1125: -ol Jan 7, 2018

Lots of chemicals and medical drugs end with the suffix '-ol'. Generally this follows guidelines for scientific nomenclature. The suffix refers to organic compounds that form alcohols and phenols. Arguably, this was influenced from some sort of back-formation [1] of words such as 'alcohol' [2], which has this ending (in this case though not a suffix) but is many centuries old and entered English as a non-scientific word. '-ol' is nevertheless said to be derived from the Latin word for 'oil'. However, given that so many words end in this '-ol' (sometimes found as '-ole') anything given this suffix could sound more scientific. People trust things that sound like they are scientific to be so, which is why there are often science-resembling words made up for the genre of science-fiction, but this also happens with drugs like Tylenol® or the renamed 'paracetamol' in Commonwealth countries which don't have the '-ol' in its standard nomenclature. Instead, the name scientifically is 'acetaminophen', and while there are certainly marketed drugs with the '-phen' ending as well, people decided to rebrand in this case. You can support Word Facts on Patreon for more content: https://www.patreon.com/wordfacts.


[1] https://stonewordfacts.blogspot.com/2017/08/993-indifferent-and-different-aug-28.html

[2] https://stonewordfacts.blogspot.com/2017/02/796-alcohol-and-arabic-words-in-spanish.html

1124: caterpillar Jan 6, 2018

Yesterday it was discussed here how the words for 'dolphin' and 'caterpillar' in Old English translate to 'sea-pig' and 'leaf-worm' respectively. In Modern English, their names may sound more elegant, or perhaps at least less semantically blunt, but it is not as though words like that, now replaced with terms derived from Romance languages, don't have ay meanings. The word 'caterpillar', for instance, is from Old French, and the predominant theory on its etymology states that it comes from the word 'chatepelose'. That may still sound more exotic to you than 'leaf-worm' (lēafwyrm in the original Old English), but it translates to 'hairy cat'. The connection to cats is present in other languages as well, such as 'Teufelskatz' in Switzerdeutsch meaning ‘devil's cat’ or in Lombard where the word for 'caterpillar' is the same as the word for cat. You can support Word Facts on Patreon for more content: https://www.patreon.com/wordfacts.

1123: Replaced by Loan Words Jan 5, 2018

Many of the words that exist in English now come from Old French. Famously, this is why there is a difference between words for meats as the animals sometimes i.e. 'pork' is not 'pig' in the way that 'chicken' is both an animal and a food, since the animals' names are Germanic but the richer Normans gave their words for the foods they could afford more often. Still, this does not explain why words like 'caterpillar' are Romantic in origin, and replaced the Old English, in this case 'lēafwyrm' or 'cawelwyrm' though. Indeed, many modern loan words exist because there is not an equivalent, such as 'sushi', a word which was borrowed because the food was borrowed as well, but many words do not need replacement. To put a complicated and controversial issue simply, anything can be expressed in any language, so long as the referents are understood. With this in mind then, there might not seem to be a reason to ever borrow words, nor especially why 'dolphin' replaced the more logical 'mereswīn' (sea-pig), but the only way this makes sense is that there are synonyms to words quite often; even looking at a modern dictionary, there are several reason, including simplicity, politics, and luck that some words can be thought of as replacing others. They are the same reasons that 'fun' is more common than 'jollification', for example.

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1122: Unvoiced Nasal Consonants Jan 4, 2018

Nasal consonants were discussed yesterday with regard to how they still require movement of the oral tract. What was not discussed was that the fact that every nasal consonant in English is voiced, which is to say that the glottis is involved. To understand the difference physically on yourself, put your finger on your throat gently while producing [s] (which is not voiced) and then switch to [z]—the voiced equivalent—and notice the additional vibration. This same voicing (vibration of the glottis) is present in [m], [n], and [ŋ], and this is true of most nasal consonants in most languages. A few, including Icelandic, Burmese, Jalapa Mazatec, and Welsh have unvoiced nasal consonants. Astonishingly Iaai has 6 such consonants: /m̥ m̥ʷ n̪̊ ɳ̊ ɲ̊ ŋ̊/. This fun video from

Glossika Phonics has an audio of what [m̥] sounds like, with a visual aid as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CcSsEbwyBFk

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1121: Nasal Consonants Require Oral Movement Jan 3, 2017

