1007: Augmentatives Sep 11, 2017

There are a number of English words that have endings like '-et' which historically were diminutive suffixes from other languages, but English does not use these sorts of suffixes anymore, and instead just use adjectives for the most part. Modern English also does not really use augmentative suffixes, which, opposite to diminutives, indicate an increased size of something, even though other languages like Italian have plenty. Instead, English has a few augmentative prefixes, such as 'over-' as in 'overlord', 'mega-' as in 'megachurch', or 'arch-' as in 'archenemy' which can carry the sense of 'physically large' but also just intensify whatever they are bound to. These prefixes, also including 'super-' and 'grand-', are fairly common in certain words, like those mentioned before, but they can be added fairly freely to new ones; if you know any contemporary examples, write a comment. Indeed, so long as someone is able to think the noun by itself, one can add one of these prefixes to invent a new term. There are also a few new augmentative affixes; the prefix 'über-' was adopted from German in the 1990's, and some have even said that the suffix '-zilla' from 'Godzilla', now found in words like 'bridezilla', demonstrates monstrousness and is an augmentative affix.

1006: Indication of Gender (g.w. 7) Sep 10, 2017

Only nouns have grammatical gender, insofar as adjectives, articles, and pronouns are either modified or selected in order to agree with the nouns they modify. Not all genders have to be distinct from each other in every word however; in German, masculine and neuter forms for possessive pronouns are often identical, and there are only two Dutch articles: one for neuter, 'het', and a common form for masculine and feminine words, 'de'. So long as there is a fairly consistent manner in which words are distinguished in such as way, however, grammatical gender can be said to exist. If people stopped using different forms for adjectives, articles, and pronouns to modify nouns with which they agree, there would be no gender, because, though the gender is determined by the noun, it is indicated by those other aforementioned lexical classes. It is partly for this reason that certain languages will include articles where there would not be one in English, which has no grammatical gender. For instance, there is no article used for unspecified referents, meaning that "cats are smart" and "the cats are smart" convey two different messages, the latter of which would only refer to cats that had been previously identified. The same sentence in Spanish however, "los gatos son inteligentes", uses an article to show the gender, but does not refer to preciously specified, in this case, cats.

This is the last day of Word Facts' Gender Week, and though there may still be posts concerning grammatical gender in the future, if you have any remaining questions, please write a comment or send a message.

1005: Loss of Gender (g.w.6) Sep 9, 2017

It is easy to look at languages like Latin or Old English—now no longer used—that were heavily inflected and each had three genders, and assume that because modern descendants thereof have either lost all or most of those attributes, languages have a tendency to lose gender, or other morphological (or morphophonological) features. Indeed, looking at the way that Indo-European languages have evolved over time, that trend is fairly consistent. Most linguist assume, however, that Proto-Indo-European was both gendered and heavily inflected, so realistically the most likely way it could have evolved was to lose some of that. This did not happen all at one time though, and the loss of gender in English took several centuries, starting in the north of England around the tenth century. At the time of the Norman invasions, many English speaking communities still had gender, which would often be influenced by the Norman French, such as the gender of 'se mona' ('the moon') which started as masculine but became feminine due to the influence of the Norman French 'lune' ('the moon'), before gender was eventually lost. It is theoretically possible that English could regain gender, perhaps on its own, or with influences from other languages like Spanish, which has already had a noticeable impact on certain American dialects, but there is no real way to predict any of this.

1004: Difficulties with Gender in L2 (g.w.5) Sep 8, 2017

While there are some potential benefits of grammatical gender in terms of the speed of recognition of words, gender can make it harder to learn a language, even if one is somewhat familiar with it. Grammatical gender requires extra memorization, in addition to the vocabulary and other features that someone needs to know when learning another language. Even in languages that are closely related, there is no guarantee that cognates will share the same gender. For instance, in Italian and Portuguese, the word for 'milk', 'il latte and 'o leite' respectively is masculine, but in Spanish 'la leche' is feminine. At best this is only something else to remember, but could also be a source of confusion for interlocutors. Furthermore, while some languages like kiSwahili base their system of noun classes on sound alone, in other languages like French or Spanish where gender is mostly arbitrary, the usual gender of the word can appear to change because its sound. For example, in those two languages, a noun starting with a stressed 'a-', regardless of its gender, would take a masculine article. In Spanish, 'agua' is considered feminine because it is modified by feminine adjectives, but it takes the masculine article 'el' to avoid the more cumbersome sounding 'la agua'. Likewise, the French 'amie' is feminine, and would take the feminine 'ma' in 'ma chère amie' ('my dear friend') when the article is separated from the noun, but when the article and noun appear adjacent it appears as 'mon amie'. Nevertheless, if you ever thought that learning French or Spanish with their two genders, Latin or German with their three genders, or even kiSwahili with its eighteen noun classes would be difficult, keep in mind that the South American language Tuyuca has somewhere between 50-140 noun classes.

