1117: norman Dec 30, 2017

Old English, and English in general, has had a lot of influence from Old Norse, but far more influential in the development of English was far more significantly affected by Norman French. Still, the Normans themselves were greatly influenced by—if not as much Old Norse—the speakers of Old Norse, which is to say the Vikings, a.k.a. the Northmen or the Norse men. It is from this phrase, in fact, that not only Norway got its name, but also ‘Norman’ came to be at all. To be more specific, the Old French ‘Normant’ is derived from the Old Norse ‘Northmathr’ meaning ‘Northman’. This happened when the Viking, Rollo became the duke of Normandy; his grandson was Guillome (William) the Conqueror.

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1116: They: Generalizations Dec 29, 2017

'He', 'she', 'they', 'he or she', and alternating between 'he' and 'she' are all options for general 3rd person singular referents, all with their respective problems. 'They' is both favoured and criticised for its vagueness, which can employed purposefully even when the gender of the antecedent is known as to make it clearer that the statement should make the listener imagine something hypothetical, e.g. "imagine your creepy male friend thinking you owe them something" (-Solomon Georgio). Other times, such as in this line from an Indian police chief, "a 4-month-old baby cannot move things from their face, and, basically, it suffocated", transitioning from a specific idea to a more general one (i.e. a particular baby to babies in general) will call for 'they'. This example is particularly noteworthy, because it uses 'they' and 'it' for a person whose sex is assumedly known. This occurrence is also quite common when people use the singular 'everyone', 'anyone' etc for generalizations.

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1115: The Misconceptions of Hard and Soft Dec 28, 2017

Hard and soft consonants do exist, and lay people use the terms quite extensively at times to describe sounds in English, but this this is not accurate. Other languages—famously Russian and other Slavic ones—have hard and soft consonants, the difference being that soft consonants are palatized and may sound therefore as if they are followed with a [j] (like the Y in 'yellow'). When people say that something is a hard consonants in English—which is not an applicable technical term in this case—it can mean lots of different things. Sometimes it refers to spelling and not phonetics, such as the G in 'giraffe' being considered soft as opposed to the G in 'gun' which would then be hard. At other times, it can reflect the different allophones of, for example, /t/, which can be considered to be the same sound, but will be more sonorous in words like 'top', than in 'pot', but neither of these examples are how linguists would use the words. If you have encountered other examples of the misuse of the terms 'hard' and 'soft', comment below. You can also support Word Facts on Patreon for more content: https://www.patreon.com/wordfacts

1114: Genderless Masculine Words Dec 27, 2018

There is a growing demand for genderless words, and not just in English. In some languages, like German, this often appears as using forms derived from participles rather than using gendered nouns, and speakers of Spanish are beginning to use '-x' rather than the gendered '-o' or '-a', for instance. In English, which does not have grammatical gender, there is less of a need for this, but in the few cases where lexical entries differ based upon gender, such as 'actor' and 'actress' the way that people make this genderless is usually just to opt for the masculine form. Effectively this makes the word 'actor' seem as grammatically neutral, or simply is lacking gender, as with other jobs like 'clerk', even though actor began as masculine. Its masculinity doesn't really matter though, as many words that were once gendered like 'gangster' (originally feminine) or 'incognita' either become genderless or stop being used respectively. Notably, this does not happen with compounds ending in '-man', like 'salesman', and instead a new compound 'salesperson' is chosen.
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1113: Analyses of Romani: Linguists knew Gypsies weren't Egyptian Dec 26, 2017

Given that 'Roma' is only starting to replace 'Gypsy' in regular speech recently, it might be surprising that linguists knew that the people must have migrated from India—not Egypt as the term 'Gypsy' suggests—as far back as the 17th century. In 1782, Johann Christian Christoph Rüdiger published "On the Indic Language and Origin of the Gypsies" (originally in German), citing many a 1755 dictionary and more importantly Job Ludolf, who, in 1691, reportedly was the first person to actually compare Romani to other languages, and established that it was not Ethiopian nor Coptic (Egyptian). Earlier claims that Romani dialects descended from Coptic languages come from people like Andrew Borde, the earliest known documenter of Romani, who transcribed and transliterated merely 13 sentences, and called them Egyptian.

