunciations, syntax, and some different lexicon while being intelligible to those who know another dialect, but that can itself be hard to determine. There are, for example, some dialects of English, like those spoken in Scotland or the Appalachians that evolved somewhat differently and might be unintelligible to someone who knows English from New York, but these are considered dialects. On the other hand, Swedish and Norwegian, and also Danish though to a lesser extent, are considered different languages, but aside from different spelling-standards and some different pronunciation, these are pretty much mutually intelligible. 

914: Muslim as a Demonym Jun 10, 2017

Almost every demonym or other adjective used to denote a people involve either a suffix like '-ish' and '-ian', or are strong nouns like 'Greek' from 'Greece'. There are some few exceptions, such as 'Muslim' that comes from the word 'Islam'. In English there are fewer prefixes that are used in general compared to suffixes, and far fewer than there are in some other languages like Hungarian. Arabic, and other semitic languages like Hebrew on the other hand don't have root words in the way that Indo-European ones to which affixes are added but use templates into which usually vowels are added to provide grammatical meaning. Nevertheless, in general M is a common way to make something into a demonym, so 'Islam' would become 'Mislam' (Muslim). In kiSwahili, a Bantu language with a great deal of Arabic influence, and 'Marekani' ('America') becomes 'Mmarekani' (American) as well.

913: -drome Jun 9, 2017

Most suffixes, like '-ness' and most other derivational suffixes for example, can be found at the end of words without any similarity in meaning, even though they are syntactically similar. Combining forms on the other hand do have an impact on the meaning of the word, such as 'Austro-' as a prefix or '-crat' as a suffix. With that in mind, it might be confusing to look as the '-drome' in 'aerodrome' ('airdrome') or 'palindrome', for while the meanings are not apparently related, removing the ending of those words would leave 'aero-' and 'palin' which are not words on their own, as would be the case were it a suffix. You might assume also that the ending is completely coincidental, as does sometimes happen, but this is not what the element is considered to be. '-drome' is said to be a combining form simply for the reason that it adds semantic meaning; it denotes the idea of running or of courses like that at an aerodrome ('airport') or velodrome coming from the Greek 'dromos' meaning ‘running’ on a track, and likewise 'palindrome' is something that runs, so to speak, again. It should be noted that 'aero-' is also a combining for, but 'air' is not.

912: hoist and heist Jun 8, 2017

While normally the word lift means to pick up or raise in a general way, informally the word means 'to steal'. Although the exact word that became slang was fairly arbitrary, and might as well have been 'raise', the connotation lifting something up, and lifting something off of, say, a shelf in a store is fairly reasonable. Somewhat similarly, the word 'heist' evolved only recently in the mid 19th century from 'hoist'. 'Heist' does not have the double-meaning that 'lift' does, but that was only a matter of luck. Not only was 'heist' an alteration of 'hoist', but 'hoist' was originally an alteration of the verb 'hoise'. In that way, while 'hoist' now is a verb and a noun, in the famous line "hoist by his own petard" it is a participle, and could have been 'hoised'.

911: European Languages in the Americas Jun 7, 2017

There are many native languages spoken in the Americas—somewhere around a thousand—though most have a fairly low amount of speakers, and only four are deemed non-endangered depending upon the source. The vast majority of people predominantly use a European language like English, Spanish, Portuguese, or French, along with a plethora of creoles from those languages. Some European language that might be associated less with the Americas than those others mentioned above might be Russian and Danish. Russian is spoken by a small number of people in Alaska who tend to be descendants of those whom originally colonized the region; the dialect uses a lot of archaic Russian vocabulary, so people call it Old Russian, and has various influences from the native Aleut or Yupik. Perhaps fittingly, most of the speakers of Old Russian now are elderly, and there aren't many of them. Danish on the other hand is spoken widely in Greenland, which is still a Danish colony. Nevertheless, the total population of Greenland is only around 56,000, so needless to say, neither Russian nor Danish speaker make up a sizeable amount of the population of the Americas. 

910: Guugu Yimithirr's Lack of Relative Positions Jun 6, 2017

There are many aspects to language, particularly in vocabulary that are fairly consistent from language to language. Even if an idea that can be expressed with a single word in one language has to be composed of two or more, theoretically it should be the case that anyone can say anything no matter what. In the case of the Australian language Guugu Yimithirr, as just one example, not everything is so simple. Its claim to fame, so to speak, is that there is no term for 'left' or 'right', and instead the people use the cardinal points North, South, East, and West. Children have to learn the concepts of left and right at a young age anyway, but just as how an English-speaking adult could identify where left is regardless of location, the speakers of Guugu Yimithirr could identify North even when spun around or in a windowless room. In memory as well people can recount cardinal direction in the same way an English speaker could remember relative position. Either way, it just takes training and practice in early childhood and beyond in order to master either relative positions or cardinal directions. 

