1045: -ling Oct 19, 2017

English has many affixes, but it also has number that are only slightly productive like '-th', or not at all like 'con-', but because the sample of words that can take those affixes is rather limited, looking at historical examples still offer a great deal of insight. For instance, the suffix '-ling' as in 'duckling' is diminutive, and can still be added to words like 'deerling' as an alternative to 'faun', but it goes back to Old English, and many words that took that suffix once have changed once it was affixed. 'Gosling' and 'darling' now no longer entirely resemble their respective stems, 'goose' and 'dear', however 'yearling' and 'youngling' do, and they do not have the meanings of "a young year" nor "a young young person (youth)". This is because the suffix was not originally diminutive but is believed to have come from a modification of '-ing' denoting origin, as in 'farthing', a coin which denoted a fourth (of a cent) and which led to words like 'duckling' or 'bearling', but also people, as in 'atheling', a word for Anglo-Saxon princes, which led to 'youngling', 'madling' etc. In this way, while there are only a few dozen words that have '-ling', many of which could be considered unacceptable today, we can still see the effect that it has had on English.

1044: Utterances Oct 18, 2017

It is often taught that every sentence must have a subject and a verb, thanks in part to Aristotle. This is true in English, in passive constructions too, but this does not mean that this is the manner in which English speakers always or even mostly speak. A general set of examples for this that requires little context is with answering questions, such as
Speaker 1: "what do you want?"
Speaker 2: "pizza"
which has no verb and, debatably, no subject, but is still pretty clear. It is also possible to replace phrases like "do you want to..." with "wanna..." which does not have subject, less (though still somewhat) debatably than before. These are not sentences though, but utterances, and while they may not be preferred for formal writing, they are absolutely fine in normal speech, especially because they can rely more on context, which is usually harder to gain from writing.

1043: Variety of L Oct 17, 2017

English has at least two different ways that the letter 'L' is pronounced. To hear the difference, say the word 'feel' and then 'leaf'. The distinction is fairly standard though blurred in words ‘feeling’. The reason for this is that it the /l/ and /ɫ/ as they are written in IPA depend largely upon where they belong in a syllable. If the 'L' is an onset, as in 'fee-ling', it will be pronounced as it is in 'leaf' with an /l/, whereas if it is said as the coda, as in 'feel-ing', it will be pronounced with the /ɫ/. This, however, can vary within a single accent or dialect.

1042: colonel Oct 16, 2017

English has odd standards for its spelling to put it simply, but for some words it makes much less sense than others. Like one of the pronunciations for another military-position, 'lieutenant', 'colonel' may seem to be missing letters to represent the way it is spoken. It is, sort of, in part due to the same reason as many words: pronunciations change after the spelling was standardised, which is inevitable anyway. The word 'colonel' comes from a now obsolete French word, 'coronel' which later developed into the French 'colonel' but did not change this way in English, though 'coronel' also originated from words that did not have this 'r': via the Italian 'colonnello' meaning ‘column of soldiers’, ultimately from the Latin 'columna' for 'column'. Indeed, 'coronel' was also fairly usual until the mid 17th century, but that is not the spelling that dominated in the end.

1041: Eye Dialect Oct 15, 2017

Because there are standards for the spelling of English, and also because the orthography of English is not phonetic, writing in a way that captures accents and dialects is tricky. Nevertheless, people get around this problem by using what is called 'eye dialect', which is the orthographical denotation of, generally, nonstandard dialects. This can still be used to imply the pronunciation of the standard dialect, such as 'wuz' instead of 'was', or 'coz'/'cuz' instead of " 'cause", which can be quicker to write, and also would give the impression of being humourous or otherwise informal. Other times, like with this example from alphadictionary.com "Ahm agonna gichew ifn yew don't quit bothern my dawg!" which is meant to represent the way that Southern American English is spoken (though I would have written 'mah' instead of 'my'), existing conventions in the standard orthography are used to denote specific sounds in non-standard writing. As a sidetone, it is thought that 'OK' comes from a eye dialect: "oll korrect" ('all correct').

