1145: Some Reasons for Official Languages Jan 27, 2018

There are a few reasons why a country would have an official language. Through most of history, the idea of an official language did not exist or was irrelevant because if is hard for them to exist outside the context of a nationstate. Nevertheless, sometimes one will be used for harmony among groups living in the same nationstate, as with the first instance of an official language, Aramaic in the Persian Empire in around 500 BCE. It was to keep relations with the recently-annexed Mesopotamia peaceful, but it acted as a lingua franca (nearly 2,000 years before the French language) and was a simple solution to having to create laws in a multiethnic and multilingual empire. Other times, as with the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the official languages were used to cement authority. Here, German and Hungarian, were the only official languages, even though a dozen or so other languages were spoken including Serbian, Czech, Polish, Italian, and Yiddish, but because those groups did not have as much legislative power, the Austrians and Hungarians did not want to give their languages official status, even though German and Hungarian was only spoken natively by a combined 43% of the population. Likewise, South Africa from 1984 to 1994, had only two official languages—English and Afrikaans—but the country now has eleven, with the other nine being native African languages, giving more power and opportunity to more, native African, people. Of course, the choice for many official languages are not quite as politically motivated, but simply make it easy for legal and medical uses etc., and to create a sense of national identity. This list could surely go on, but is meant only to give a general idea about why countries have official languages, if they have them at all.

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1144: Historical Comparatives Jan 26, 2018

There are certain unspoken rules, so to speak, concerning when an adjective in the comparative or superlative form will take '-er' and '-est', or 'more...' and 'most' respectively. It is why we get 'prettier' and 'prettiest' but not 'beautiful-er' or 'beautiful-est' which you can read more about in a previous post. There is somewhat of a discrepancy with the word 'fun', as 'funner' and especially 'funnest' is acceptable to some, particularly Americans, but not other, notably Brits, though despite this, generally the phonetic conventions are observed. When you see an adjective, then, with '-er' and '-est', it is probably safe to assume that there is a form without these suffixes, which is called a perfect adjective. With the words 'latter' and 'last', it might not be apparent whether they are related, and if so, what the perfect form would be, but a look into their etymologies reveals how they came to be the way they are. In fact, historically, these are a comparative and superlative form; 'latter' now means 'towards the end' or often 'the second of two', but in Old English 'lætra' just meant, more broadly ‘slower’, and was the comparative of 'læt' meaning 'slow' or, as you can maybe guess, 'late'. 'Last' on the other hand, while it is less direct in its relation to 'late' comes from the Old English 'latost', which was an adverb that has now gained an additional adjectival form, and is indeed related to 'late'. This is not to say that 'latter' and 'last' are the comparative and superlative form of 'late', given also that English has 'later' and 'latest', but clues from the meaning of a word and more importantly the way it looks can lead to certain insights.
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1143: Locatives without Prepositions? Jan 25, 2018

Latin is famous for its case-system, for while English uses word-order or prepositions to indicate syntactic function, some language use affixes. Even before Romans had their five cases (or six including the vocative) that students are familiar with now, there used to be more, including a distinct locative case for indicating location, though this all is still nothing compared to Finnish's fifteen cases. While Latin used the locative case, and English uses certain prepositions like 'to', and 'from', there are a few words where an exception is made. In both languages, the word for 'home' does not act conventionally; it is accusative in Latin and does not take a preposition in English. Nevertheless, in English, it is still considered to be locative because it describes a location where somebody is going to or coming from. People are certainly welcome to disagree; linguistics is not always about facts so much as it is about evidence-based claims that correspond to observation (like any science). It has now been observed, however, that other locatives (or at least what would be locatives) in some dialects of British English drop the prepositions in certain contexts, such as before store-names or other places that are well-established as being names for places. It may sound odd to some, but consider that most of the time, from given context, it should be fairly obvious that some word is locative, especially since there is already a word that everyone agrees can be locative without a preposition.
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1142: Verbs that Resist the Present Tense Jan 24, 2018

To simply say that something is in the present tense is not necessarily especially informative. This is not only because the present tense can be used to express the past tense (including non-past before) and future action—English does not technically have a future tense—but also, there are multiple forms that the present can take. A present tense verb can either be in the simple present of present progressive, and while the simple present tends to refer to habitual action that may or may not be ongoing at the time of the speech-act, verbs that describe an emotional or mental state of being (e.g. 'love', 'hate', 'fear') resist being put into the present progressive, that is to say, "...hate [object]" is far more common that "... (be) hating (an) [object]". It is not impossible to do this, but it will be deliberate; 'I am loving it' might emphasise that the subject used to not love whatever 'it' is, or also could simply draw attention to the statement due to its apparent ungrammaticality, and thereby demonstrate either that the speaker's feeling is stronger than a sense of wishing to maintain grammatical conventions, or otherwise make the statement noteworthy. With that said, hopefully you love Word Facts, and if you are loving it, support Word Facts on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/wordfacts.