1003: Benefits of Gender (g.w.4) Sep 7, 2017

If, as has been said in the last few days here, that gender is fairly arbitrary and also has the potential to complicate things, there may not seem to be any use for it. That is not to say every aspect of every grammar has to be reasonable—there is not a reason why some languages rely on word-order to indicate syntax while others use inflection—but at least in that case there needs to be some way to show how the words relate to each other, whereas there does not need to be gender: three quarters of the world's languages do not have it at all. Still, at least one of the possible benefits to grammatical gender is recognition of words. In the paper, Young Children Learning Spanish Make Rapid Use of Grammatical Gender in Spoken Word Recognition [1] written by Casey Lew-Williams and Anne Fernald, it was discussed that children learning Spanish were better able to identify referents when they were given the morphosyntactic cue, and native-speaking adults showed similar results as well. They said "studies show that adults respond more rapidly to nouns preceded by valid cues to grammatical gender than without such cues" [1]. Although it is not necessary to have gender to identify words—otherwise all languages would have gender—there are advantages when it comes to recognition at least.

[1] Lew-Williams, Casey, and Anne Fernald. “Young Children Learning Spanish Make Rapid Use of Grammatical Gender in Spoken Word Recognition.” Psychological Science, vol. 18, no. 3, 2007, pp. 193–198. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40064714.

1002: Inanimate Genders (g.w.3) Sep 6, 2017

As mentioned yesterday, grammatical gender does not have to relate to men and woman, or at least if it does, people do not have to be the sole focus or foundation for gender. For instance, like kiSwalhili, Ganda has many noun classes—ten classes in this case—that are simply numbered as such. The noun classes are based upon sound—not meaning—but some people still assign names to the semantic groups, including 'long objects', 'large objects and liquids', 'small objects' and 'pejoratives', as well as 'people', 'animals', though all of these groupings are pretty general and full of exceptions. Many languages divide words by 'animate' and 'inanimate' either instead of or along with 'masculine' and 'feminine', or in other cases such as with Chechen there will be a 'masculine' and 'feminine' that appears alongside classes that are simply considered miscellaneous. Moreover, Czech, Polish, and some other languages also have multiple varieties of a gender, such as in this case 'masculine animate' and 'masculine inanimate'. While a few languages spoken by many like Spanish or German have gender-systems that relate only or mostly to 'masculine' and 'feminine', there is a lot of variety in systems that do not follow that same pattern.

1001: Noun Classes (g.w.2) Sep 5, 2017

About a quarter of the world's languages have grammatical gender, but while some of the ones with which people familiar, including mostly Indo-European languages, may only break up nouns into the categories of masculine feminine, and sometimes neuter, this is not how grammatical gender appears in all languages. Some languages have more than 3 genders, but when this happens the terminology switches from 'genders' to 'noun classes' and so there is no longer an association with ideas of maleness and femaleness that there might have been before, even though there is always some arbitrariness. In kiSwahili for example, there are 18 noun classes. In the same way that Latin nouns are divided into genders by the way that the suffixes sound, and change to indicate syntax or pluralization, the noun classes of kiSwahili are divided by prefixes, but these are numbered rather than named. Still, some noun classes can be called "semantic groups", because they tend to contain certain types of words, such as class 14 which tends to have concepts, like 'upendo' ('love'), or noun class 1 which concerns words for people, like 'mtu' ('person'), 'mtoto' ('child'), and 'mwanafunzi' ('student'). Unlike what typically happens with Indo-European gendered words which often follow biological associations when possible, such as the French "l'homme" ('man') in the masculine and 'la femme' ('woman') in the feminine, the words for ''man' and 'woman' in kiSwahili—'mwanaume' and 'mwanamke' respectively—are both in the same noun class, because divisions in grammatical gender are almost entirely due to how a word sounds rather than what a word means.

