1137: How Old Can a Language Be and Still Be Known?

Proto-Indoeuropean (PIE) was not written down, and its immediate descendants were not written down either, but much of the vocabulary and syntax can be reconstructed by looking to how modern languages—and even some dead ones—appear today. Using these tools, linguists estimate that PIE was spoken 6,000 years ago, but certainly there were people around before then who would have had to speak other languages. The thing is, even looking to other language-families people don't know what they spoke, and there seems to be a finite amount of time after which it is no longer possible to reconstruct even a proto language. For the Mayan language family it's about 4,200 years, for Austronesian its 6,000, but the longest of any is Afro-Asiatic—including Hebrew, Arabic, Ge'ez, and Aramaic—at more than 9,000 years. Still, this trend, including many more language families, indicates that there is a fairly standard rate at which languages change to the point that they are no longer intelligible. Very few languages can be deciphered after as little as a few hundred year anyway, consider looking at Middle English today, though a mere handful exist, such as Greek, which reportedly still allows people to get the gist of Ancient Greek. If you are interested in learning more about reconstruction of dead languages, and the rate of language-change, comment. You can now support Word Facts on Patreon for new things and to help make the content better: https://www.patreon.com/wordfacts.

1136: Mx. Jan 18, 2018

The abbreviation Ms. was created in the 20th century in order to solve (at least) two problems; first and foremost, it does not require people to either share or be aware of a woman's marital status, which was a double standard given that Mr. never did that anyway, and second it made hypothetical statements or unknown information possible to share without compromising truth or personal comfort. This did take a while to catch on; the title was invented in 1901 and was not adopted by many major publishers until the late 20th century at least. Today Ms. is perfectly common—and possibly encouraged—even if the referent's marital status is well-known.

A modern movement similar to this is with the honorific Mx., much in the same way to how Spanish speakers are now using -X instead of the gendered -O and -A at the end of nouns, which solves the similar problems of not requiring people to be aware of gender, and making hypotheticals (or simply guessing) fairer. Moreover, it also does not assume a binary, which Mr. and Ms./Mrs/Miss all do. With the comparison in mind, it may be a while until major publishers catch on to this trend, but that does not mean, however, that it will not happen. You can now support Word Facts on Patreon for new things and to help make the content better: https://www.patreon.com/wordfacts.

1135: The Myth of Untranslatable Words Jan 17, 2018

When people refer to ‘untranslatable words’ they usually mean a word that does not have a direct translation into a given language, in this case English. A crucial distinction, however, is that the ideas are translatable, even if there is not a single word that can replace it, as with the misconception that Eskimo's have more words for snow. If that were the case, one would have to learn whole languages to understand things, and moreover, if a foreign language has these so-called untranslatable words (which any will surely have), logically it would not be possible to learn a second language at all. These words are translatable. Indeed, there are whole books, card-series, and more—such as the image below—that one can find when searching for untranslatable words, but all of them come with little, translated, definitions. Otherwise, these books would just be filled with foreign words, and people would have to take it on the author’s authority that they mean anything to anyone.

If you also think that, while maybe the general concept is understandable, there is a certain je ne sais qua that only native speakers know, consider that this is true of dialects of English. Though not a perfect analogy, to an American, ‘jam’ and ‘jelly’ would both be called ‘jam’ to a British English speaker, who must differentiate by saying like ‘smooth jam’ as a retronym. Support Word Facts on Patreon for new things and to help make the content better: https://www.patreon.com/wordfacts.

1134: Devoicing of [ɹ] Jan 16, 2018

It has been discussed here how when [t] comes before [ɹ] as a syllable's onset, it is produced as [t͡ʃ], (consider 'tip' and 'trip'), but this is not the only change that happens. Normally, [ɹ] is voiced, which is to say that the air passes through the vocal tract while the vocal cords vibrate. However, after [t͡ʃ] (as in the consonant in 'chai') as an onset, [ɹ] becomes devoiced, and is written as [ɹ̥]. If this is hard to imagine, or you don't sense a difference, say the word 'rain' and then 'train' while you hold your hand gently against your throat; in the first you should feel a vibration when saying [ɹ], but this should not happen with 'train'. It should be noted, however, that these two sounds are not distinguishable in English exactly, since there is no word where alternating between the two would either change the meaning nor remove meaning altogether. Therefore, these are allophones in English. You can now support Word Facts on Patreon for new things and to help make the content better: https://www.patreon.com/wordfacts.

1133: Esperanto Failed because of Politicians Jan 15, 2018

Esperanto is not the global language that it was designed to be as discussed yesterday, and even factoring in the many second-language and even first language speakers thereof, it is not used for things like trade,  scientific research, international or multiethnic politics etc. This could have been different though. Part of the reason that only language-enthusiasts use Esperanto and not politicians is that a few key political figures hated the idea of Esperanto in the 20th century. Esperanto was nearly the official language of the League of Nations, a precursor to the United Nations; ten out of the eleven delegates agreed to this proposal, but it was vetoed by the French delegate, who worried that Esperanto would replace French as the global lingua franca. Furthermore, Esperanto was banned by the Nazis (partly because its creator was Jewish) because it was globalist and Hitler therefore saw it as communist, which is almost ironic because the Soviets banned it as well. Franco also banned its use in Spain, and the Imperial Japanese outlawed it as well. 

