1177: Word Families Feb 28, 2018

People may be fairly familiar with the concept of a language-family, as it shows many of the relationships that languages have to each other. Nevertheless, it is not the only type of family that linguists are concerned with, such as also word-families. Much like how Spanish, French, Portuguese, Italian, and Romanian etc. are all considered Romance languages becasue they derive from Latin, many words for relating to 'nose' now, including 'snout', 'snot', 'sneeze' etc comes from the Proto-Indo-European 'snu', making it a word family. These do not have to come from extinct sources however, and in Kalaallisut for example, there are many words that come from 'oqaq' ('tongue') that all still relate to it somehow, such as 'oqarpoq' ('says'), 'oqaaseq' ('word'), 'oqaluppoq' ('speaks'), 'oqaasilerisoq' ('linguist'), as well as some more complicated ones, such as 'oqaatiginerluppaa' which means 'speak badly about him'. Indeed, this style of derivation is quite common in Inuit-Yupik languages, and it contributes to the existence of stereotypically long words, because even long complex ideas expressed in a single word often come from one of not too many roots.  If you can think of any word-families, include some examples in a comment.
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1176: Exception to Duality of Patterning Feb 27, 2018

Imagine a language where every word had a unique sound: no compounds, no affixes, and no phonemes. Even in terms of logistics, that is hard to picture, because there are thousands of words, and each would need its own completely different sound, eventually probably relying on snorts, sniffs, and knocks. This idea is called the "duality of patterning" and as logical as it is, it is not true of all languages, as it only takes one language to break the rule. While it can be said to be true of all known spoken languages, Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language (ABSL) is a language forming within a community with large rates of deafness in Israel. It has been assessed that the language uses gestures exist independently. Most [all other] sign languages rely on combinations of other smaller gestures to convey what can be thought of as words; indeed in this way other sign languages have morphology, and can therefore be assessed on a sub-word level in the same way as spoken languages. What this means, in addition to being an exception to what was assumed a necessary part of language, it that the users of ABSL must know an enormous amount of gestures.
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1175: Adjunct-Order Feb 26, 2018

Much like there is an order to how adjectives are used based upon what they connote—e.g. size comes before shape—there is an order to adjuncts in certain languages as well. This is somewhat more complicated since adjectives that do not indicate case tend to be fixed to the noun, but adjuncts are not as fixed. It is why in English, one can say
"yesterday, I helped the rude customer" or
"I helped the rude customer yesterday"
but the 'rude' cannot be moved throughout the sentence. Nevertheless, in some languages like German, and to a lesser extent English, will arrange their adjuncts by what they mean. In German, the order is: time, cause, mood, and location; these can be thought to answer the questions "When? Why? How? Where?". All of this, however, for German adjuncts or English adjectives alike can be subverted if the speaker is attempting to emphasize one element or another. This is true of many things, because the more abnormal something appears, the more focus it will get; this extra attention is also true of whatever is at the beginning of a statement.
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1174: Duality of Patterning Feb 25, 2018

As was mentioned in the discussion of semiotics, human language is arbitrary; there is no reason that the arrangements of sounds that make up each word should be the ones they are, even if a few of them are imitative. However, not only is it impressive that people know and repeat the precise arrangements of sounds as they do, but spoken languages also rely on building words out of smaller parts. These smaller parts can be as large as elements and affixes, or as small as phonemes and sounds generally, but this means that each word will not have its own unique sound. It is theoretically possible to have assign each word as a different sort of sound, such as a snort for 'dog', a sniff for 'cat', a squeal for 'fish' and so on, but this is not the case. This is called the duality of patterning, and it means not only can people use alphabets for their languages, but also that people can build large phonetic systems for language.

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1173: Topic Prominence Feb 24, 2018

In English, it is common for the subject to be the first part of a sentence, whether or not the clause is active or passive. There are ways to avoid this however, depending upon the circumstance, including beginning with an adjunct, such as  with "in English" at the beginning of this paragraph. Some languages, such as Japanese and Korean, place less emphasis on the subject than English—a subject prominent language—does, and instead have topic-prominence. In these languages, rather than always differentiating between the subject and the object, speakers can also differentiate between the topic—what is being talked about—and the comment—what is being said about the topic. In English, the subject is understood to be the topic naturally, which is why the passive voice in necessary for an inversion of the object, but topic-prominent languages don't need a passive necessarily. The effect of topic-prominence is still present in English to an extent; the invented sentence "oranges: he like to eat them" may sound odd out of context, but it is perfectly grammatical. Furthermore, this style of sentence-organization is quite popular in advertising.
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1172: Ethnolects Feb 23, 2018