1000: Arbitrariness of Gender (g.w.1) Sep 4, 2017

In languages that have grammatical gender, a noun can be masculine or feminine (or neuter if there is a third gender), but this does not mean that it can be classified as 'male' or 'female' in the way that some people may make it seem. In general, words that relate to biology, such as terms for 'man', 'woman', 'penis', 'vagina' etc. correspond to the grammatical gender of masculine or feminine, but there are some issues with generalization. There is no guarantee that this convention will always be followed, so while the German 'Frau' ('woman') is feminine, the word 'Weib' ('wife' or 'female') is neuter, and likewise 'Eierstock' ('ovary') is masculine. This may appear strange but the reason for this is fairly logical: the terms 'masculine' and 'feminine' were only created to describe trends that were already in use. While there are certainly some patterns in terms of how words related to one idea may belong to one gender or another, once one starts looking at the relationship between grammatical gender and the meaning of certain words, there is no more reason that, in German, most alcohols are masculine, or most words relating to a house are neuter than there is a reason 'Weib' is not feminine. These ideas and more will be explained here in more depth over the next six days.

This is part one out of seven of Word Facts' Gender Week to celebrate the 1000th post. Remember to like, share, and stay tuned for the next six.

999: Language-Isolates Sep 3, 2017

Tomorrow's post at 5:30pm EST will be the 1000th Word Facts!

There is not any language that is necessarily easier or harder to learn for infants when they are first developing language-skills, though some linguists may claim polysynthetic languages like Greenlandic (Kalaallisut) are easier for children to understand. Nevertheless, once one learns a language, the difficulty of learning another depends upon how similar it is to one's first, or other languages with which that person is familiar. Finnish would be quite difficult to learn for an English speaker because the grammar and vocabulary is completely different, but it would be very hard for a speaker of Estonian. Some languages, however, are not related to any other at all, thereby making them generally hard to learn as a second language for anyone. Basque may be the most famous example of one, spoken in Spain and to a lesser extent in France, is regarded by most linguists to not be related to any other language. There are a few other language-isolates, such as Korean, which gain that status once all other languages in its particular languages become extinct, though there are some dead languages that are also considered isolates, like Sumerian. Unfortunately, because they are unrelated to other languages, it makes understanding the history of them difficult, as the standard comparative method of linguistics cannot be applied.

998: Conjugating Initialisms Sep 2, 2017

Generally, an affix like '-ness' or '-ing' can be attached to any word so long as it is the suitable part of speech, though in English there is a great deal of fluidity between nouns, verbs, and adjectives anyway. With this in mind, one can observe the way that people will—subconsciously or otherwise—consider utterances as certain parts of speech. The initialism 'LOL' ('laugh out loud') for example first started in text-messaging but has since made its way into the lexicon of many people. One would say "I laughed out loud" when using the past-tense by conjugating the verb 'laugh'. However, when using the word 'lol', in order to indicate that it is in the past-tense, one would not say "I L-ed OL" but instead would say or write "I LOLed" which is sometimes found as "LOL'd" thereby treating the whole initialism, or acronym depending upon the speaker, as if it were its own verb. Since English is so tolerant to this type of change, new words like 'LOL' can and do develop very quickly.

997: Pronunciation of -(E)S Sep 1, 2017

The majority of English nouns are pluralized with the letter '-(e)s', but this is pronounced three different ways: /s/ as with 'cats', /z/ as with 'dogs', or /ɪz/ (or /əz/ depending on one's accent) as with 'beaches'. This is not random but is based off of the sound that comes before it. In general, if a consonant precedes it and is unvoiced like /p/, /t/, or /k/ the suffix will be /s/ but if it is preceded by a voiced consonant like /b/, /d/, or /g/, or a vowel it will become /z/. There is a chart below showing voiced and unvoiced consonants, you can also feel the difference if you make the unvoiced /p/ sound and then /b/ that uses more air. There are certain sounds that act as an exception to that rule, including /s/, /z/, /tʃ/ (‘like church’), /ʃ/ (like ‘rush’), /ʒ/ (like in luge), and /dʒ/ (like in 'hedge'), because when the pluralizing suffix '-(e)s' follows those it becomes /ɪz/.

