1157: Hisself is More Consistent Feb 8, 2018

Every dialect will have its own rules and its own exceptions thereto, so even in a dialect that is considered "standard" so to speak, it does not mean that it necessarily the most consistent. For instance, in Standard American English and British English, and others, reflexive pronouns are usually formed by the genitive [possessive] form of the personal pronoun + 'self'. For instance 'you' --> 'your' --> 'yourself', as well as 'I' --> 'my' --> 'myself. This is because it was originally two words, but the determiner phrase eventually came to be thought of as a single term. There are two exceptions to this: the 3rd person singular masculine ('himself') and the 3rd person plural ('themselves'). However, in African American English (AAE), the pattern of using the genitive form + 'self' is maintained. This is most obviously seen in 'hisself', which is a standard variant of 'himself', but 'theyselves' is also consistent with the pattern. The reason for this is that in AAE 'they' is also possessive as well as being nominative. For a long time AAE was thought of as lazy and simply ungrammatical English, but in this case it is even more consistent with certain rules.

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1156: (Possible) Sexist Animosity of Vocal Fry Feb 7, 2018

Creaky voice, vocal fry, sometimes called laryngealisation, pulse phonation, or glottal fry may sound horse and scratchy to some when it is extremely pronounced, but it is totally normal to use, and jut about everyone does. There is a video from Johns Hopkins University showing how this sounds looks physiologically, but warning: it shows someone's throat, and is fairly graphic. Some people criticize it for sounding lazy, detached, or for being bad for people's voices, etc. but to understand this animosity one has to keep in mind that it is "increasingly common among young American females" [1], and furthermore, not only do people associate it with young, educated, city-dwelling women, but that is makes people (women) sound "less competent, less educated, less trustworthy, less attractive, and less hirable" [1]. The confusion that vocal fry is associated with educated women but gives the impression of being less-educated, well noted by linguists, shows the way in which people hold opinions about pronunciation and dialects without necessarily basing them upon evidence. Ultimately, the dislike of vocal fry is one that goes beyond the language itself, and is an example of how language is sometimes tied to culture—or people, generally—whether it makes sense to do so or not. This will be the focus of a video in the next few weeks, so do include any thoughts or questions you may have in a comment.

[1] https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0097506

1155: Danger of Death Feb 6, 2018

It can be tricky to get people to talk right away, especially within formal settings. Indeed, the idea of "small talk" describes a common sense that such speech is not especially relevant or important, but may be felt as necessary anyway. However, people in an ordinary conversation have as much or as little time as they want, at least in theory, but meanwhile researchers may need to collect data in a setting that is fairly formal and perhaps intimidating (to the participant), so the concern is that the speech will not be as authentic as it ought to be to do proper scientific analysis. Regarded as the father of sociolinguistics, William Labov came up with a solution to this, with the notion that “danger of death” (as a question) elicits a thorough response. The question would be something such as "have you ever been in a situation in which you were in serious danger of being killed?". Clearly, this is a very bold question, and evidently not only was it effective enough to be used relatively frequently, but that got participants to focus more on the question than on being overly careful with their language-use, though some people have criticized the fact that it can also make people nervous, on the spot, and could also prevent people from talking as much as they would otherwise. Ultimately, there is no right answer to the question of how to ask questions.
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1154: Small Clauses and Tense Feb 5, 2018

Something that everyone who speaks English (and German, and many many other languages) knows subconsciously is that the verb only needs to be marked for tense and number etc. once. Usually this is once per clause, such as 'he has seen' or '...had seen' rather than '...has sees'. This is also true when one verb, such as 'need', takes another, such as in 'he needs her to explain' which has 'to explain' in the infinitive form. When there is another clause, then the verb will also be conjugated, such as what follows 'what' in "he needs her to explain what she needs". The reason however, that one cannot say that there will be one verb marked for conjugation for every clause precisely is that so called 'small clauses' contain unmodified verbs. If you were to say "I find these inconsistencies to be confusing", the phrase "these inconsistencies to be confusing" is a small clause, because of the type of verb it follows. To be clear, this is not to say that they have no tense, but just that it is not marked, and that meaning is then dependent upon the main verb.
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1153: Passival Pt. 2 (Semantics) Feb 4, 2018