1040: Determiners versus Adjectives Oct 14, 2017

Sometimes, explanations given to children about grammar are not exactly accurate. On the website linked to here for instance, it states that an adjective should be able answer certain questions pertaining to a noun: "What kind of noun is it? Which noun is it? How many are there?". Though sometimes these are applicable, at least for the very vague first two questions, many types of words have functions similar to that of an adjective but are not adjectives. Participles are among these types, but the focus today will be on determiner's; while adjectives describe the quality of a noun, determiners indicate the reference a noun has, such as 'every', 'that', or 'the'. However, determiners also include numbers, and possessives like 'my' and 'her', but also words that have the possessive suffix '-s' [3], like in "Beth's", even though it could be said that "Beth's" and 'two' in "Beth's two dogs" answer the questions of "which noun is it?", and "how many are there?". A good trick for those now unsure of what is an adjective or not is that they describe quality, and two-ness, for instance, is not a quality; indeed, no determiner can take the suffix '-ness' which adjectives can. More about determiners will be explained in he near future.

1039: Flexibility among Nouns Oct 13, 2017

English is fairly flexible when it comes to syntax. Not only is it possible to make many verbs into nouns and vice versa by simply putting it in the sort of context that a noun or verb takes, giving us the ability to say "I'm going to walk" and "I'm going on a walk", but different types of words within one lexical class, such as mass nouns like 'milk' or 'glass' and count nouns like 'shirt' are also somewhat interchangeable, with understood variation in meaning. Though generally mass nouns do not take a pluralizing '-s' like count nouns do (e.g. 'a dog' and 'dogs'), when they do, it means "varieties of", so 'milks' would not refer to an quantity of milk but could denote kinds of milk like whole-fat, skim, chocolate etc. On the other hand, singular count nouns take articles like 'a' or 'the', but when they don't, and are used like mass nouns, it can have several different meanings. For animals, English-speakers can refer to meats by using the singular version of the word with no article, e.g. "I like horses" versus "I like horse". Other times it can mean "bits of", such as, "after that car-crash, there is car/deer/tree/street-sign all over the road", which functions like a mass noun.

1038: Productivity Oct 12, 2017

Affixes all attach themselves to individual words, but some have the ability to be affixed to more than others. The term for this is 'productivity'. For instance, the suffixes '-ness', '-ity', and '-th' can all be added to adjectives in order to make nouns (with some variation in meaning), however, '-ness' can be added to far more adjectives than '-th' can'; indeed, sometimes, '-ness' even can replace '-th', though this is not possible the other way around. Therefore, it is said that '-ness' is more productive than '-th'. Also, certain affixes may have meaning for some words, but will not add additional meaning to others. 'In-', with some words, for example 'invoke', cannot be removed from the root, whereas with 'inbreed' it can be, so it is said that 'in-' is productive in certain circumstances, because it only produces new meanings that are separate from that of its root some of the time. Furthermore, for words begin with 'con-' or 'com-'—which are historically the same prefix that has been modified for phonological reasons— such as 'compute', 'convict' or 'convoke', the affix cannot be removed ever (i.e. there is no 'pute', 'vict', not 'voke') so it is said that 'con-' is non-productive.

1037: Compounds: One Word or Two? Oct 11, 2017

Is there a reason that 'bookcase' 'bookmark', 'bookshelf', and 'bookstore' are all written as one word, but other terms like 'book publisher' or 'book writer' are spelt standardly as two words, marked with a space?—not really. It might not seem important whether there is a space or not—after all, all spelling-conventions are arbitrary—and people do not speak with breaks between words anyway, so the separation of words would not change pronunciation. Nevertheless, these standards change the way that people think about language; orthography affects the way that people interpret a so-called standard variety of a language, so even though syntactically speaking 'book writer' is a compound word (and could be spelt as 'bookwriter' or 'book-writer' instead), it is perceived as two, while other ones, even occupational words relating to books, are written without a space standardly, like 'bookseller'. For more on the controversial issue of determining what makes a word, see Word Facts' 3-part series on the topic, click here.

1036: Rebracketing Oct 10, 2017

Back-formation has been brought up several times on this blog, but while that follows logical processes that people are accustomed to seeing in words with legitimate, productive suffixes, other words are sometimes broken down into different elements incorrectly without following any linguistic patterns necessarily. 'Rebracketing' for example, is a process in the field of historical linguistics, which concerns itself with the study of how languages evolve, in which a word that derived from a single origin is segmented into a set of different elements. One famous example is that of 'hamburger' which is sometimes falsely taken to be from 'ham' and 'burger' as a sort of compound. It could be that without thinking too much about the actual meats involved in the food the word is seen to follow the pattern of other types of burgers, like "turkey-burger" or "veggie-burger", but those two are also retronyms designed to clarify that something is not a hamburger. Indeed, 'burger' itself is only an abbreviated form of 'hamburger', but rebracketing does not need to follow much logic anyway, and this example would only be considered folk etymology.