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1112: 'Everyone' can be Plural Dec 25, 2017

Words like 'everyone', 'anyone' and 'nobody' are all considered to be grammatically singular, but sometimes this is not semantically accurate. It is reasonable that 'anyone' etc are considered singular, given that the determiner alone tends to act as a singular (e.g. 'any dog', 'any chair' etc) because 'every' and 'any' and the rest all refer to one unit selected out of a whole group. In both meaning and grammar then, it is singular. In other constructions however, such as "everyone, children or adults, who gets lost or is in danger should know the Morse code for SOS" [1] (taken from a Dear Abby from 2000) uses the grammatical singular as is evidenced by the conjugated 'gets' and 'is' but clearly refers to two elements at once, which furthermore happen to be plural themselves. Likely, without the 'everyone', it would appear as "children or adults, who get[] lost or [are] in danger..." as otherwise this would sound odd. Often, people get used to hearing the same grammatical constructions without thinking of the meaning, but even if this is not grammatical necessarily, it is still understandable to a native speaker.

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1111: The Creation of Indefinite Articles (in some languages) Dec 24, 2017

Latin didn't have indefinite articles, like 'a' or 'an' in English, and it didn't really have definite articles either. Latin did have demonstrative pronouns (which could also function as deictic pronouns) such as 'ille, illa, illud' (masculine, feminine, neuter (m, f, n)) meaning 'that' which became 'il' and 'la' (m and f) in French, as well as other similar definite articles in other Romance languages, because the function of those pronouns is similar to articles. However, French and other Romance languages also have indefinite articles now, such as 'un, une' (m, f), but these don't come from pronouns. Instead, they come from 'unus, una' (m, f) meaning the cardinal number 'one'. This occurrence is not only restricted to the Romance languages either; Old English didn't have indefinite articles either, and the word instead comes from 'ān' which meant 'one'. It is fairly logical that this should happen with articles, since "that [noun]" and "one [noun]" have nearly identical meanings to "the [noun]" and "a(n) [noun]", but allow people to convey even more meaning. As a side-note, 'an' is more similar to the Old English number 'one' in pronunciation, even though it has a different meaning, but the use of [w] in the beginning of 'one' [wʌn] was only really considered standard in English in the late 17th century.
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1110: Lack of Assimilation Dec 23, 2017

One feature of words in certain languages such as German that can help to make make the distinction between words easier to understand is that assimilation there does change when there is compounding. For instance, an 'sp-' and 'st-' in the middle of words are pronounced as [sp] and [st] respectively, but at the start of words they become [ʃp] and [ʃt] (like SH). This assimilation, however, is maintained when there is a prefix, or if it is the second element in a compound, even if this requires a glottal stop. Therefore, while the affixes are not a different word, nor are compounds multiple words, the individual elements are mostly preserved. This does not happen in languages like French.

1109: Complements Dec 22, 2017

Adjuncts, as discussed yesterday, are phrases that are not grammatically necessary. Nevertheless, an adjunct in one clause will not necessarily be an adjunct in another. For instance, in the sentence, "He found the salt on the table", "on the table" is an adjunct since the sentence would be grammatically complete as simply, "he found the salt", but if the verb were substituted for 'put', nothing would be unnecessary in "he put the salt on the table", because 'put' requires three arguments: a subject, a direct object, and an indirect object (a complement).

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1108: Extraposition Dec 21, 2017

Adjunct—phrases that modifies or qualifies something in a sentence but is not grammatically necessary—are fairly common in especially given that there is not necessarily a limit on how many can be used. This does not mean, however, that these will be treated the same way syntactically. In the sentence, "Bill is a student of linguistics", "of linguistics" is an adjunct, and so is "with glasses" in "Bill is a student with glasses". However, while one could say "what (field) of linguistics is Bill a student of", one could not really say "what (colour) glasses is Bill a student with". This is because some adjuncts can be extraposed, which is to say that they can be moved to the front of the sentence, often leaving a preposition behind, while others cannot. Extraposition is also why people can start a sentence with an impersonal 'it', such as 'it is no use crying over spilt milk" as opposed to "crying over spilt milk is no use", where 'it' does not appear in the latter example because there the subject is in the first position, as is standard.