The chart is from http://gawron.sdsu.edu/intro/course_core/lectures/SSAE.html

996: Exceptions are Universal Aug 31, 2017

The English language has a great deal of exceptions in the way that words are formed and arranged, which will be true of almost any general rule people might make. It can be frustrating for sure, but this is going to be the case in every language, both in descriptive rules, which reflect on how language is used, such as "adding '-er' to a verb makes it a noun indicating the agent of said verb", and prescriptive rules, which try to force people to speak in a certain way, such as "don't end a prepositional phrase with a preposition". Indeed, even Latin—the language which provided the base for many prescriptive rules in English—would have just as many exceptions. The only languages that will not have exceptions to rules nor irregular forms—such as the conjugation of 'to be'—are ones that are invented, such as Esperanto, though some people who make up languages will include exceptions and irregulars in order to give the illusion of being authentic and natural. Given enough time, and given enough use, Esperanto will also develop exceptions to its rules, as that is one of the many ways languages evolve.

995: Homophones Aug 30, 2017

There are some homophones in English that are spelt differently, such as 'your' and 'you re', ''they're', 'their', and 'there', 'two', 'too', and 'to', or 'due', 'do, and 'dew', as well as many more that are spelt the same but still have different origins—called 'homographs'—such as 'limbo' referring to a dance and a synonym for 'purgatory', as well as 'bear'. All of the homophones that are not homographs listed above still do contain all of the same consonants however, but this is not always the case. As spelling does have an element of arbitrariness, and because speakers pronounce individual sounds differently depending upon the sounds that precede and follow them. Some words like 'disgust' and 'discussed' are indistinguishable, as are 'prints' and 'prince'. There will be more on this tomorrow, but if you think of any yourself, write it in the comments.

994: disgust Aug 29, 2017

As discussed yesterday, and as any native English speaker would know, there is no positive form of 'disgust', which would resemble something like 'gust'. Unlike other words like 'disk' or 'distich' for which the 'dis-' is simply coincidental, etymologically 'disgust' contains 'dis-' which indicates reversal, but in English there is nothing being obviously reversed. This is by no means the only words where this occurs—it happens fairly frequently with other words including 'distort', 'disguise', and 'dismiss'—especially as English has so many words adopted from other languages completely, or sometimes only as parts of a whole word. In the case of 'disgust', it comes from the Latin word 'gustus' meaning 'taste', and while there is no 'gust' or even 'gustus' in English, the word 'gusto' comes from the same root. Nevertheless, even when a word does start with the historical prefix 'dis-', it does not mean that there should, or even could be a positive form, as with 'discuss' in which the 'dis-' does not negate the root-word, but simply means 'apart'.

993: Indifferent and Different Aug 28, 2017

English has a few words like 'butle' which come from back-formation—the process of making words by removing what are affixes in other words— but a fairly large group of words like 'gust' from 'disgust', or 'evitable' (or 'evit, for that matter) from 'inevitable' simply don't exist in any vernacular. Unlike 'inevitable' though, which does not have a positive form as its negating prefixes indicates, the word 'different' does exist, but not as an antonym of 'indifferent'. This is because the word comes from 'differ' in the sense that something is changing or, in other words, becoming different. In Middle English, 'different' could also mean, in a general way, 'partial', so 'indifferent' came to mean 'unchanged' or 'impartial'.

992: Levant Aug 27, 2017

There are plenty of names for countries or regions that originate from geographical relation to other places. The words 'Austria' and 'Australia' both etymologically derive from the Latin for 'south', and 'the orient' as well as the German for 'Austria', 'Österreich', both etymologically derive from words meaning 'east'. Likewise, the 'Levant', denoting the area east of the Mediterranean Sea, comes from a French word that gained the sense of 'east'. Initially however, the French 'levant' meant and continues to mean 'rising' as a participle of 'lever' (which is where English gets 'lever') meaning 'to lift'. It is from the understanding that the Sun rises in the east that 'levant' became associated with lands to the east, at least in relation to France and England. Indeed, the meaning of 'to rise' relating to the Sun is the same that lead to 'orient' and 'orientation', from the Latin 'oriri' meaning 'to rise'.