1141: Names for African-American English Jan 23, 2018

Most African-Americans use their own dialect of English, which was greatly influenced from Southern American English, and very occasionally West African languages, incorporating unique features that developed naturally over time as well. While linguists have acknowledged this for a long time, the names used to describe the dialect have changed a great deal, not because the dialect changed, but because it has been named misleadingly. Originally, the dialect was called 'Ebonics' but this claimed that it was a language in its own right, and given the usual definition of a dialect as being mutually intelligible with other dialects of the same language, this would suggest that other English speakers would not be able to understand African-Americans, which is of course not true. The dialect has also been called 'Black English', but this could include black people from other English-speaking areas, which would not be accurate. Even the more common 'African-American Vernacular English' (AAVE), while accurate, is a poor choice because all dialects are vernacular, but moreover 'vernacular' connotes ordinary day-to-day language, which is—again—true of all dialects, but suggests that it could not be used for more official or literary purposes. Given that society is changing to be more accepting of the dialect in official settings and schools etc., people now opt for simply 'African-American English' (AAE), which, as a bonus, is quicker to say anyhow.
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1140: Stress-Timing Jan 22, 2018

Certain languages like English, Thai, and Persian have what is called 'stress-timing'. This is the notion that while syllables may differ in length, the perceived amount of time stressing is the same, which is in contrast to syllable-timed languages like French, Welsh, Icelandic, and Mandarin as a form of isochrony wherein syllables are perceived as the same length as each other. These categories are rough and somewhat subjective, lacking definitive empirical evidence, but are widely accepted by many linguists. What this means is that, for example, an utterance like 'bid for peace' in which there are two stressed syllables on either side of an unstressed syllable, the unstressed syllable, in this case 'for' is pronounced for longer than it would were it not between two stressed syllables. Most of the world's languages are classified as stress-timed. You can now support Word Facts on Patreon for new things and to help make the content better: https://www.patreon.com/wordfacts.

1139: "This is a Wug": Experiments in Morphology Jan 21, 2018

Perhaps one of the most famous psycholinguist experiment is Jean Berko's "Wug Test". The experiment was very simple, and you can see it all in the photo attached; it presented children with a picture of a made-up thing called a 'wug', and then asked "there are two of them. There are two ______". It might seem obvious that the answer is 'wugs' (unless somehow someone were to think it were one of only a few strong nouns, making it something like 'wag') but the test showed that children understand the basics of linguistic morphology. Anecdotally, it is easy enough to see children say 'holded' instead of 'held', indicating that they memorize the morphology and not words on an individual basis, but using the invented word 'wug' meant that the children could not have heard the morphological change before taking the test, and therefore would not simply be repeating some adult. The test did not look at how 'wug' could also be made into a verb i.e. 'he wugs' as is possible with nouns in English, but nevertheless demonstrated that people, even children, don't need meaning to have grammatical sentences, which is an important idea in the theory of Universal Grammar. You can now support Word Facts on Patreon for new things and to help make the content better: https://www.patreon.com/wordfacts.

1138: Rate of Language-Change Jan 20, 2018

Today will continue the theme of reconstruction of dead languages, and the rate of language-change from yesterday.

First, it is important to note that while dialects are not distinct languages (usually) dialects will eventually become their own languages, and subtle differences increase. After dialects become languages, they then can have their own branches, and eventually become their own language families. Much like biological evolution, which is not noticeable unless looked at over a large period of time, random linguistic variations only develop over time by luck. However, while its true that the exact nature of the variables are random, and only spread—more or less—because of chance, some linguists have claimed that languages change at a standard rate over time. This was said after looking at the change of Latin into the modern Romance Languages among other examples. This was later criticized, however, because while those examples retain 86% of core vocabulary over every thousand years fairly consistently, other examples do not, such as Icelandic which is virtually unchanged over the last thousand or so years, especially compared to related languages like Danish that dropped case and other things. Moreover, in a few decades Traditional Dyirbal became the unintelligible descendant of Young Dyirbal without becoming a creole, or anything else such as that even. Linguists search for patterns, but due to population shifts, politics and other social considerations, languages are sometimes unpredictable. You can now support Word Facts on Patreon for new things and to help make the content better: https://www.patreon.com/wordfacts.

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.