977: Ablaut (Reduplication part 3/3) Aug 12, 2017
This is the third and final (for now) post on reduplication; click the links day 1 and day 2 for the previous ones. As discussed yesterday, English does not use reduplication to indicate verbal modification in the way that other languages like Latin or Gothic. Nevertheless, English does have ablauts: a common feature in Germanic strong verbs and strong nouns. These appear in related forms that are not irregular, like 'swim, swam, swum', 'drink, drank, drunk', and 'spring, sprang, sprung' for which the form of the vowel is changed in the same way from word to word. To be clear, ablauts are not themselves reduplicates, but there is a strong association between the two, and in words like the Greek' dérkomai, dédorka' ('δέρκομαι, δέδορκα') meaning 'I see' and 'I saw', both ablaut and reduplication is present. Additionally, English words like 'chit-chat' or 'ding-dong' employ so called 'ablaut reduplication' which uses both processes. It is almost always the case that in those words the first vowel is a high vowel, while the second is a low vowel. This is demonstrated on the image below depicting where vowels are produced on the tongue, taken from:
976: Derivation (Reduplication part 2/3) Aug 11, 2017
This is the second post on reduplication, but if you missed the one yesterday, click the link. Reduplication is not only used for emphasis as discussed before, but also it is used to indicate grammatical changes, in other languages. Many languages, such as those in the Malayo-Polonesian family, use reduplication as a way to pluralize words, so, for example the Indonesian 'orang', from which English gets 'orangutan' means 'person', but the plural 'people' would be 'orang-orang'. Plenty of other languages allow for this as well, including Dakota in which adjectives also can be reduplicated depending on if they modify a singular or plural noun, but reduplication can also occur with verbs in order to indicate different forms, ranging from tense to number and more. While this is not possible in Modern English, some verbs in Indo-European languages changed tense by reduplicating segments of a word (though not the whole word), so Gothic's present tense 'háitan' ('to name') becomes 'haíháit' in the past-tense ('I named'). Additionally, some languages use reduplication of verbs to show increased force or attention.
Stay tuned for even more tomorrow on reduplication.
Stay tuned for even more tomorrow on reduplication.
975: Focus (Reduplication part 1/3) Aug 10, 2017
There are many ways in which reduplication—which can refer to any kind of doubling in speech—is employed to different effects. Sometimes, due to the multifaceted nature of word-definitions, words are reduplicated in order to contrast other meanings. One example of this is with the word 'like' which can denote lots of types of joy and pleasure, so when referring to romantic interest in another person, one (especially a child perhaps) may differentiate between "do you like him?" and "do you like-like him?", the latter of which is to say 'have romantic feelings'. This type of reduplication is called "contrastive focus reduplication", but reduplication can also produce the opposite effect. So called 'Shm-reduplication' (or Schm-reduplication) such as "rules shmules" is used to mock and dismiss an idea. These examples highlight the way in which reduplication in English directs the focus of a listener to a word in order to communicate different non-grammatical concepts, but this is by no means the only way this process is used; there will be more on this in the next few days.
974: Accentuation Aug 9, 2017
There is a lot of information that is conveyed linguistically beyond just words and beyond pragmatics. English does not have tone in the way that Chinese does in order to indicate lexical information, but there still are way in which accent, intonation, and things of that sort are used to communicate different meaning. In the somewhat famous sentence "I never said she stole the money", every word can be accented differently to produce a different meaning out of the sentence. This information is also useful when differentiating between two words that are spelt the same, such as 'rebel' (noun) and 'rebel' (verb).
973: New Sounds (Phoneme Inventory 2/2) Aug 8, 2017
After discussing yesterday how English has lost phonemes from its phoneme inventory, one might wonder what would happen if too many sounds are lost over time. It is possible to differentiate two words' meanings from context—or in some languages, also grammatical gender—such as 'there', 'their' and 'they're', and in German 'das Tor' and 'der Tor' (neuter and masculine respectively) mean 'door' in neuter but 'fool' in masculine. Nevertheless, this would not be too easily sustained if too many sounds were lost over the years; in languages with smaller phoneme inventories, the words tend to become longer rather than becoming homophones, such as in Hawai'ian. It should be noted that there is little need for concern that there will be only a handful of sounds used in English in the future; while some sounds merge or indeed even are dropped, new ones develop. In Old English the consonant sound /ð/ as in 'the' was not always present; it only emerged as a variant of /θ/ as in 'tooTH' when appearing between certain vowels. It can be hard to determine the evolution of sounds as it happens, but as time goes on, people start using these slight variations in different ways. This is one way how languages develop, and it happens in all languages.
