1077: Ambiguity Nov 20, 2017

Humor relies a great deal on misconceptions based upon ambiguity. Syntactic ambiguity has been discussed here before, when a word can be more than one part of speech, but there is also structural ambiguity, such as in the sentence "I saw the girl with glasses" (i.e. it is not clear who has glasses). Also, there is lexical ambiguity, when a word has two possible meanings such the answer to "in what state will this water be flowing?" could be 'liquid' or, say, 'Kentucky'. Then finally there is referential ambiguity, such as the old joke "where was the Declaration of Independence signed?": "at the bottom". There is of course a great deal of similarity sometimes with these.

1076: Understanding Ungrammaticality Nov 19, 2017

People are surprisingly good at understanding bad grammar, and perhaps equally good at determining when good grammar sounds bad. This is not to say that people will to innately follow prescriptive rules, but that, on the contrary, people can often make out a reasonable meanings that are not provided in the language, for instance if the sentence is worded in a confusing way, such as with double-negatives. Although these do not have to rely on 'not', no', and '-n't ', these are prevalent, as in sentences like "this is not to say that I don't think that it isn't [adjective]" which would have a negative meaning when parsed, but in conversation could easily be interpreted as positive, because it combines two commonly used double-negatives: "I don't think that it isn't" and "this is not to say that I don't think (that...)". For an example of this confusion in the real world click here. Often, as with 'me' after 'than', people get used to conventions and it may sound worse to be grammatical. On the other hand, Chomsky's "colorless green ideas sleep furiously" makes no sense, but it grammatical.

1075: pudding Nov 18, 2017

Differences in people's dialects will not only manifest themselves as accents but there will also be some amount of separate lexicon. For instance, while in America and Canada, 'pudding' only denotes a sweet, custard-like dessert, in Britain (and other Commonwealth countries) 'pudding' is synonymous with 'dessert'. Neither could be considered to be wrong, so to speak, but you may wonder which of those is traditional. The answer is: neither. The term in Middle English denoted a sausage, as is still the case when the word is qualified, such as 'black pudding'. As a side-note, haggis is technically a pudding as well.

1074: Onomatopoeic Variation Nov 17, 2017

Onomatopoeias—words that mimic non-human sounds like 'shriek'—should all logically sound more or less the same, since people are ostensibly all hearing the same noises, but this is not exactly the case. Sometimes the variation is reasonable, such as how cats for English speakers say 'meow' whereas in Malay the word is 'ngjau', which is not the same, but both start with a nasal sound and end in a similar vowel-sound, while other times it may be rather different, as with the Bengali 'hamba' for the noise a cow makes, or the Russian 'gav gav' for dogs. If you know of any others, do include them in the comments. The only sort of explanation, besides any variation caused by different breeds (which would not account for differences in onomatopoeias of inanimate things, like the German version of Rice Krispies' "snap, crackle, and pop" being "Knisper! Knasper! Knusper") is that crucially cows do not say 'hamba', but neither do they say 'moo'; all of these are at best an approximation that people probably don't think much about after early childhood when learning the sounds from adults in the first place.

1073: Origins of Language Nov 16, 2017

No one knows what the original language sounded like, or even if there ever were such a language. Really, the furthest back that people can estimate ancient languages is a few thousand years, depending upon the language family. Still, it is thought for various, mainly biological and anthropolicical reasons that language began as far back as 100,00 BCE. This is largely to do with adaptations in the brain and larynxes of early humans. It is debated whether language developed before this, but there is really no way to know, and this also raises the question of what constitutes a language. Studying other animals can lend some insights however; some believe that language wasn't created from nowhere but developed as a replacement for other forms of communication including grooming, or some form of involuntary sounds like laughter or cries, which can be supported by studying monkeys.

1072: Syntactic Ambiguity: Past Participles Nov 15, 2017

Syntactic ambiguity [1] is a problem that speakers, and especially writers of English must deal with fairly regularly. This happens when one word can act as two parts of speech, and there is no way to determine which decidedly, given its linguistic context. This happens with present participles that can appear like adjectives, e.g. "visiting relatives can be boring" but this also happens, perhaps unsurprisingly, with past participles. In this case, the confusion would usually surround whether something is a passive verb or an adjective, such as in "plans can get complicated". However, it doesn't really matter. Here, there is less of a distinction needed than was the case with present participles, because the words function like adjectives not in spite of the passive nature of the participles but indeed because of it, largely.