1035: False Correlations: Diminutive -el Oct 9, 2017

One thing to be aware of when looking at patterns in various aspects of language is that even if two things look to be related, that does not mean that there is a valid correlation to be made. For instance, the words 'kernel' and 'satchel' both are historically diminutives with the '-el' ending. Nevertheless, due in part to the fact that English is somewhat of a hodgepodge of other languages, it happens that these two words come from completely different origins. Unlike other suffixes like '-en' [1] or '-et' that act as diminutive suffixes for multiple words that derive from the same language, the '-el' in 'kernel' comes from the Old English diminutive 'corn', 'cyrnel' while for 'satchel', the ending isn't really a suffix at all but instead comes from the Latin 'sacellus' from 'saccus' meaning 'bag', via the Old French 'sachel'. Interestingly enough, the verb 'sachet' is also a diminutive that ultimately comes from 'saccus', but here it takes the standard diminutive '-et' suffix in French.

1034: nugget Oct 8, 2017

One of the fun aspects of etymology is that while they often can be presented as a matter of fact for certain words, there is still room for deliberation. The word 'nugget', for instance, has an unclear origin. Though it is believed that the word came about in the mid-19th century either way, one theory states that the word came from a misinterpretation of the word 'ingot', which is is fairly reasonable on account of both words' association to gold. Another, perhaps more accepted theory is that it comes from a dialectal variation of the word 'nug' meaning "lump" from Southwestern American English. It is then possible that 'nugget' could follow the pattern of 'jacket' and 'pocket' and others with the diminutive '-et' suffix.

1033: -fucking- Oct 7, 2017

Though most of the affixes used in English have been used for centuries, new ones still can appear in speech. It is fairly rare that this happens in comparison to the number of new nouns or verbs created every year, but -fucking- is nevertheless relatively new as an infix. This happens in words like 'abso-fucking-lutely' or 'unbe-fucking-lievable' (or 'un-fucking-believable') for the purpose of emphasis on the original word. The infixes as well are not simply inserted randomly; the '-fucking-' will appear before the stressed syllable of a word; with certain cases, such as with 'unbelievable', the words can be stressed differently from individual to individual though. Words with the stress in the first syllable therefore cannot take this infix, such as 'wonderful' or 'beautiful'.

1032: Flexible Word Order Oct 6, 2017

Characterising a language as having a certain word-order is more of a generalisation in many ways than it is a standard or rule. In English, even though there is some flexibility such as in "what say you", being in object-verb-subject (OVS), people use impersonal pronouns like 'it' in "it is raining" that don't mean anything but fill in for a subject first which English-sepakers will prefer to have in most constructions; one could not say *"the sky is raining" but it equally as strange to hear "is raining" with no subject at all. In other languages however, not only is word-order not consistently fixed in the way it is in English, such as in inflected languages like Latin, but some languages allow for omission of certain elements such that there is not always, say, a subject included. In these cases, including a few examples in certain dialects of English, usually it is said that whatever is omitted is implied, but strictly speaking there is not always a subject or verb in every sentence. These standards are also even less important in verbal utterances, which relies much less on sentence-based construction that most written work. At least a few languages don't have word-order at all also, but this will be discussed in a post in the future.

1031: Influences on Estonian Oct 5, 2017

As stated before, when speakers of two languages come into contact for long enough, some parts of one language will likely influence the other. Sometimes this can be obvious, such as how much of English's vocabulary comes from romance languages due to the Norman conquest of England and other events, but there is still often plenty of room for debate. Estonian, for instance, has been heavily influenced by (Low) German and Russian due to about 700 years of contact with Germans starting in the 13th century with the Teutonic order before Estonia became part of the Russian Empire and later Soviet Union. Since Estonian is a Uralic language, not an Indo-European language, one might assume that the influence from those aforementioned languages would be quite apparent, but this is not always the case. Certain verb markings to indicate tense, aspect etc. in Estonian are mostly similar to other Finno-Ugric languages, but other times it may differ slightly, in which case it is not always clear whether the grammar was influenced by German or Russian individually, though more often than otherwise the effects are attributed to Low German. The subject does need to be studied more, so perhaps within the next few decades new information will shed light on this issue.