972: Pane and Pain (Phoneme Inventory 1/2) Aug 7, 2017
The reason there is more than one way to spell the same sound e.g. 'pane' and 'pain' is not only because people writing English hundreds of years were inconsistent—though that did happen—but also because English used to have a greater phoneme inventory in some regards, that is to say, there were more sounds used. Of course, all languages will over time lose some sounds and gain new ones along the way, such as GH (phonetically /x/) in words like 'night' which would have been pronounced like the German CH now, which is no longer present in English. With vowels however, those that are lost weren't all dropped in the same way that /x/ was, but instead they tended to merge with other sounds. In just about all accents for English 'pain' will be pronounced /peɪn/ with the /eɪ/ sound representing a diphthong (one sound produced by two vowels), which is the same for 'pane'. The sound /e/ used to appear on its own in English though, as it would have when appearing in 'pane' a very long time ago, but eventually those two sounds were no longer distinguished. This is also the case for 'do', 'due', and 'dew', along with many other words.
971: jaw Aug 6, 2017
There are plenty of words for which there is no agreed etymology, but there are still a number of ways in which looking over those words can be insightful or at the very least interesting. The word 'jaw' comes from the Middle English 'jowe, joue' meaning more or less what it does now, but aside from that there is some debate. It is thought that the word comes either from Old French 'joue' meaning 'cheek', which could originate from Gaulish, but there are some issues with this explanation. It could also be Germanic, and related to 'chew' and 'jowl'. Either way, 'jaw' (or really 'jowe') replaced the Old English 'ceace, ceafl'. That C in Old English, by the way, would have been pronounced like the CH in 'chew', which in Old English was 'cēowan'. In related words in Dutch and German, however, a /k/ is used, such as in 'kauwen' and 'kauen' respectively, as one who didn't know Old English pronunciation might assume. This is also the case with 'jowl', or, in Old English 'ceole', but related words in Dutch and German, like 'kevels' and 'Kehle' respectively, have /k/.
970: Semantics and Pragmatics Aug 5, 2017
There are a lot of words that each communicate different concepts, but this does not cover all of the ways that people understand the meaning of a sentence, even just in English. Most of the time, meaning is understood through semantics, which can be thought of as the sum of all the meanings of words individually. In the sentence "it is lovely to pet cats and dogs" one only needs to know what each word denotes (assuming comprehension of how the order of words indicates syntax) in order to understand what it all comes together to mean. In the other sentence "it is raining cats and dogs", the semantic value of each word does not communicate what this sentence would almost certainly connote (unless it were the apocalypse or something), which is that it is raining very heavily, as that sentence relies on pragmatics, i.e. understanding that the context of the words in a sentences creates a new, not necessarily related concept.
969: Hard and Hardly Aug 4, 2017
Much of the time, the only thing necessary to make an adjective into an adverb is to add the suffix '-ly', but as the phrase "working hard or hardly working?" illustrates, 'hardly' does not retain the meaning of 'hard' when it becomes an adverb at all. The word 'hardly' used to only mean 'with force' or 'with effort' but that changed in the 16th century when the word gained the senses of 'barely', 'not at all', and as a way to soften a negative, such as "I can't hardly tell what this word means". Now, it would be incredibly rare and possibly confusing to hear 'hardly' mean what it had originally. To communicate that sense that the adverb used to have, the word 'hard' functions as an adjective, as in "the way he slammed the door was hard", but can also be used as an adverb such as "he slammed the door hard".