Verbs in English are either active or passive, but occasionally there is a third option, because people are surprisingly good at making sense of gaps between grammar and meaning that don't always match apparently. What is sometimes know as the passival is a form of the middle voice which is passive in meaning but active in form, such as the awkward sounding 'the food is eating' (i.e. 'being eaten'), but also appear more colloquially, such as in "this book reads well". This is different than "this child reads well" because of course children have eyes and brains with which to read, while books do not. What makes this voice a middle voice is that the action is done by the recipient of said action—which is totally fine as either active or passive e.g. 'he shaved himself' an theoretically 'he was shaved by himself' respectively—but sentences in this form of the middle voice, such as also "the window breaks", is not something that can actually happen given the meaning of the words, even when the sentences are absolutely grammatical.
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1152: Marvin Gaye is a Verb Feb 3, 2018

The line “let’s Marvin Gaye and get it on” from the song 'Marvin Gaye' uses the name of said artist as a verb, which is fairly obvious, but more specifically the lyrics use it as one word. It can easily be thought of as two words given that it uses both two parts of someone’s given name, which can often be thought of as two elements, but the grammar shows otherwise. In the term ‘store-owner’ as opposed to ‘storage’, while both are single words coming somehow from ‘store’, the ‘-age’ of ‘storage’ (here not referring to the noun ‘age’) cannot function as its own word, whereas both ‘store’ an ‘owner’ can function independently of each other. Here, Marvin Gaye is also not a compound, but to be clear, that is not to say that ‘Marvin’ or ‘Gaye’ cannot exist on their own as verbs theoretically even, but because this example is using his name quite inventively, only it has semantic meaning that could allow for the syntax to do what it does.

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Due to technical setbacks, yesterday's post was only uploaded now. Today's will be on schedule.

1151: Few Words for Smells Feb 2, 2018

There are a number of adjectives that can be used to describe how something looks, or feels. Of course, it is sometimes easier to observe what else something is like e.g. "this brick feels like a rock", but using words like colors or others like 'pale' for vision and other words like 'hard', 'soft' rough' etc. there are plenty of ways to describe the way something appears or feels using these more abstract adjectives. This is also true of tastes and sounds, for example with 'sweet' and 'savoury' or 'loud' and 'quiet'. Certainly there is also some crossover because of how people can assume that one sense would not contradict another, so something can look smooth because it is assumed to feel smooth. None of this information should be surprising to an English speaker, but when it comes to scents there is a certain lack of adjectives. Bad smells are comparatively easy to describe with words like 'stinky' and 'putrid', and people can say something has a 'strong' or 'putrid' smell, but most of the time people need to rely upon relating smells to other things. One's sense of smell is comparatively the weakest of all of these five, and mattered little unless something might have smelled as if it would be unhealthy to consume or otherwise be near, so people were not as inclined to make new adjectives, but there certainly is the potential for it. Languages that don't have words for certain colors also sometimes relate it to other things, such as relating something that could be called 'blue' to the sky.
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1150: How Large was Shakespeare's Vocabulary? Feb 1, 2018

Following yesterday's post about Shakespeare, another possible misconception about the vocabulary he used was in the number of distinct words he used in total. The number is 24,000-28,000, though the exact number is tough to gauge especially with ordinary compounding [2], but also that he would quote things from foreign languages verbatim sometimes. This has been suggested to mean that he knew around 100,000 words, which is certainly quite impressive. Nevertheless, this also has to take into account the vast amount of words that he used in the first place; between sonnets, full plays and everything else that he wrote, there is no doubt that he was prolific, but when compared to other works by the total number of words used therein, according to Matt Daniels' statistics, the first 35,000 words of Moby Dick has more distinct words than all of Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Othello, Macbeth, As You Like It, Winter's Tale, and Troilus and Cressida. Moreover, that same study compared Shakespeare to modern rappers, and using the same, first 35,000 word mark, a few artists including Aesop Rock used more than those writers in his songs. Shakespeare's language and was certainly impressive, but he is not necessarily as revolutionary as people can make him out to be.