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1107: The Number of All and Every Dec 20, 2017

The words 'all' each and 'every' are often interchangeable semantically, except that 'all' is used as to describe quality, such as "all right", as well as many other nuances. Moreover, 'every' and 'each' may have generally the same meaning of uniting a group as 'all' does, but grammatically they are not often treated the same, and instead they skew more towards only singular than 'all' would skews towards the plural. One could say "all men [plural] are dogs" but that would likely become "every man [singular] is a dog", for example. It is easier to use 'all' in singular settings such as "all food [singular] is expensive" or "all foods [plural] are expensive", which does not work as often with 'every'. There are exceptions of course, such as "trains leave every 2 minutes [plural]". Even more than 'every', 'each' almost never would be used with the plural.
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1106: Before- and After-Clause Dec 19, 2017

English does have grammatical tense, but sometimes this is not effected from the semantics of a clause. One type of such a clause is the "before-clause" or "after-clause", which indicate action prior to or following another that would be indicated at another point in the sentence, but is not in the past-tense. In the sentence, "before/after buying [present tense] groceries, he went [past tense] to work", the use of the adverb signals clearly enough that the action happened at a different time than the present, but the present tense is nevertheless used. Other constructions, such as 'having bought..." use the past tense in the ordinary way, so the before-clauses are rather exceptional in English, as a sort of semantic quirk. It should be noted that just because a clause has 'before' or 'after' that does not make it a before- or after-clause, such as in "after having bought..." which does not have the nonpast verbal form of the earlier after-clause.
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1105: Word-Frequency Dec 18, 2017

Dictionaries can have thousands, even tens of thousands of words in them, but only a fraction of those words will be used with much frequency. Generally speaking, almost all words are rare, and in given text, it is not rare if only half of it will be made up of only 100 to 150 distinct words. For example, 80% of the Greek New Testament is comprised of merely 319 different words, while the remaining 20% is made up of 5,118. This is particularly noteworthy in English, as around 60% or more of the vocabulary can be considered Romantic in origin (particularly from Old French and Latin), while only 26% or so is Germanic. Nevertheless, it is not uncommon that sentences, especially concerning every-day, non-technical ideas, will contain all or almost all words that have Germanic origins. The reason for this has to do with the history of English.
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1104: Word-Order and Rearranged SVO Dec 17, 2017

Impersonal pronouns, such as 'it' in "it is raining" allow English speakers to—among other things—maintain the most common word-order in the language of subject-verb-object (SVO). Not only that, but also, even when rearranging the order of words in a sentence, the word-order is maintained with impersonal pronouns. The sentence "Elizabeth likes tiramisu" is in SVO order, but it could be rearranged with the object first for the purpose of adding focus to the direct object; this could be done with the passive ("tiramisu is liked by Elizabeth"), but it is also possible to start (sort of) with the object in the active voice. This would theoretically appear as "is tiramisu that Elizabeth likes", however, the pronoun 'it' is necessary to make this grammatical, so while more focus is placed on the object in the rearranged sentence "it is tiramisu that Elizabeth likes", the impersonal pronoun still is a subject in the first position.

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1103: All as a Submodifier and Intensifier Dec 16, 2017

While the word 'all' acts semantically to unify things (i.e. "*all* the parts of something), the use of the word extends to one as not only a submodifier with varied senses but also as an intensifier. One can say that someone is 'all wet' to mean that every part of someone is wet, but in other cases, such as 'all better', the meaning does not necessarily refer to the literal whole of someone, but contributes to a quality. In both cases, the word is a submodifier, but the literal sense was extended to a more abstract notion of a person in the latter example. Moreover, while 'every' refers to parts of something "all parts" "every part", it does not lend itself to modifying the way 'all' does, such that someone cannot be 'every better'. Furthermore, somewhat colloquially, 'all' can be used as an intensifier, such as in "you look stressed", to "you look all stressed".

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1102: Differentiation of Syllables through Stress (s.s.w.7) Dec 15, 2017

Stress and syllable-structures are linked in many ways, so while throughout the Syllables and Stress Week they have largely been considered separately, many of those ideas overlap. In English, a language heavily affected by stress, stress can be seen to affect the way individual words are pronounced, but language is more than individual words. The reason why Hawai'ian cannot have consonant clusters, for instance, is not only because those don't exist within words, but since words must end in vowels, clusters cannot appear within a sentence. With that in mind, it would seem that words like 'box' [baks] may be considered monosyllabic, but when followed by a word with no onset (most words that start with a vowel), one might assume that the [s] would become an onset, so 'box opener' would be something like 'bok sopener'. To some extent, this is true; were one to slow down a recording of speech enough, it is likely that it would be indistinguishable. However, one way that this does not happen frequently is that each word will have predicable stresses, and if words compounded (or otherwise merged), this changes the stress. Stress is, for example, altered for nouns when they become compounded anyway, which is how people can understand what is a compound when it appears in speech.