968: Deictic Pronouns Aug 3, 2017
There are lots of different kinds of pronouns, including personal pronouns like 'I' or 'she', demonstrative pronouns like 'that' or 'this', and interrogative pronouns like 'who', though the list doesn't end there. In a very broad sense, a pronoun is any word that can stand in for another word or phrase, but while some personal pronouns make this very simple by standing in for one or several names, deictic pronouns like 'here', 'that thing', or 'next Friday' depend on context entirely, but still do stand in for an idea. It should be noted that pronouns can belong to more than one category, such as, 'you', which is a personal pronoun, but also a deictic pronoun.
967: time and tide Aug 2, 2017
While there are examples of people using language as a tool to try to explain culture or cognitive abilities extremely and unfairly such as Sapir's ideas about the 'Eskimos', when used more generally, linguistics and etymology can offer good insight into the way people think or thought. The word 'time' comes from Old English 'tīma' and is related to a number of other words in different languages, but for a while, 'tīma' related to the tide. Eventually it took on only its temporal meaning, but not only did the word that became 'time' have the relation to tides, but the Old English 'tīd' that led to the Modern English 'tide' had the sense of 'time' or 'period'. In fact, this relation that it has to the sea now only goes back to late Middle English. With all this, it is safe to conclude that the relationship between the sea and the passage of time was very strong to English speakers, to the point that it did not always need to be distinguished by two words.
966: Bluetooth (FUTHARK) Aug 1, 2017
Runic letters, also called FUTHORK, FUTHARK, and FUÞORC, etc (ᚠᚢÞᚨᚱᚲ), are characterized by the straight lines that make up the symbols, in the same way that cuneiform is noted for its triangular marks. This is due to the fact that they were generally carved into stone, beech, and other materials making curved lines harder to create, though it should be noted that the alphabet varied greatly over the many centuries it was used, and by the location in which people were writing. With a few exceptions in some alphabets, such as Icelandic's retention of Þ, Ð, and Æ, these letters are no longer used. Even so, the symbol and name for Bluetooth technology, comes from king Harald Bluetooth whose initials, H.B. were written ᚼᛒ in runic letters, but for the logo, the characters were combined into one. He was famous for uniting parts of Denmark and Norway; now the idea is that Bluetooth unites people technologically.
965: moist and must Jul 31, 2017
According to the BBC, the most unpopular word in the US, UK, Canada, and Australia is 'moist', so there is a good chance that many of you don't like the word; nevertheless, it does have an interesting etymology. The word ultimately comes from the Latin 'mucidus' meaning 'moldy', but it was also influenced by the word 'musteus' meaning ‘fresh’, even though those two ideas are not necessarily related. The word is also related to the noun 'must', both as it relates to grape juice and also dampness (but not the frenzied state of certain animals during mating-season). Concerning the former, 'must' meaning "grape juice before or during fermentation" comes from that same Latin word for 'fresh' while the other 'must', or to be more precise, 'musty' is thought to come from an alteration of the word 'moist', also influenced by the grape juice sense of 'must'. Despite that variety of words to which 'moist' is related, it should be noted that there is no connection between that word and 'mold' nor 'mist', which arguably have a more similar meaning to 'moist' that either of those aforementioned senses of 'must' in the way that people use them contemporarily.
964: Pronunciation of G in Old English Jul 30, 2017
Old English would look alien to anyone who speaks Modern English; partly this is because of the inflection—all the verbs were conjugated and all the nouns decline—and also the vocabulary was quite different. As Old English is a dead language however, pronunciation would not always be one of the reasons people may have difficulty learning it, but there were some significant differences. One way in which this differs is that G was pronounced /g/ such as in 'gum' today, but before certain vowels would become closer to /j/ as in 'yum' or 'yellow'. In Beowulf, one of the most famous Old English texts, the hero is Geatish, but while people now usually pronounce that /git/ (approximately 'geet') in Old English it would have been /jaət/ (approximately 'ya-ut').