909: Inuits have 50 Words for 'Snow' (A Myth) Jun 5, 2017

There is something of a myth surrounding the claim that Eskimos, more commonly now called Inuit-Yupik peoples have so many words for different kinds of snow. Depending upon where you may look, this number can range from 50 words to a couple hundred, but this misconception that began with Franz Boas is incorrect for two reasons. First, there is not a single language that the peoples from the arctic speak, with the Inuit-Yupik languages referring to three language-families, each with different languages that make them up, so to make the claim about the vocabulary as if it were consistent for all of the many languages in this group would be a huge generalization. Second, it does not take into account the structure of these languages and the way words are formed therein. In Inuit-Yupik languages, incredibly long words are made by placing many affixes all around a single root word such that theoretically a word can be a whole clause by itself. Due to the highly synthetic nature of these languages, what would require adjectives or gerunds in English, such as to say 'drifting sea-ice' is one word in these other languages, making it seem like there are more ways to express the same idea when in fact it comes down to nothing more than syntax.

908: guerilla Jun 4, 2017

Guerilla tactics have been used in wars for thousands of years, but the word that we use in English is fairly modern. Historically the name for guerillas has varied from place to place, and from perspective, i.e. one side might say 'freedom-fighter' and the other say 'rebel'. 'Guerilla' itself comes directly from the Spanish word that became fairly well known during the Peninsula War against Napoleon in which the Iberians lost but citizens continued fighting with small, informal assaults. The word recognizes that scale as well, as it is the diminutive of the Spanish 'guerra' meaning 'war'. There are quite a number of related words, either within one language or between two that differ only on the G or W, like with 'wage' and 'gage'.

907: Problems with Studying Language through Culture Jun 3, 2017

Language is a fine tool as a way to study some aspects of culture, but when people rely on language too much to do so it leads to problems. An example of this is with a study done in 1901 by Dr. W.H.R Rivers who was an anthropologist, neurologist, and ethnologist, but when he wrote the paper Primitive Color Vision in which he studies a group living on islands in the Torres Strait, he analyzed language. In this article on a people whom have only three words for colors—what would translate to 'black', 'white', and 'red'—he wrote, “the ground of the development of their color language corresponds with the order in which they would be placed on the ground of their general intellectual and cultural development” essentially claiming that these people were less intellectually evolved than others; some people have also made similar claims on the basis of word-order. This is certainly a racist point of view, but works now as a lesson that researchers today should not assess language as a reflection of any people, individuals or as a group.

906: Cyrillic and Cuneiform Jun 2, 2017

There are a great number of alphabets from all over the world, all with different names. Some names for writing systems, perhaps most, come from the name of the language for which they were intended to be used, such as Arabic or Georgian. Also, 'Cyrillic' is used for many languages, generally Slavic ones, names after St. Cyril who invented it based off of the Greek alphabet to better fit Slavonic; part of the reason for that was that most of the initial uses were ecclesiastical, so the East Orthodox church would have wanted to be closer to the Greek Orthodox church rather than the Catholic church. Cuneiform got its name, deriving from the Latin, 'cuneus' meaning 'wedge' not from the language not the creator, but because of the wedge-shaped marks that make up the individual characters. People writing in this system pressed a tool into clay, with different orientations and combinations.

905: pear tree (from Twelve Days of Christmas) Jun 1, 2017

Now that it's June, Christmas is probably not at all on anyone's mind, though perhaps pears are. Either way, much like many other old jingles and nursery rhymes, The Twelve Days of Christmas has undergone a number of changes and has a significant amount of variation from version to version. An example comes from one of the more famous lines: "a partridge in a pear tree" which has also been found as "some part of a juniper tree" and "the sprig of a juniper tree" by a misunderstanding of the words. That is not to say, however, that "partridge in a pear tree" is any better. This phrase comes from a similar French jingle in which the words 'perdriole' or 'perdrix', depending on the version, feature. Both of those words mean 'partridge', but it is commonly held that some mishearing of the word 'perdrix' lead to the phrase 'pear tree' which only appears in the English version of the song, even though there are many besides just the English and the French.

904: business and busyness May 31, 2017

'Business' is spelt nothing like it sounds in a manner that is strange even by English standards. It is for that reason that unlike other adjectives ending in Y that take the '-ness' suffix like 'happiness' or 'craziness' for which the terminal Y gets rewritten as an I, 'busyness' keeps its Y from 'busy' as a way to disambiguate itself from 'business'. If to you it feels like 'busyness' should also be written as 'business', know that it was for a very long time. In Old English the word was 'bisignis', or what would today just be 'busy' and '-ness', though the need for the suffix to make it into a noun in this case is rather odd as there was already the Old English noun 'bisig'. The original sense of this 'business' in Old English was 'anxiety' and '(state of being) busy' which was kept in Middle English and Early Modern English, but eventually the senses of being given a task, or having an occupation, as well as every other modern sense, arose, necessitating some differentiation between 'business' and 'busyness'.