1030: Subject Oct 4, 2017

In English statments, the verb will almost always come after the subject, though this is not true of questions nor imperatives. Because English is not declined i.e. the form of the noun does not change depending upon how it functions syntactically, it does not especially matter whether the subject were to be considered an object or an agent of the verb by the speaker; nothing changes phonetically to the individual nouns in sentences like "the man saw the dog" and "the dog was seen by the man", so generally it doesn't matter. Nevertheless, even though the agent was "the man" in both sentences, in the one written in the passive voice, "the dog was seen by the man", 'the dog' is considered the subject, and indeed "by the man" can be omitted. If this seems like an arbitrary classification however, consider that in other languages, such as Latin, in which nouns are declined, even when the subject is not the agent, in passive constructions, the nominative case used for subjects would be employed. We even see this with English pronouns, such as in "she saw him" and "he was seen by her", as the pronouns change depending upon how they are used in the construction.

1029: Null Pronominal Objects Oct 3, 2017

It is nearly impossible to consider something a grammatical rule, for a single language or multiple, even if one were to speak incredibly generally. For instance, to indicate agreement with personal pronouns and antecedents, English relies on word order, and in some cases—though by no means always—gender, number, and case. It is for this reason that in the sentences taken from Nature, Nurture and Universal Grammar, it is clear to a native speaker of English that in “John said that he thinks he should wash himself” the 'himself' refers to John, whereas in “John said that he thinks Bill should wash himself”, the 'himself' refers to Bill. In English, the pronoun is necessary, though in other languages that role can be filled when the pronoun would be indicated by the verb. In those languages where the pronoun can be omitted, the absent pronoun is called the 'variable pronominal' or 'null pronominal', depending upon how easily it can be omitted given context. It was thought, due to only logical assumption, that a transitive verb would require an obligatory pronominal object (like 'him') or it would agree in person and number with the optional, variable objects. Nevertheless, in Imbarbura Quechua, a pronoun can be null while there is no indication from the verb as to the presence of a variable object. For example, these lines taken from Null Objects in Universal Grammar show the Quechua (line 1), the verbatim translation (line 2), and then the English as a native-speaker would use it (line 3).
Juan munan Juzi Ø rijsichun
Juan wants Jose   know
Juan wants Jose to know him.
Any rule pertaining to grammar in general can be debunked, so to speak, with even one example, and since languages vary so greatly, there is perhaps nothing that can be said to be always true of grammar, past and present.

1028: Strong Verbs (phonology) Oct 2, 2017

In English, there are far more strong verbs than there are strong nouns, all of which change to indicate tense, so it can be easy to assume that this is the only reason that strong verbs are used grammatically. Nevertheless, in addition to ablaut reduplication and reduplication for the purpose of emphasis, sometimes—though not so much in English—strong forms can feel fairly arbitrary and change for phonological reason. For instance, the German infinitive form for the word meaning 'to catch', 'fangen' becomes 'du fängen' in the second person singular informal. This process of modifying a German '-a-' into a '-ä-' is fairly common, as is '-e-' to '-i-' and '-u-' to '-ü-, even though they may remain in the same tense in the case of verbs.

This post was inspired by a fan-question; queries and comments are always welcomed.

1027: Re- (remote) Oct 1, 2017

Though often affixes are used to indicate certain meanings fairly regularly, for a few different reasons, certain ones can often have multiple meanings. Sometimes, as with the prefix 'a-', an affix can become a homograph; in this case, it came from different origins and only appears the same coincidentally. Other times, as with the prefix 're-' it is only due to chance that an affix can take on more than one meaning over time. Here, the prefix can function as an intensifier in words like 'remember' historically, but also can show distance in words like 'remote', or even indicate repetition in words like 'replay', though it should be noted that the latter group includes many newly-formed verbs. Still, it is because of this that 'remove' does not mean 'move again', but indicates movement to somewhere distance. As a side note 'emote' and 'remote' both relate to motion etymologically, but the former is more metaphorical.

1026: Chicano Vowel Shift Sep 30, 2017

When speakers of two or more languages, or speakers of two dialects, come into contact with each other enough, certain traits will eventually merge somewhat. Historically, Spanish has had a great deal of influence on English, but more modernly, Mexican Spanish spoken in and near the United States has led to vowel-changes in certain dialects of American English. In Chicano English spoken by Mexican Americans in places like the American Southwest and Chicago, as well as Californian, several shifts have occurred. The "cot–caught merger", which makes /a/ and /ɔ/ appear indistinguishable (present in the two words respectively) is complete, as well as the "salary–celery merger" which merges /æ/ and /ɛ/ before /l/, and also the /ɪ/ in 'sing' (/sɪŋ/) becomes /i/ like in 'see', which also happens in Californian English. Also, make long vowels become monophthongal, but this is a feature of Great Lakes accent as well, and has much less to do with Spanish. These are just a few of the many features that change due to exposure to to Spanish, though any dialect will change on its own given enough time, with or without external influence such as this.