963: Exceptions to Standard Sentence Formation in English Jul 29, 2017
Every language will have a lot of so called "rules", but so long as someone is understood, exceptions can appear. One feature of English that tends not to be too flexible is that word-order indicated the syntax of the word, so "the man bites the dog" means something different from "the dog bites the man. It is not usually possible to begin with a grammatical object before the verb like it is in languages that indicate this morphologically, such as Latin, but still there are a few exceptions, such as the colloquial phrase, "what say you?". Another feature is that prepositions are necessary to indicate motion to/from somewhere. If going to a store, or to a city, the word 'to' is necessary for example, but this isn't the case with the word 'home', as that is implied, as in "I'm going home" rather than "I'm going to home". Normally, the only words that do not need 'to' in this case are adverbs like 'out', 'here' or 'there', though it should be noted that if an article like 'the' or 'my' comes before 'home', the word 'to' needs to be included.
962: give (and PIE) Jul 28, 2017
Everything that it said about the theorized language of Proto-Indo-European is all based on comparing Indo-European languages that are studied now, both living and dead languages. Some linguists have noted a trend in which words meaning 'give' often are related to words meaning 'take' etymologically. Sometimes these words no longer have those meanings and the only reason we know of any relation is from historical documents, but there are also some more obvious ones. The word 'give' for example, is Germanic from a Scandinavian origin and is similar to other words that have the same meaning in Germanic languages, unsurprisingly. It is thought, however, to also be related to the Latin word 'habēre' meaning 'have' or 'hold'.
961: Language Extinction (Bungi) Jul 27, 2017
The most common reason that a language goes extinct is that it is seen as more sensible to teach children a language that is spoken by a large group of people as opposed to a regional language; doing so gives a person, potentially, more options financially. Nevertheless, sometimes people also abandon languages because it is not what is taught in schools, or because they face discrimination for using it. With Bungi for instance—a creole language of mostly Scots English with influence from Orcadian Scots, Scottish Gaelic, Cree and Ojibwe—now thought to be extinct, researchers found that the speakers were embarrassed to use it. The accent was noticeably different from Standard English, and they faced discrimination from English speakers, but also they were not intelligible to Cree or Ojibwe speakers. Most of the time, people opted to teach their children Standard English due to those problems, as well as the fact that it was a minority language and was not taught in schools, so not very practical outside of certain communities.
960: holy cow Jul 26, 2017
The expression "holy cow" is a fairly versatile one denoting surprise and alarm, but it has nothing to do with cows. It does, however, relate to 'holy', in a way, as, much like 'gadzooks' and other expressions, this was a way that people got around saying certain religious terms like 'G*d' or in this case 'Christ' in vain. Much like most of those other expressions relating to the supernatural in a euphemistic way that are used in English, this is from the Victorian Era, with the first documented use appearing in 1905, though it was likely used earlier in speech.
959: Limitations of the -or Suffix jul 25, 2017
For those who come across an unfamiliar word, especially those learning a new language, affixes can be quite helpful in figuring out what it means. The suffix '-er', for example, can be added to most verbs to make nouns meaning "agent of [verb]", except with some words like 'over' for which the ending was just coincidental; 'over' is also not a noun, so it wouldn't be an exception to that rule anyway. The suffix '-or' performs a similar function as '-er' in that it denotes someone who does whatever action was indicated with the verb. A person who creates is a 'creator' and someone who conducts is a 'conductor', but this process does not always go both ways, as a 'doctor' is not someone who 'docts' nor is a 'janitor' someone who janits. Theoretically, both of those aforementioned verbs could exist in English through back-formation, but because they both come from Latin words that look quite different from what they would now. To know that '-or' can be to verbs to indicate action or an occupation is not always as useful information without some other memorization of vocabulary and various grammar-conventions.
958: harlot Jul 24, 2017
Many of the words and swears that we use now connoting sex tend to relate more to women than men. This happened in Old English to possibly even greater an extent, as many word that related to promiscuity and seduction as well tended to be feminine grammatically, though the significance of this is debatable. The word 'harlot' today is used as an insult or a somewhat dated synonym to 'prostitute', almost always if not entirely directed at women. This wasn't always the case however, and in Middle English the word denoted a vagabond or lecher, and would be used to refer to a man or a woman. In fact, the word originates from the Old French 'harlot' meaning a '(poor) young man' specifically.