903: espouse and spouse May 29, 2017

The verb, to espouse, something means to support a belief, while the noun, spouse, is a married partner to someone. If today, one wanted to express that noun as a verb, there are plenty of ways to say that, including, 'wed' or 'engaged' or others depending on the situation, so there isn't much need for a new way to express this, but historically, 'espouse' was synonymous with 'marry'. That word originated as a participle from the Latin verb 'spondere' meaning 'betroth', and even when 'espouse' meant 'wed', it tended be be found as 'be espoused to', just like it would have been translated from Latin. Though of the pair, only 'spouse' kept its association with marriage, 'wed' has gained the sense of being attached to an idea separate from marriage, similar to 'espouse'.

902: More about glob May 28, 2017

Last week on Word Facts you might have learned that 'glob' comes from a combination of 'blob' and 'gob', though this is not where the story ends. 'Blob', which was generally synonymous with 'bubble' and has quite a similar form to many other words that denote droplets of water or another liquid, including 'blotch' 'and 'botch', whose origins are unknown, and 'plop' which is imitative, as well as 'blot' from Old Norse. Many of these words, just like 'glob' itself are blends of other words; 'blotch' is thought to be at least partially a blend of 'blot' and 'botch'. All of these seem to follow the pattern of bubbles of liquid, which is reasonable for this list, so it may be surprising that 'blubber' denoting fat, not water, would be on this list as well. As it happens however, 'blubber' initially denoted sea-foam and other bubbles on the water, and not just animal fat. If you know of, or suspect any other words that could be on this list, feel free to write them in the comments.

901: snivel, snuff, and sniff (Snu) May 27, 2017

The Proto-Indo-European (PIE) word for 'nose' is thought to have been 'snu' which led to the derivation of many other words relating to noses such as 'snout', 'snot', and more nouns, It also led to the creation of certain verbs we have today like 'sneeze'. 'Snivel', which is more often found as the adjective 'sniveling', comes from the Old English 'snyflung' as a verbal noun from 'snofl' meaning ‘mucus’, though it has only been recorded as a verbal noun. The word nowadays doesn't relate to noses, at least not directly, but the related word 'snuffle' certainly does. Having so many of these other related words helps to influence the formation of more, as was the case with 'snuffle' which was first found in the 16th century but is also related to 'snuff', as in tobacco found about a century later. Not off of the 'sn-' words that relate to noses can be attributed to PIE however, as though it was the foundation for many words, some do pop up on their own somewhat. Both 'sniff' and 'sniffle' were created in the last few hundred years due to onomatopoetic imitation of how those sound; no one is sure about much concerning PIE, but it might be safe to assume 'snu' was formed the same way.

900: record (re-) May 26, 2017

This is the 900th Word Facts, if you were keeping a record; thank you for all the likes, comments, and shares. The subject today, 're-', has a few different uses explored on this blog, including its function to express intensive force which you may remember from, 'remember', and to refer back to something such as with 'refer' coming from Latin meaning 'bring back'. With the word 'record', before technological means to document things, could mean "repeat to commit to memory". The word has a Latinate verbal prefix, but now the word when accented differently can be a noun, this sense came about later. By that time, the word already connoted written documents and laws, but originally what has now become a 'record' was oral, and meant in the English translation of Latin, in essence, "back to the heart" ('re- cord'), not terribly dissimilar to the expression, "remember something by heart", as was the original understanding of the word. 'Cord' has its own interesting relationship to the English word 'heart' which has already been discussed here several times.

899: Greek Numerals May 25, 2017

In many countries people write numbers using Arabic numerals, though these are poorly named as they come from India, and in the Middle East today very few of their numerals look the same; e.g. 2, 3, and 4 appear as ٢,٣, and ٤ respectively. There are many more systems of writing numbers out there, but in the West there tend to only be two used commonly, including the Arabic numerals of course, and Roman numerals. The latter use letters—I, V, X, L, C, D, and M—to express numbers, similar to many other systems. The Greek numerals, though less common than their Roman counterpart today, also use alphabetical letters to represent numbers. Some on the Roman system was somewhat arbitrary, such as V and L for fifty when the Latin word for both starts with a Q, but Greek numerals represented 1-10 with the first ten letters of their alphabet, and 20-90 (going up by tens) is represented by the 11th through 18th letter, and hundreds are represented by the 19th through 27th letter (including the archaic sampi).

898: austro- May 24, 2017

Combining forms are a good way to indicate relation between two areas. This appears in terms of conflicts, such that the Austro-Sardinian War, but also to denote regions, such as the Austro-asiatic language-family. The problem with this is that the aforementioned war, also called the the Franco-Austrian War took place between the Austrian Empire and the French and Sardinians, whereas Austro-Asiatic languages are spoken in Southeast Asia, and does not relate to Austria at all. In this case, the name 'Austria' and the name 'Australia' both come from the Latin 'australis' meaning 'south'. The Austro-Asiatic language family also does not relate to Australia, but they are found in the south of Asia.