Some dialects are considered ethnolects, meaning that the variety of the language is differentiated by ethnicity rather than by region. Examples of this include African-American English (AAE),  Chicano English, Jewish English, Multicultural London English (MLE) (which is also technically regional) etc. given that the dialect is associated with a people who may not all live in one area, but who all speak the same way. In all of these examples however, there is influence from other regional languages and dialects; Chicano is heavily influenced by Californian English and Mexican Spanish, AAE is influenced by Southern American English and certain West African languages, Jewish English is influenced by Yiddish and Hebrew, and so on. This is often the case with ethnolects, which are sometimes based around migration, or alternatively they act as a sort of creole such as with MLE, but this is not necessarily true; there are certain speech patterns and lexicon often associated with gay men for example, but this is due to the fact that language is also always used as a tool for identification within a group, creating a sense of unity for the in-group, and a sense of distance from an out-group.
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1171: Terms of Venery Feb 22, 2018

Names for groups of animals such as 'murder of crows', 'pod of whales', or 'tower of giraffes' are called 'terms of venery'; as the name suggests, they were originally when hunting (compare with 'venison'). Many of the names may sound silly to people now, and not unreasonably; there is no reason to memorize all of them, so in practical use people will opt for 'herd' or 'group' rather than saying other specific words, with a few exceptions for more common animals. It may seem that this is because we have less of a need to discuss animals nowadays, as few people need to hunt and farm than in the past, but before the 11th century, and in some ways even before the 14th century, nobody used terms of venery much anyway either. Considering that there would not have developed a hunting culture around, for instance, wombats (for whom a group is a 'wisdom') in England and France where these terms began, it should be reasonable that these terms developed more as a fashion and less as practical terminology. Indeed, terms of venery were only supposed to be as a linguistic mark of higher status originally, but after several books in the 15th and 16th centuries were published with these names, people kept making them up for fun, as people continue to do now.

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1170: Coordination Feb 21, 2018

Although children are taught what parts of speech are, they likely identify them intuitively, in the same as a kid would for syllables. There are tests for them, however, that syntacticians can use to prove that a word or phrase actually is one lexical class or another. One such test is called 'coordination', in which one looks at a word or phrase, guessing the part of speech thereof, and than adds another example with "and...", so for example, to determine that 'apples' is a noun phrase in 'I ate apples', one could add another noun phrase, as in 'I ate apples and pears'. This test works, however, because English already allows speakers to not have to repeat obvious elements, or otherwise the previous example-sentence would be the very clunky 'I ate apples and I ate pears', and indeed coordination is quite common in speech anyway. Considering regular speech does show, some phrases cannot be coordinated together, such as with adjuncts and arguments. This can be seen in the ungrammaticality of *"I ate the apple and with a fork", while one can say "I ate with a knife and (with a) fork".

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1169: Cornish: Dead or Alive Feb 19, 2018

Cornish is somewhat like the Schrödinger's cat of languages, as it can be considered dead, but also living. This is because usually it is easy enough to say that a language like Ancient Egyptian is dead because there are no native speakers, and scholars didn't even know how to interpret much of it before the discovery of the Rosetta Stone. Oppositely, English is obviously a living language, and hundreds of millions if not billions of people use it daily, many of whom can only speak English. Cornish, like many other languages, only has bilingual speakers using it, and moreover, it is not a daily part of most of those speaker's lives. None of this is rare for languages, so what separates it is that it was revived; the last native speaker died in the 18th century, and then due to efforts in revitalization for cultural purposes, a couple hundred people learned the language recently. Hebrew has shown the word that it is possible to bring back a language from its status as dead, but students and scholars also know Latin, which does not make it a living language because it is not used natively, or habitually. Ultimately, Cornish is considered a living Celtic language, but given that it had already died, and does not have a body of native speakers, it can also be argued that it is dead. What are your thoughts?
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1168: antisemitic Feb 19, 2018

While the concept of antisemitism has been around at least a couple thousand years, the term 'antisemitism' has only been around for about 140. Before then, at least in Germany, the popular term was 'Jew-hatred' („Judenhass“) but to sound more scientific and more euphemistic, Wilhelm Marr coined the term in the late 1870's. Originally, he used the term „Semitismus“ as a synonym for 'Jewish spirit' („Judenthums“), but a few years later published an antisemitic pamphlet using the word we have today: „Antisemitismus“. It quickly became so popular that within the year it was used for the name of the League of Antisemites. It is for this reason—that the term was created almost as propaganda so that bigots would sound more official and the word sounded less direct—that 'antisemitism' does not also describe hatred of all Semitic groups, including Arabs, Assyrians or Amharas. This is also not the first time that Germans have used words to describe many people—mostly Middle Eastern—and applied it to only one, as was also the case with 'Aryan'.