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1101: Possible Exceptions to the SSP (s.s.w.6) Dec 14, 2017

Syllables are notoriously hard to define, despite the fact that children can be taught to parse a word into its syllables with only instinct. Indeed, it was said by Ladefoged & Johnson, “[syllables are] a unit of speech for which there is no satisfactory definition. Syllables seem to be necessary units in the mental organization and production of utterances.” Though principles like the MOP and SSP can be trusted as a way to empirically break up a word (or more accurately: a phrase) into syllables, there are some oddities. The complex word 'sixths' [sɪksθs] not only has three consecutive fricatives, and four non-syllabic consonants in succession, but far more importantly, [k] has lower sonority than [s] or [θ], so it would seem like, according to the SSP, [sɪksθs] must have to be 2 syllables. For that matter, this is the case with other words like 'box' [baks] or anything other word such as those that end with a plosive and then quite commonly [s]. However, in words like 'box' and (arguably) 'sixths', the ending is still considered part of the coda, partly because the plosives can be so similar in sonority to the fricative [s] that any differentiation in stress or volume is difficult to notice, particularly at the end of a word. If you want to play around with this, I made a program last year that deals with syllables: http://snap.berkeley.edu/snapsource/snap.html#present:Username=emmettstone&ProjectName=Stone%20Final%20Project

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1100: Syllable Structures (s.s.w.5) Dec 13, 2017

So far in the Word Facts series, Syllable and Stress Week—the focus has mostly been on English. While English syllables are as interesting as any other perhaps, the rules for them are not universal. While English has, for instance, a limit (though not terribly strict) of how many consonants can cluster as a single onset—practically, it can have three, such as in 'spree' [spɹi]—other languages like certain Semitic or Slavic ones can have whole words composed of only consonants, including in the famous Czech tongue-twister 'strč prst skrz krk' ('stick a finger through the throat'). On the other hand, some languages such as polynesian languages like Hawai'ian can't have consonant clusters whatsoever to the point that syllables can't end in consonants because that could result in two consonants of separate syllables next to each other. Therefore, there are four types of syllables in Hawai'ian: V (vowel), VV, CV, (consonant-vowel), and CVV; this is called a 'null coda' or more generally, an 'open syllable'.

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1099: Positions of Stress: Lexical Stress (s.s.w.4) Dec 12, 2017

For most words, the stress does not really affect the meaning thereof, but there are occasions where stress is not simply a natural feature of a given term, but will change, for example, a lexical class (part of speech). For instance, for some nouns with corresponding verbal forms (or vice-versa) will have different stressing, such as ‘rebel’ or even ‘associate’, where primary or secondary stress is shifted to the end of the word when it is a verb. This type of stress, called ‘lexical stress’ or sometimes ‘word stress’, leads to more predictable positions for stress in English, where stressing can appear at first glance more or less random, unlike in ‘Finnish’ where the stress is always on the first syllable. Furthermore, words do not need to change lexical class to have variant lexical stress. ‘Defence’ in American English has stress on the first syllable when used for sports /ˈdiːˌfɛns/ whereas when the stress is on the second syllable, it tends to carry connotations the law or the military /dɪˈfɛns/. Some languages have tone that change the meaning of a word, but this is not the same.

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1098: Sound Shifts from Stress (s.s.w.3) Dec 11, 2017

Stress affects the way that certain sounds are produced fairly often, insofar as accentuation makes certain sounds more or less simple to create; whether or not one's emotional state changes one's speech is a different matter. For instance, historically, unstressed or lax vowels before an initial [h] would have led to the reduction of [h] entirely, so 'have' would have become [æv] but 'hay' would likely remain [heɪ]. This is related to why it is acceptable to say 'an historic...' or 'a historic...'. Moreover, many of the words sound the way they do today because unstressed or long vowels would often diphthongize, so an [æ] in 'has' (or 'hasn't) cold become [ɛ] as in 'bed', and then [e] to [eɪ] as in 'hey'. This is one proposed reason for how 'hasn't' could become 'ain't', or less controversially why 'have' does not rhyme with its derivative 'behave'.

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