1065: Neutral Pronouns for People (in German) Nov 8, 2017

It would not be considered grammatical and could easily be taken as offensive if someone where to use the pronoun 'it' in lieu of either 'he' or 'she', but this is not entirely to do with the impersonality of 'it' per se, and more to do with English conventions. People accept when babies or animals are referred to as 'it', and also can use 'that' instead of 'who' with certain sentence-structures, but none of that matters as much as the fact that in other languages like German or even Old English, plenty of words that relate to people, particularly women in those cases, are in the neutral gender, and can take the pronoun that would translate into 'it'. In the original German for Rapunzel from the Grimm's Fairy Tales for example, it reads „Rapunzel ward das schöste Kinde unter der Sonne. Als es zwölf Jahre alt war, schloß es die Zauberin in einen Turm...“ meaning "Rapunzel became the most beautiful child (neuter) under the sun. When it was twelve years old, the sorceress locked it up in a tower" despite the fact that Rapunzel is a girl. As such, those English translations would not be acceptable, but it shows that one way how trends relating to gender in nouns and pronominals are fairly arbitrary.

1064: When is a Language Dead? Nov 7, 2017

Out of the more or less 7,000 languages spoken world-wide, all but a handful of popular ones are spoken by only around 10 percent of people. This means that there are a great deal of languages which only have a few speakers. Ayapa Zoque (Ayapaneco), also referred to as Tabasco Zoque, or by its native name, Nuumte Oote, is an endangered language spoken in Mexico by around 15 speakers, all of whom are elderly. Once however, there was once a rumour that there were merely two speakers, who no longer were talking to each other. While this was later found to be false, it does highlight the notion that a language does not die when the last speaker thereof dies, but indeed can be considered dead if all speakers but one die, because in that case there is no longer anyone to talk to in that given language.

1063: Long Consonants (and Vowels) Nov 6, 2017

English speakers may be fairly familiar with the idea of long vowels, as in the difference between the [a] in 'car' 'father', but these vowels depend largely on the sounds they precede, and whether or not that the consonant is voiced; it would not sound normal to use short or long vowels in alternated places, but it would probably would be understandable to switch the two, and the issue usually concerns whether the vowel is lax or tense instead. In some languages however, the length of vowels affect the meaning of words a great deal more. Anyone who has seen Finnish writing would know that it has a lot more vowels than English writing—it is possibly the only European language to normally have more vowels than consonants in a given text—but partly this is due to the fact that a repeated vowel signifies long vowels. Furthermore, in Finnish as well as many other languages, consonants can be long as well, so for example 'kuka' means 'who', but the word 'kukka' means 'flower'.

1062: Over-Pronouncing Nov 5, 2017

People teaching the way that sounds are produced, usually to children but also to second-language speakers ought to be careful not to over-pronounce sounds, so to speak, and make every part of a word or syllable stressed, or vocalize too long, etc. Perhaps the clearest example of this is the word 'a' (and 'an'), which is—outside of exceptional contexts such as emphasis for semantic reasons—pronounced [ə] as in 'duh' but may said to pronounced [ei] which is the name for the letter in the alphabet, but is not the same as how people actually say it in a sentence, and is indeed even a diphthong. The article can be pronounced as [ei], as mentioned before, in certain contexts, such as clarification of the fact that there is only one of something like "I have [only] a shoe", but this is not the typical use. Below is a link to a video from Electric Company which is supposed to teach children about putting sounds together to make a word, but exaggerates the way that 'pr' is spoken in the completed words; the person in the video says [pəɹ]. 

https://youtu.be/lfQseUDQB2o

1061: A or An? Nov 4, 2017

The usual rule told to those when learning English is that 'a' is used for that state with a consonantal sound, and 'an' is used for words when the article precedes a vowel. There are at least two ways this can be confusing to some. Because English orthography is not phonetic nor even phonological, the letter 'u' can represent the [ju] in 'mute' at the beginnings of words, such as 'university'. Therefore, even though 'u' is a said to be a vowel, it represents two sounds in certain words, the former of which is a consonant, and would therefore take 'a' not 'an'. The other possible issue is that of which article to use before [h]: is something "a historic day" or "an historic day"? The first option is generally preferred, and much of the reason that people would use 'an' in this case is that historically the 'h' was not pronounced in the 18th and 19th centuries, as is still the case in some dialects of English. Interestingly, even though some people such as Bernie Sanders pronounce 'human' without the [h], this still does not necessitate changing the article because here, again, 'u' represents those two sounds [ju].