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1132: J.R.R. Tolkein's Opinion on Esperanto Jan 14, 2018

J.R.R. Tolkien did not only create the Lord of the Rings series, but he also created nearly a dozen languages for his books, all based off of natural languages like Finnish, and Old English which he studied and taught professionally, and also less famously basing Dwarvish on Hebrew and other Semitic languages. Nevertheless, he did not hold as high of an opinion on constructed languages as that evidence might suggest, saying "Esperanto and other constructed languages were "dead", far deader than ancient unused languages, because their authors never invented any Esperanto legends". His argument here is that because there is no group of people who do or have spoken the language, there is no culture tied to it; no word is more or less significant, and the only phrases and idioms would have to be artificially invented, etc. Even with Hebrew, which is the only language successfully revived on a large scale, not only was the language already tied to a culture, but the creation of Modern Hebrew relied a significant amount on loan-words and new words in order to adapt to the culture found in the world today, as opposed to when it died a very long time ago. There will be more on why Esperanto failed as a global language, this time due to politics, tomorrow.

As a side-note, in the quote Tolkien uses 'dead' comparatively, which is rare (some have argued semantically impossible) given that, like other words such as 'pregnant' where someone either is or is not, it cannot really be described in degrees.

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1131: Many A... Jan 13, 2018

There are plenty of words that are plural in form but singular in meaning, such as 'news', 'dominoes', and 'physics', and likewise some words act in the opposite way, but the phrase "many a..." makes whatever would follow it singular. Strangely then, the meaning of the phrase is "a large number of", so semantically it will seem plural, such as in the example from Learner's Dictionary, "many a politician has promised to make changes" where both 'politician' and its corresponding verbs are singular. While this trend may exist as exceptions to the rules of pluralization for a handful of terms such as the ones listed above, it is far rarer to find it in something phrasal like this. If you know any examples of other phrases that are different semantically to what the grammar would suggest, write it in a comment below. You can now support Word Facts on Patreon for new things and to help make the content better: https://www.patreon.com/wordfacts.

1130: Different Ways People use 'Was' and 'Were' Jan 12, 2018

Though there is something to be said for the regularity of strong verbs or strong nouns, which often are called irregular because they do not use '-ed' in the past tense nor pluralize with '-ed' respectively, everyone would agree that 'to be' is irregular. Not only are the present forms: "am; are; is" irregular, but also the past tense forms do not follow any apparent structure. In Standard English, in the first and third person forms 'was' and 'were' are divided by singular and plural subjects, i.e. 'I was' and 'she was' but 'we were' and 'they were'. Nevertheless, to make matters more confusing, many other nonstandard dialects (which is not the same as 'ungrammatical') reverse this, and would say either 'I were' for example, or 'they was'. Furthermore, in some parts of the UK, people are more likely to just use 'was' in positive constructions, but 'weren't' in negative ones, e.g. 'I was going to do that' but 'I weren't going to do that'. You can now support Word Facts on Patreon for new things and to help make the content better: https://www.patreon.com/wordfacts.

1129: Meme Dialects Jan 11, 2018

People interested in language are probably familiar with terms like 'Standard American English', 'Standard (British) English', 'Australian English' etc., but while those dialects all came to diverge slightly because of geographical distance of people over time, other environments can lead to the creation of dialects as well. Some dialects are associated with ethnicity, of course, but also the Internet has led to what could be called 'meme dialects'. While most memes still use standard English, others—famously lolcat- and dog-memes—use what began as nonstandard English, which you can see below, but eventually developed to have fairly standard syntax. What separates this dialect from others mentioned before is not only does it not necessarily belong to a well-defined group, but also it has no phonology, because it is written down.

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1128: Discourse Markers Jan 10, 2018

One possible way to sound more conversational in writing without necessarily switching into the second person or asking questions is to use what are called 'discourse markers'. These words include 'well', 'oh', 'ya know', 'I mean' etc. (feel free to comment others) and have many functions in a conversation. In addition to indicating the beginning or the end of a piece of dialogue, drawing attention to new information, indicating that the next idea is either reported or otherwise not necessarily facts held confidently, and making sure that someone is listening at all, speaking generally, these discourse markers allow the speaker to show the listener how to interpret the message. These all can help to make a conversation feel more personal not only because they are less formal but also because they convey more information about how the speaker considers the information in the first place. And, oh...well, ya know, you should really check out the Patreon for Word facts: https://www.patreon.com/wordfacts

1127: Adjective Clauses Jan 9, 2018

Every child who's played Mad Libs® (and hopefully also those who haven't) knows what an adjective is. These descriptors aren't the only way to describe something though. Adjective clauses—not to be confused with an adjective phrase—act to describe a noun, just as an adjective would do, but do not contain an adjective. This is a type of adjunct, but unlike those that are prepositional phrases which act adverbially (e.g. 'in the house' in "we saw him in the house") adjective clauses rely upon relative pronouns like 'which' or 'who' or relative adverbs like 'where'. In languages besides English, these pronouns can agree in number and gender (but not grammatical case) with the noun they modify as well in the same way, more or less, that an adjective would have to. You can now support Word Facts on Patreon for new things and to help make the content better: https://www.patreon.com/wordfacts

1126: Backchannels: Wordless Expression Jan 8, 2018

In terms of spelling anyhow, 'go!' may be the shortest possible sentence in English, and while people don't always speak in full sentences, this is still only counting words. Incomplete sentences that could still convey meaning are called utterances, and these are usually shorter than sentences given that they can be grammatically incomplete, relying on understood information and context, but again these also rely on words. 'Backchannels', as they're known in psychology, or otherwise 'minimal responses' are the sorts of things that people say to indicate listening, generally, but can be more socially complicatedly and even show empathy. These can range from short phrases like 'oh no' to murmurs and grunts as in 'mmm' or 'mhm'. These rely heavily on non-verbal cues like body-language, as well as the context to whatever the other person is saying, as well as tone, volume etc. making these difficult or impossible to use in text, even if it is just as, or more evocative emotionally than a full sentence could be. Support Word Facts on Patreon, and make sure to vote for the next series! https://www.patreon.com/wordfacts.

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.