Most consonants (and vowels, to be clear) in English are produced by moving air through the mouth; these are called oral consonants and include phonemes like [b], [d] and [g]. To prove it to yourself, you can hold your hand close you tour lips and say something with those consonants like 'bog-dog' and feel the air moves out of your mouth, and not your nose. The phonemes [m], [n] and [ŋ] (like in 'siNG') are the only nasal consonants in English (do the same test with 'non-mom' if you'd like)—out of a total of 16 known nasal consonants—meaning that air exits through the nose after the velum is lowered. However, just because these are nasal consonants doesn't mean that the mouth isn't involved. For instance, if you prepare your mouth as if you were about to produce [b] and then [d], even without producing any audible sound, you would still have to move your tongue and open your lips, and likewise you would move your mouth from getting ready to make an [m] followed by [n], which are nasal. If you, again, prepare you mouth to produce a [d], and then next an [n], you would not move your mouth however. This is because [m], [n] and [ŋ] are the nasalised versions of [b], [d] and [g] respectively. As a side-note, not only is [ŋ] a nasalised [g], but [g] is a voiced equivalent of [k], so it is possible to say 'kangaroo' without really moving your mouth until the [ɹ] (but people probably would for the vowels).

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1120: Vocalic Assimilation in Kalaallisut Jan 2, 2018

English has plenty of examples of assimilation: when a sound consistently changes due to the phonemic context, i.e. the sounds around (particularly after) it. This can be seen with [n], which becomes [m] before sounds like [p] (e.g. 'impossible' is the negating 'in-' prefix + 'possible), or [t] becoming [t͡ʃ] before [ɹ] (e.g. the sound modified from 'tail to 'trail'). In Kalaallisut (a.k.a. West Greenlandic) this is even more extreme. At first glance it may seem that there are between 5 and 11 vowels, but because of assimilation there are only 3 vocalic phonemes: [a], [i], and [u]. Funnily, the alphabet for Kalaallisut contains 5 vowels—A, E, I, O, and U—but E and O only appear before [R] and [q]. All of the other vowels are allophones of [i], [a] or [u], even though they would be considered separate phonemes in other languages such as English. To see the range of each of these Greenlandic vowels, look at this graph below (citation after the links). You can also support Word Facts on Patreon for more content: https://www.patreon.com/wordfacts.

Fortescue, Michael (1990), "Basic Structures and Processes in West Greenlandic", in Collins, Dirmid R. F., Arctic Languages: An Awakening (PDF), Paris: UNESCO, p. 317, ISBN 92-3-102661-5

1119: Helium Doesn't Change a Voice's Pitch Jan 1, 2018

New Years' Eve, yesterday, was a day of partying for many, and maybe involved helium balloons. If you have happened to inhale helium—and likely even if you haven't—you may think that it makes the pitch of one's voice higher, but this isn't exactly true. The pitch of one's voice itself is not greatly affected by air-quality, so long as there is air at all. If that were the case, not only would this make it hard to comprehend two people with a relatively high and relatively low voice respectively in the same room, for instance, but also keep in mind that people can control the frequency of the movement of their vocal cords in order to alter the pitch of their voices, as is typical especially when singing. Your ears do not deceive you too much though, as what helium does do is to make the air travel faster, and the frequency of the airwaves passing through the larynx does change. This is also why records that are sped up can make whatever is being played back have a higher pitch than otherwise, or why slowed voices are lower.
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1118: The Person That... Dec 31, 2017

English speakers are not terribly comfortable with using 'it' for humans older than infants. People elect to use other terms, such as 'they', to be neutral—semantically, not grammatically—when the pronoun needed is the subject (and 'them' for objects) of a given verb, but relative pronouns tell a different story. 'That', among other things, is the non-human equivalent of 'who' for relative clauses, e.g. 'the chair that rocks is used by the man who rocks (in it)". Nevertheless, it is nothing rare to see 'that' used for people, such as in the title of the 1999 work "The Woman That Never Evolved" by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy which, uncharacteristic for feminist literature, could be said to use a non-human pronoun for 'woman', though likely nobody would take a stance serious. This did not cause controversy because it is rather a non-issue in terms of political correctness, even if some prescriptivists dislike its use. This topic will be continued as a Word Theory on January 9th, 2018 on the Word Facts Patreon account: https://www.patreon.com/wordfacts.

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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