1060: Vowel Harmonization Nov 3, 2017

In English, an affix can be said to be more or less productive, but whether it can attach to fewer than 50 nouns as in the case of '-th' or thousands, as in the case of '-ness', the affix will not change its form. Occasionally whole words change over time, such as what would have been something like 'youngth' becoming 'youth', but this is not systematic in any way. Meanwhile, in some Uralic and Turkic languages, vowels have to harmonize with the word to which the affix is bound. For instance, a multiplicative ending, similar to '-(i)ce' in 'once' or 'thrice' in Hungarian is '-szor' for certain vowels (back vowels) like in 'hatszor' but will appear as '-szer' and '-ször' when harmonizing with front vowels or front rounded vowel respectively.

1059: Kinship Systems and Translatability Nov 2, 2017

English has plenty of words for the different people in a family such as 'brother', 'sister', 'mother', 'father', 'grandparent', 'aunt', 'cousin' etc. This is fairly typical for other languages; words for things that are important and fairly basic will have simple one-to-one translations to most other languages usually, while other things may require a full sentence, like words for snow in Inuit or indeed the Inuit word 'iktsuarpok' which denotes an excited anticipation waiting for something and repeatedly checking its arrival (e.g. when excitedly waiting for friend or an event and constantly checking the time). Nevertheless, some languages have more or very occasionally fewer words for family-members than English does. It is thought that Proto-Indo-European had more words for family-members, such as a single term for "son's wife" which English needs to construct with multiple words, and plenty of languages have different words to differentiate between paternal and maternal grandparents and/or aunts and uncles. On the other hand, Pirahã does not have a word for 'mother' or 'father' and instead just has the equivalent of 'parent' [màíʔì], though this is still quite similar to the near-universal phonetic trend for words denoting 'mother'. There is also no evidence that the speakers denote familial relationships any more distant than siblings; it is the most simple lexicon to denote members of a family that linguists are aware of.

1058: Smallest Phoneme Inventory Nov 1, 2017

The English alphabet has 26 letters, but has as many as 45 phonemes (sounds), depending on accent and somewhat upon the researcher. Plenty of languages have more, including !Xóõ (a.k.a. Taa) a click tongue which has over 120 phonemes and between 2 and 4 tones, but some have only around a dozen. Rokotas is considered to have the smallest phoneme inventory of any known language, with as few as 11 phonemes, though this does not mean necessarily that the words get especially long on average to theoretically compensate. Interestingly, the alphabet has 12 letters, similar to Hawai'ian, but the S and the T both represent /t/; S is only used before I and in the name for the language. The only other language that has been claimed to have fewer is debatably Pirahã.

1057: Recursion in Pirahã Oct 31, 2017

Because people can add on new information to a sentence or clauses with adjuncts or subordinate clauses as well as other modifiers, theoretically anyway, a sentence in English could go on forever and there is an infinite number of possible sentences, even though there are a finite number of words. This is the case for very nearly every language, except (at least) one, Pirahã, which is quite famous for being different in a number of ways to most. In addition to having an incredibly small phoneme inventory and not having words for numbers, Pirahã also does not allow for recursion for strings of adjectives into serials like in "large blue soft old (pillow)" nor recursion for possessives like in "my mother's uncle's cat's (toy)". Due to these observations made by Daniel Everett, as well as his conclusion that embedded clauses in this language can only have one level of depth i.e. "he knows about making food" would be acceptable but "he knows how to talk about making food" would require two sentences, he asserted that there are a finite number of sentences in Pirahã.

1056: Garden Path Sentences Oct 30, 2017

Intonation of individual words in a sentence, both in tonal language and non-tonal languages conveys syntactic information that is not present in written texts. Generally, because there are conventional ways to arrange a sentence, including information from word-order or even adjective-order cues, as well as having a knowledge of lexicon, this fact does not hinder readers. Nevertheless, certain sentences, sometimes called "garden path sentences" may appear initially ungrammatical at first but when stressed differently will make sense. One famous example is “fat people eat accumulates” which may be initially read with the phrase 'fat people' instead of thinking of them as two nouns, i.e. 'fat [that] people'. This type of confusion can come from all sorts of factors, but perhaps the most common reason is the use of substantive adjectives or the lack of hyphens in many compounds. It should be noted that this is not the same as syntactic ambiguity, because here the whole phrase only has one acceptable interpretation.