1071: Classical Influences on Modern Linguistics Nov 14, 2017

A Classical European education would typically include Latin and Greek along with one's native language, or any other modern languages available in school. This meant partly that for a few centuries once linguistics became established as an academic field, while there was a large collection of data on languages of Africa, the Americas, etc. and later Oceania, comparative linguistics was largely narrow. With a few exceptions, most likely Hungarian, this somewhat accidental cultural norm was one of the factors that led the prevalence of Indo-European as a focus of study in linguistics for those in Europe and often elsewhere. This issue was not only cultural nor racial, but also political. In 1799, Hungarian was related to Finnish (correctly), but other languages belonging to the Finno-Ugric family [2] could not be studied, as they were spoken within Russia. Some languages were unfairly included or excluded from the label (which went by many names over the years) by modern standards for political reasons as well. Now, while language-classifications are determined in a far more systematic way, and there is generally more data accessible, much of linguistic analysis is skewed towards a relatively small group of languages in part because it is often easier at any period in time to work using ideas established by others.

1070: Welsh Names of English Places Nov 13, 2017

The Welsh city Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch is known for having the longest name of any city in Europe (though not the world) at 58 letters, but this is not the only reason that Welsh [1] names for cities should be notable. Celtic languages used to be the dominant language family of the British Isles, and indeed most of Europe, and there are still trances of this. The city ‘Dover’ in southern England comes from ‘Dwfr’ or ‘Dŵr’ meaning 'water', even though English has been the dominant language there for a considerable amount of time. As well, somewhat redundantly, since 'afon' means 'river', the River Avon would simply mean 'river river' when considering its Celtic origin.

1069: Metric versis Imperial (inch and ounce) Nov 12, 2017

In the same way that the arrangement of streets for old cities are arguably less logical than those of new ones because people had the ability to plan new cities more, newer words for units of measurement tend to be more structured as well, but this is not to say that older systems like the Imperial System never had any reasoning. Words like 'meter', or 'gram' come from words that mean 'measure' and 'small weight' in Greek and Latin respectively, and how prefixes in the metric system come from words that denote powers of ten in Greek and Latin, because the metric system was designed to be easy for conversions, and people creating it had the ability to plan and standardize more easily than for the Imperial System. In that system, words would either relate to measurements for practical things like lengths of fields, or would relate to fractions. Both 'inch' and 'ounce' come from the Latin 'uncia' meaning 'twelfth' (ounces are a twelfth of a pound troy); twelve was historically more often used, which it still is for time, as it is better for simple divisions than ten, as it has more factors.

1068: Simple Present versus Present Continuous Nov 11, 2017

There are many ways in which the present tense is used as has already been explained on Word Facts, but it is worth revisiting the differences between present continuous and simple present. Grammatically they very clearly distinct: the present continuous takes a form of 'to be' and then a participial with '-ing', such as 'He is driving' whereas the simple present conjugates the verb itself, such as "he drives". Both, however, can indicate that a the action is coinciding with the time of the speech-act, and can also indicate that the action is occurring habitually, so while one form maybe tends to mean that the action and speech-act will be simultaneous, there is no certainty. In African American English however, the 'habitual be' only means that the action is ongoing, i.e. "he be working" or "she be in college" implies merely that the subject is employed or attending school, even if that subject (contextually) were on a vacation.

1067: Why Preserve Language? Nov 10, 2017

Some people believe that the language one speaks natively determines—or at least heavily influences—the way that he or she thinks. This has been discussed here on multiple occasions from 'Eskimo's' (so to speak) having more words for snow than in English, to Sapir's idea that the 'Eskimo' would have an easier time understanding Kant than a German-speaker and how these, and other non-Eskimo relating ideas, tend to be illogical or even racist. On the other hand then, if a language does not relate to cognition, it might not seem like it would matter should a language die off; this is not to say that all languages are the same (which some people believe), but just that nothing would be lost really if people move onto other languages. Nevertheless, there are a variety of reasons why preserving a language is important. Linguistically, much of what is known about languages—particularly historical languages and linguistics—is done not by textual records necessarily but by comparison to other related languages; this is why relatively little is known about Basque as opposed to other languages of Europe. Also, languages (and dialects) allow for people to identify themselves as a group, and are often quite crucial for one's identity. More on the latter topic will be explored later on in other posts.

1066: Control Nov 9, 2017

Ostensibly, the clauses "he gave me the gift" and "he gave the gift to me" have have the same meaning, as each word has the same syntactic function in both, i.e. 'he' is the subject', 'gave' is the only verb, 'me' is the direct object, and 'the gift' is the indirect object. This rearrangement is true of sentences with 'give' as the main verb that have a direct object and indirect object, as well as other such verbs such as 'brought', 'ask', and more. The difference between the two original sentences however is control, which is to say the how the interpreted subject—which is in control—relates to the elements of the predicate. Generally, elements closer to the subject after the verb are said to be in higher control, so while is would be acceptable to say "he gave to me the book" is sounds a bit clunkier and perhaps archaic, but because more focus, so to speak, is put onto 'me' in that construction, its role as an indirect object is understood without the preposition.

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.