1085: Determiners are not Adjectives Nov 28, 2017

For a long period of time, articles ('the', 'a', or 'an') were considered to be a type of adjective rather than a type of determiner. Though they do act differently in some ways, they do—at least at first glance—seem to modify nouns and though they have to go before adjectives, there is already an order to adjectives anyway. The difference is not only in the way it operates syntactically, but also differences semantically. Determiners create a reference to the noun, rather than a modification thereto, so saying 'a dog' doesn't change the quality of the dog. Genitives like "Mike's" is also a determiner, for the same reason, but also a noun cannot take two determiners, so there can be "the dog" or "Mike's dog" but not Mike's the dog".

1084: Yiddish and German Nov 27, 2017

The most similar language to English is generally said to be Frisian, specifically West Frisian. Still, if an English speaker heard West Frisian for the first time, he or she not likely understand what was being said, because even though they share the Ingvaeonic root (see photo below*) there are still many centuries of foreign influence and geographic isolation that made the two languages distinct. Because they are both so famous, and because they are spoken quite near to each other, one might assume that the most similar language to Modern German would be Dutch, and while the two are certainly quite similar to the point that there is some level of mutual intelligibility (though not 100% or anywhere close to that) Yiddish is actually closer related. Though German and Yiddish occasionally differ in some vocabulary, accent, and word-order, they are remarkably similar, in part because the two only diverged relatively recently, and were spoken in a similar region.

*http://yiddish.biz/

1083: dinner Nov 26, 2017

To many people, ‘dinner’ is the last meal of the day, which can also be called 'supper' or in some places 'tea', while to many other people in certain places, 'dinner' is the mid-day meal, as opposed to something else like 'lunch'. Though 'dinner' as the final meal of the day may be more common globally, neither that nor the alternative labelling of what would otherwise be 'lunch' was not without reason. The word 'dinner' comes from the Old French, 'disner' meaning 'to dine' and when it was adopted into English, it often would denote the largest meal of the day, not when it was timed. Moreover, it is believed that 'disner' comes from 'desjëuner' meaning 'to reverse' and 'fasting', or somewhat more idiomatically: ‘to break fast’. In this way, a word that originally that either descended from or at least is related to breakfast now means 'supper' or 'lunch'.

1082: Telic and Ateilic Verbs Nov 25, 2017

There are lots of ways to describe types of words, and all of them have different applications. Words are broken up into well-known categories like ‘nouns’, ‘verbs’ ‘adjectives’ etc based upon the way they function in a clause. Beyond that, types of words in various lexical classes are also broken into categories like ‘mass nouns’ and ‘count nouns’ which have different sorts of meanings when they get pluralized or have determiners, such as ‘milk’ and ‘cookie’ respectively, but classifications for words are not always—albeit they usually are—syntactic. Telic verbs, for example, relate to actions or goals that have a defined end, such as “build” whereas atelic verbs do not. This does relate to syntax, as certain phrases can only be added to certain verbs, such as “he ran in an hour” which sounds bad, while “he built (something) in an hour” is fine, but this is also somewhat of a semantic issue.

1081: Reported Speech Overview Nov 24, 2017

There are a lot of ways to report speech, but not all of them are treated the same way, both socially and grammatically. A traditional way to do this is “[person] said/ordered/mentioned/stated/posited (that)...” which reports, obviously, what was communicated verbally. There are plenty of verbs other than “said” such as the ones before, but these all use the same syntactic structures, and while they all communicate the same thing more or less, certainly some of them would sound clunky outside of written work. Other phrases such as “[person] was like” sounds less formal generally—one wouldn’t find it in a newspaper or academic journal—and (at least for the second half of that statement) there is good reason. “[person] was like” allows the person reporting the communication to include non-verbal cues, and it is certainly possible to simple utter the phrase and make a face, or gasp etc, which wouldn’t serve written work much, but does allow for people to include much more information about past conversations. In some dialects, like MLE (spoken in London), the phrase “this is [me/them]” is used the same way as “[person] was like”.

1080: Salient Variables Nov 23, 2017

There are many different accents and dialects of English spoken all over the world, but since this is the same language, the differences will only be slight. Even if people do not know the linguistic academic terminology, people are generally able to pick out the ways variation appears, such as how the same sound can appear two distinct ways in the same context, e.g. rhotic or non-rhotic R in a New York and London accent respectively. When people are aware of this difference, it is called a 'salient variable'. Not all variables can be called salient for every person, which could be a small part of the reason why some people are bad at putting on other accents. These variables can also be emphasised or diminished in order to adapt to situations, and appear either more or less to belong to a certain group.

1079: Cooperative Principles Nov 22, 2017

Having an understandable sentiment linguistically is more than simply the grammar of a sentence when considered in isolation. The term Cooperative Principle describes the idea that people will speak in a way that is suitable to the context of the conversation, both linguistically and otherwise. The four Gricean maxims, simply put, identify rules by which people know how to talk to each other. First, there is the maxim of relevance: the notion that people will give relevant information. A somewhat exaggerated example how this is broken could be:
Speaker 1: "how's the weather?"
Speaker 2: "I like cats"
Next, there is the maxim of quality, which states that people cooperating in a conversation would tell what they believe is truthful. To lie would violate this maxim. For the following two maxims, there is some overlap. The maxim of quantity posits that people try to be as brief as they can, and the maxim of manner states that people will try to be as clear as they can—which could entail being brief—but also stating things in a way that is, for instance, chronological and grammatical. If you wanted to be annoying and confusing, you could try throwing in an irrelevant, long-winded, and unclearly stated lie into your conversation, but this also works for some jokes, such as
"In which battle did Davy Crockett die?"..."his last one", which does not violate the maxim of quality, but could be said to break the maxim of relevance, arguably.

1078: The "Do So" Test Nov 21, 2017

One way to determine when something is a verb-phrase is that it can be substituted for "do so (too)". For instance, both "walks the dog" and "walk the dog on Tuesdays" in "Yosef walks the dog on Tuesdays" are verb-phrases, which we known because one could say "...and Beth does so too (/ on Tuesday)". It is not that this test does not work for all verb-phrases exactly, but there is the problem that this works too much. In the sentence "Beth is selling her house, but Yosef could never do so", "do so" does not mean "selling her house", (or "his house", as this is not specified either) but simply "sell [his/her] house". The meaning could be essentially the same, or not, but this is not only a matter of semantics, but also one of syntax. Also, people understand that certain meaning is not carried forward with 'do so', such as "Yosef pet the cat, but he never would have done so with a dog". Since 'do so' corresponds to "pet the cat", a possible—though improbable—interpretation could be "...pet the cat with a dog" i.e. not his hand. This example relates more to semantics, but either one is an instance of the human ability to understand how—in this case—verbs are used, and have to change based on either the grammar or the literal meaning.

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.