991: Pronunciation of Lieutenant Aug 26, 2017

Depending upon whether you pronounce words as people do in the United States or in the United Kingdom and Commonwealth you would pronounce the word 'lieutenant' as either /luːˈtɛnənʔ/ (as if it began with 'lieu' by itself) or as /lɛfˈtɛnənʔ/  (as if it became with 'left'). The first element 'lieu' has the same Old French origin as 'lieu' when it appears on its own, as in "in lieu of", except in that case both groups would pronounce it the same way, phonologically anyway. As for the difference in the way that 'lieutenant' is pronounced, no one is quite sure the cause, but generally it is thought that the /lɛf-/ is from a variation in Old French or Middle English, as spellings indicate that there was a rare form or the word that was in Old French 'leuf'. Another, less likely explanation is that there was confusion concerning the spelling of the word with a U or a V, as for a long period—due to standards from Latin—these letters were indistinguishable. It's possible that none of that matters too much, however, as in certain naval traditions, such as that of the Royal Navy, the pronunciation is simplified to /ləˈtɛnənt/ (as in what the 'lu-' represents in 'lung').

990: Dying Languages and New Accents Aug 25, 2017

Many people lament that languages are dying out at a rate that has been estimated to be as many as one every two weeks, but is more likely to be around once every two to three months. Regardless of the exact numbers, it is true that most people speak only a small percentage of the world's languages, and dialects and accents are becoming less distinct largely because of an increasingly global economy, as well as technologies that allow people to connect with others far away, and necessitate a lingua franca. Not all hope should be lost, however, for while many languages are losing speakers, and dialects are disappearing, new ones are emerging. It is easy to discern when a language has become extinct because no people, or only one person can speak it, but it is much harder to determine when a new one is formed. Much about various standards are political, such as how to classify the difference between Norwegian and Swedish, but also natural changes to dialects that will eventually become new languages over time can be hard to spot. For example, some of the vowels have changed subtly in American English spoken in the South West due to influences from Spanish, but while this is only a change in accents, it is changes like those that eventually become new dialects and new languages, as happens with phonemes often. Also, it should be noted that the majority of languages are poorly documented at best, so exact numbers of languages, and even general knowledge of whether something is a language or a dialect can be hard to assess accurately.

989: Assimilation of N Aug 24, 2017

The prefix 'un-' that negates certain words like 'unmanageable' or 'unlockable' does not change based on the word to which it affixes. The prefix 'in-' on the other hand appears in all sorts of ways before some sounds, such as 'il-' in 'illegal' or 'im-' in 'impossible' when it is used to negate the meanings thereof. In fact, this also happens when the prefix is used to indicate 'in' or 'into', as this phenomenon is due to phonology. As it happens, when written, it will almost always appear as 'il-' before the letter L, 'im-' before a B, M, or P, and as 'ir-' before the letter R, as in 'irrespecitve'. Indeed, the sound changes in speech too of course, but not only does this occur when 'in-' appears as a prefix, but also when it is used as its own word. It is much less work for the /n/ sound to be produced like a /m/ before certain aforementioned sounds like /p/, and because /m/ and /n/ don't sound especially different, particularly when there is context, everyone will understand. For example, the sound /n/ in 'in' will assimilate to an /m/ in "I spoke French in Paris" as it precedes a /p/, but will not in "I spoke French in France" in ordinary speech. Certainly, though, it is possible to pronounce the word with an /n/ if you are thinking about it.
See yesterday's post for more on this here.

988: insure and ensure Aug 23, 2017

Anyone who had to learn how to read in English probably has been frustrated by the inconsistencies, and while there is no reason that they had to exist in the first place, we can still look over orthographical oddities and explain why. The prefix 'en-', as explored yesterday, can indicate several meanings including "in something", but so can the prefix 'in-'. Indeed, while these variations usually only necessitate some memorization of what words use which letter, sometimes it can alter the meaning of a word. In the case of 'insure' and 'ensure', there is some overlap in the two meanings; while, 'insure' tends to have the sense of financial compensation for certain problems like health-concerns or property-damage, both words, often followed by the word 'against', mean "protect against or prevent a possible problem". In that case, it is often interchangeable, especially in American writing. As it happens, most often the only difference between words with 'en-' and words with 'in-' is that the former come from French or Spanish, while the latter derive from Latin or Italian, though some may come from Germanic languages, or other ones entirely. In this case, 'insure' is just a variation of the earlier 'ensure' which was adopted from Anglo-Norman French. These words are also related to the English 'assure' and 'secure'.