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1149: Did Shakespeare Really Invent 1,700 Words? Jan 31, 2018

Shakespeare certainly had an effect on the way that people use and consider English. He wrote at a time of rapid change within the language—sounds were shifting and vocabulary changed with it—with the result being Modern English, so if he wrote much earlier or later, his contribution would likely be less noticeable. Nevertheless, no matter how much he did or did not do, the number of words that he created is often stated in a way that is misleading. Shakespeare certainly coined many words, but considering the notion that he invented around 1,700 words that are still fairly common, this is not exactly in the same way as Sir Thomas More invented 'Utopia' or how Paracelsus possibly invented 'gnome', because Shakespeare is said to have invented words often by simply adding affixes to words where there hadn't been ones before—which only includes ones that were not found to be written before—or using some parts of speech in a way that was not typical e.g. using what would be a noun as a verb. This is how a word like 'circumstantial' can be linked to Shakespeare when at most he added '-al' in the way it would normally be applied. This is not to say he did not have a lasting impact or an impressive legacy, but that the issue is more nuanced than imagining that The Bard pulled 1,700 words out of thin air which all happened to catch on among the public in a way that no one could have used before him.

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1148: Omitting 'That' Jan 30, 2018

English tends to be fairly flexible about word-order, but in terms of clauses that begin with 'that', it is often acceptable to omit it entirely. For example, in the sentence "Jane saw (that) Jim left", the word 'that' is optional. This is not to say that the grammar lends itself to only being optional, but that is the case with indirect perception, as seen before. Nevertheless, in the sentence, "Jane saw Jim leave", which is direct perception instead, the phrase cannot take 'that'. Sometimes, the reason for omitting 'that' is because it is also used as a demonstrative adjective and demonstrative pronoun, and so there are possible sentences like "that dog that that man had..." which gets rather clunky, though often 'that' can be replaced by 'the' or 'it', depending on the context.

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1147: How Dolphin Could have been 'Sea-Pig' Jan 29, 2018

As has been discussed before, the Old English for 'dolphin'—'mereswīn' meaning 'sea-pig'—may sound silly now, but as a compound probably makes more sense than the Greek word that entered the language via French which we use today, since it does not relate to anything else most people would know or be able to associate to the word. Compounds reduce the amount of words have to memorize and allow people to relate it to other words more easily, however, compounding is far more common in Germanic languages than it is in Romance languages. However, not only is it possible to compound in Romance languages, it was theoretically plausible that 'dolphin' could have been a compound. The word 'porpoise' comes from the Old French 'porpois' but is ultimately based on a Latin phrase 'porcus marinus' meaning ‘sea hog’. In this way, essentially the same compound arose in two different languages, but 'dolphin' nevertheless persisted. 

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1146: Dialect Continua Jan 28, 2018

Languages usually exist along a dialect continuum which eventually forms the language family. This is to say that moving town-to-town, each dialect will be mutually intelligible with the next, but two given dialects that are used far enough apart will no longer be mutually intelligible. Looking to standardised languages, this is not so easily see; Spanish is not apparently like French which is not apparently like Italian, but looking at regional dialects of these languages, there is not always as clear differentiation. If you are interested in exploring this further, look into Occitan for example, which is a minority language [dialect] spoken by few now, but it looks—to use non-linguistic terms—a bit like a Spanish-y French. This is also clear when looking at certain words from English, Dutch and German. Looking at 'that' and the German 'dass' for instance, there is some small similarity, but not much. However, factor in the Dutch 'dat' and the link becomes clearer. Furthermore Kölsch (the German dialect from Cologne), spoken very near the Netherlands can replace terminal [s] with [t] such as 'das' for 'dat' or 'wat' for 'was' which translates to, incidentally, 'what'. If you know other examples from other dialect continua, feel free to leave it in a comment.

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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.