1055: Feminine Endings (IE) Oct 29, 2017

Looking at feminine nouns and given names, and the adjectives and pronouns that agree with them in Indo-European languages, especially in those from Europe, there is an tremendous amount ending in '-a' and '-e', while there is not such a broad trend for masculine or neuter words. The exact pronunciation of which varying slightly from language to language, but usually it is close to [a] or [ǝ]. In Spanish for instance, around 89% of feminine nouns end with '-a', and in given names the number rises to 98%. In Romance languages, this quality comes from the predecessor Latin, for which many feminine nouns and their adjectival and pronominal counterparts ended in '-a', as did many given names, a number of which were originally words anyway. Nevertheless, the trend among other language families such as Germanic or Slavic languages, while less prevalent in nouns, is still quite noticeable in given names. Some of the proper nouns would have ended in '-a' or '-e' naturally, but also some gained the ending from external influences (often Latin), such as the Germanic 'Brunhilde' or 'Hroswitha' which were originally 'Brunhild', and 'Hroswith' before they became Latinized. Around the world, plenty of masculine nouns or traditionally masculine names end in '-a', and this pattern is really just one of certain groups of a specific language family.

1054: Tip of the Tongue Oct 28, 2017

Every person will have experienced the feeling of having a word on the tip of the tongue, so to speak, and not be able to think of something but feeling that it should normally be simple. The name for this phenomenon is, unimaginatively perhaps, "tip of the tongue" (TOT), and though the knowledge of the neurological mechanisms for this need more research and there are several distinct theories about it, the experience of TOT is understood to be fairly universal, with people often remembering certain syllables, certain—usually first—letters, or only remembering words that are similar, either semantically or phonologically. TOT has implications in psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics, but also other fields which relate to memory or (meta)cognition.

1053: Hapax Oct 27, 2017

There are lots of ways to estimate the meaning of words—determining from context, looking to words that appear related, etc.—but sometimes words will only be found once for a certain author or in a certain language. This is called a hapax (legomenon), and it exists for dead languages and living ones, but for different reasons. In dead languages this happens sometimes because there is a limited, often small collection of words that survive, like for Old English with 'uhtceare' which meant ‘lying awake before dawn and worrying’, however, this can also occur in living languages, either by mistake, or when people use a word humorously, such as with 'runcible spoon'. There is no single way which these words' meanings can be determined, and even for words with established definitions, arguments among translators still occur.

1052: Perception of Past and Future in Aymara Oct 26, 2017

There is really nothing present in languages that can be said to be universal. Many ideas, even incredibly general ones like, to paraphrase, "a language will have nouns and verbs" or "a language will have sounds" are based on logical assumptions about the way people think but are then disproven by the existence a feature of even a single language, an idea which will be discussed more in the future. Furthermore, to continue the idea from yesterday about the relationship between motion and time, it is quite common to have words, including English prepositions, conjunctions, adverbs, and some verbs that relate to both forward movement or position and the future, or oppositely backwards movement and the past. Perhaps the clearest examples of this would be the fairly common phrases "look forward to [some future event]" or "put the past behind you". This exists—in some form or another—across numerous languages, but there is one that is quite famous for exhibiting this trend oppositely; in Aymara, a language with many similarities to Quechua, the past is related to forward motion or things otherwise in front of someone, and the opposite is true for the future. Until fairly recently, studies of Aymara were poor or would often view the language through a culturally Spanish lens, but the generally ascribed cultural reason for this is that the future is unknown, and unseeable: therefore as if it were behind someone.

1051: Time and Space in Language Oct 25, 2017

The sorts of connotations that people have with words in a language will inevitably change the way that the words—or derivatives thereof, after enough time—are used. Reviewing etymology, this is quite common as societies change, such as why 'aryan' means what it does today, in many ways opposite to what it used to. There is one relationship, however, that is fairly consistent over millennia, and it is that of space and time. Sometimes that happens for natural reasons, like the joint source of the words 'time' and 'tide', but this happens in grammar as well. For instance, prepositions that relate to space like 'before' (e.g. "kneel before royalty") also relate to time (e.g. "she arrived before him"); sometimes both interpretations are possible without any context, e.g. "he was standing before her". This is common across languages as well, in which—almost always—the future is associated with words that mean "in front of" and the past is accordingly associated with words that mean "behind". Generally this is ascribed to the fact that people usually move forward in space relative to them, while they also, obviously, experience time. Indeed, even the verb 'to go' can indicate motion, but it also conveys the future, e.g. "he is going to go home soon". More will be posted on this topic, and comparisons to this occurrence in other languages in the next few days.