1167: Writing Systems: An Overview Feb 18, 2018

There are many different writing systems from all over the world, used with varying frequency, but not all of these are alphabets. The most obvious example of this may be with pictographic and logographic writing systems (symbols that represent words but aren't images thereof), which aren't alphabets because little to no attempt needs to be made to convey the way that the word sounds. This is why Cantonese and Mandarin (are not mutually intelligible when spoken always, but are written in much the same way. However the list goes on, for instance with abjads, such as for Arabic, Hebrew, and also Tifinagh, Syriac, and ancient Phoenician for which consonants are represented, but not necessarily vowels; Greek and by extension Latin and Cyrillic alphabets are essentially Phoenician but written left-to-right and with the addition of vowels. There are also syllabaries—where a syllable is represented but not the individual sounds—such as for Cherokee or Katakana Japanese. Finally, there are abugidas, which represent consonant-vowel segments; this gives the vowel more prevalence than in an abjad, but not equal status to consonants, such as in an alphabet. Of course, some languages are more suited for certain writing-systems than others, which is why Inuit words look so long written in the Latin script, and but why the Cree abugida (used for some Inuit-Yupik languages) could not be used for Georgian, with its long consonant-clusters.

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1166: Contractions: One or Two Words? Feb 17, 2018

If you listen to some speaking a completely foreign language, you won’t hear pauses between words. Some languages make this easier than others to decipher, such as Estonian, which always has stress on the first syllable of a word (though the idea of what a word is has no major consensus). This lack of division is made even more apparent when looking at words that together influence the pronunciation, for instance ‘in’ is pronounced [ɪn] usually, but before certain sounds, like [p], it becomes [ɪm] (2). Considering that there is no actual space between words when spoken, and that words can still influence the way other words are pronounced, there is not really any reason that contractions, or arguably words like ‘another’, should be considered one word. “ ‘Tis” and “isn’t”, or more extremely even, “won’t” are considered to be one word, but act grammatically as two. Moreover, most of the time, at least one element of the contraction is usually unchanged at all. To be clear, there is nothing wrong with writing these together—the International Phonetic Alphabet just writes all words together anyway—but it can give people a skewed view of grammar, and word-count less importantly.

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1165: Zero-Markers Feb 16, 2018

There are affixes that indicate grammatical function without carrying meaning themselves necessarily, such as '-tion' which makes verbs into nouns, or '-S' which pluralized or indicated the 3rd person singular tense for verbs. There are also free words that have a similar role, such as 'will' indicating future time (not future tense, technically). While some of those were affixes and some are words, all of those are considered 'markers', and markers can show many different things. There are, as shown before, tense markers for instance, but just like how there are "zero-determiners" which do not exist in speech or writing but whose apparent absence still means something, the lack of a '-ed' or '-s' on a verb does not mean that it lacks tense, and indeed people know only because of the lack of an apparent marker that 'I walk' is not in the past tense. These zero-markers of course still mark things, but less intuitively. Some languages like English, or moreover Chinese will use zero-markers more than languages like Latin or Finnish where meaning is comparatively more dependent on affixes.
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1164: Double U; Double Approximate Feb 15, 2018

What sound does W make? Even the more scientific question: "what sound does [w] or [ʍ] make?" may appear rather pedantic or even silly, but it actually lends itself to phonological and orthographic insights. First off, the question is a bit of a trick; while any native speakers of English would be able to pronounce the phoneme, it is considered a doubly articulated consonant. That is to say, while other sounds are pronounced in one part of the vocal tract, such as [b] being produced by a closure of the lips, [w] is produced by  at the lips, just like [b], but is also velar, such as [k], but it is not exactly like either. Other languages have dealt with this in a few ways. For instance, 'west' in French is 'ouest'; the French doesn't use [w] the same way of course, but it does show how a clearly closely related word has been recognized to be pronounced with a closure (or at least partial closure) of the lips, which happens when the lips round to pronounce [o] and then the way the tongue moves back to pronounce [u], or indeed other velar sounds like [k]. The fact that it is called "double-U" is quite fitting therefore, since while it is not the same as actually having two U's in terms of pronunciation, at least it coincidentally acknowledges that there are two ways this is pronounced at the same time.
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1163: Sentences without Syntax Feb 14, 2018