1050: Hypercorrections Oct 24, 2017

Prescriptive grammarians may preach rules for the way in which a language ought to be used, and though this can come from good intentions, on occasion it may lead people to make more mistakes, both prescriptively and descriptively. This is called 'hypercorrection', and it takes many forms. As discussed a few months ago with 'whom' but also with 'me', the fear of misusing a word, or form thereof, can cause people to avoid it and use other terms, such as in this case 'who' or 'I' where prescriptivists would say it does not belong such as in *"he gave it to my friend and I". This also happens too with pluralizations like 'campus' mistakenly pluralized as *'campi'. All of those would be considered wrong by prescriptivists, but other examples, such as *"I informed her of all the things up to which I was" rather than "...I was up to" which attempts to avoid a preposition at the end of a sentence without recognizing the intention of the phrase, would be ungrammatical to anyone. Indeed, "up with this I will not put".

1049: footage Oct 23, 2017

There are many ways that a word might become dated, obsolete, or archaic. It is certainly possible that words will stop being popular without any particular reason, just like how "some pumpkins" used to be used as a synonym for 'impressive' (or as an exclamation) but no longer would be said ordinarily. Other times, technologies, cultures, etc. change and words like 'squiriferous' disappear because they are no longer needed, since people don't need, in this case, squires. Nevertheless, words can survive by taking on new meanings, such as 'footage' did. Like other words for distance, including 'yard', the suffix '-age' can be added to 'foot' to mean "a length measured in feet" but this took on the meaning of "a length of film". Film is much less popular now, but 'footage' has since come to mean the video recording of something, even digitally. It also used to denote a piece-work system for paying workers, but that meaning did not either continue nor adapt.

1048: No Subjects in Ergative Languages Oct 22, 2017

Word-order in English is fairly fixed because it needs to be due to a lack of much inflection that other languages like Latin have. This means that as flexible as the order was in English, classifying Latin as being subject-object-verb (SOV) has more to do with conventions than much else. Nevertheless, Latin had subjects at least which makes this sort of classification possible, but not all languages do. Ergative languages like Basque, Mayan, and even a few Indo-European languages like Gorani do not have subjects; instead what would be the subject of transitive verbs (i.e. ones that take a direct object) is called an 'agent' and behaves differently than the argument of intransitive verbs in that the arguments resemble the object of a transitive verbs. Though this is not the same as distinguishing between nominatives and accusatives, a rough English-equivalent, to alleviate confusion, might look like "she reads it" but "her dies". Classifying these languages as SOV (or any other order) is not suitable therefore. This is also not the same as simply dropping off a subject from utterances like in English.

1047: Syllabic Consonants Oct 21, 2017

Syllables can be fairly complicated, but the procedure for dividing them is fairly objective. In English, a syllable has an optional onset, which is a group of one or more consonants, then a nucleus which is usually—though not necessarily—a vowel (more on that later) followed by the optional coda. For example, in 'hugs' /həgz/, /h/ is the onset, /ə/ is the nucleus, and /gz/ is the coda. There will be a post explaining how this can be determined in the near future. Some consonants however, even in English, can be considered to compose the nucleus and the coda, which together is called the 'rhyme'. The sounds [m], [n], [ɹ], and [l] all can do this, such as in the end of the word 'column' where the pronunciation can be argued to switch from /l/ to /m̩/ (marked with a small diacritic underneath) without a vowel in the middle, though also sometimes it is written with the schwa [ə] in the middle for simplicity. In other words like 'hmm', it is even clearer, because one doesn't even need to open ones mouth. It is for this reason that the verb 'can' in a sentence is often not pronounced with the [æ] (for Americans) but may sound more like /cn̩/, even in words like 'cannot'.

1046: Hurricanes Oct 20, 2017

Every year, a number of natural disasters occur, but unlike earthquakes and other phenomena, hurricanes are given names. This has been done since the mid-20th century with names that would be associated with people, but until the 1950's they were marked by the year and order in which they occurred therein. The reason for this is that unlike earthquakes that occur only in one place for which it can be named, hurricanes move quite large distances. Starting in 1953, the United States began using female names for these storms as it was simpler to remember, and reduced confusion when multiple occur at the same time, as errors when using radio-communications were common. In 1978 and 1979 respectively, both men's and women's names were used for storms in the North Pacific and then the Atlantic basin based off of the names are designated by the World Meteorological Organization. Some names are retired if the storms that are associated with them are so disastrous that it could cause confusion, but also if there is an excess of hurricanes—more than 21 in a season—the World Meteorological Organization can use the Greek alphabet.