A subject will be nominal (specifically, a determiner-phrase), but that doesn't meant that every pronoun, noun etc. will be a subject. Semantics relates a great deal to the way  that people can construct sentences, in part due to things like this. The sentences "the man saw the dog" and "the dog saw the man" are both fine, and no one would argue against the validity of "the woman eats the carrot" but that cannot be reversed to become "the carrot eats the woman" in the same way. Opposite to Chomsky's famous "colorless green ideas sleep furiously" which is syntactically acceptable but semantically meaningless, the existence—but lack of acceptably—of "the carrot eats the woman" means that regardless of word-order, or declension (theoretically, English doesn't use it) there is only one possible meaningful utterance here, so the sentence can exist without needing a syntactic structure. It is therefore possible that a language could allow for speakers to invert this specific word-order (assuming there is no case-system) howsoever they choose in these situations where carrots cannot logically eat people. This already sometimes happens in sentences like "the book reads quickly".

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1162: Syllable Structures Feb 13, 2018

When phoneticians describe the arrangements of consonants and vowels, in a syllable, they will often just denote them with C and V respectively, so 'cat' would be CVC, and 'strengths' [stɹɛŋθs] would be CCCVCCC. This is useful for talking about the differences between English and Hawai'ian, where there are no consonant clusters, and all syllables will be CV, V, or VC, but not useful for explaining why [vdgihlp]—which is also CCCVCCC—can't be an English word. Though admittedly that was an extreme example, there are plenty of languages, famously Slavic and Caucasus languages that allow many more; Kartvelian regularly contains clusters of 6-consonant, and contains words like /ɡvbrdɣvnis/ with 8 or more, in this case CCCCCCCCVC. Nevertheless, no matter how long strings of consonants can be in a language, there will be constraints on the arrangement thereof. Even normal pairs of consonants, like [sl] at the beginning of English syllables (e.g. 'slip') cannot be reversed as [ls] as a syllable's onset (i.e. 'lsip').

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1161: X-Bar Assumptions Feb 12, 2018

Syntacticians sometimes have to make certain claims about how language must be logically, even if it doesn't appear that way necessarily, in order to maintain certain theories. This is not prescriptive as such, because these linguists are still describing how people actually talk, but simply have to come up with certain reasons of how things must be. For instance, "a subject must be a determiner phrase", i.e made up of at least a determiner (like 'the', 'a' or 'some') and a noun. Nevertheless, plenty of subjects do not have such elements, such as with given-names, or when there is zero-determiner, also called a silent determiner. In English, a silent determiner regularly appears when the subject is indefinite and plural, e.g. '[determiner] men are from Mars", as opposed "the men....", which changes the meaning. Why not just say that subjects (and many other things like this) don't need to have a determiner, and instead claim that they have a determiner that happens to be silent? Consider that most present tense forms of verbs are not modified at all; if a verb 'run' is put in the first person present "I/we run", this does not mean that the verb doesn't have tense in this case, but does when it becomes "he runs"; instead, both are present tense, but 'I run' has a zero tense-marker. The logic of the theory (X-bar theory it's called), is still supported by a great deal of syntactic and neurolinguistic evidence, even though certain assumptions have to be made about how humans think. 

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1160: Condensing Expressions Feb 11, 2018

People are very good at figuring out what implied information should be. Simply put, this is how people can understand pronouns and other things like that. It also means that people can leave off the end of sentences, e.g

Speaker 1: "Can you meet your deadline?"

Speaker 2: "I will try" [and finish meet the deadline]

When this happens often enough to the same clauses, then the rest can easily exist on its own. Expressions like "put 2 and 2 together to make 4" are regularly abbreviated to "put 2 and 2 together". All of this is done in an effort to save time, and to sound less clunky when stating something which is probably obvious. Not to be confused however, other expressions feature bits of words or phrases that already carry connotations, such as 'bright' in "not the brightest crayon in the box" or 'sharp' in "not the sharpest tool in the shed". This also happened with 'cute'.

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1159: Adjective-Noun Compounds Feb 10, 2018

Usually when people think of compounds in English, people thing of words composed of two nominal elements ('noun-noun'), or occasionally two verbal elements in the same fashion, but sometimes it is different. For instance, the nominal form of 'slow' is 'sloth', but the term for the pot that stews things over many hours is not a 'sloth-cooker' but a 'slow-cooker'; indeed, a 'sloth-cooker' would mean something very different entirely: culinarily savoury, but ethically unsavoury. What makes 'slow' here different than an ordinary adjective is that it does not describe the 'cooker' so much as it becomes a new one. As extra proof, consider that 'slow' can't be removed while retaining the core meaning, but it can be modified in ways that would otherwise be impossible semantically, as in 'fast slow-cooker', and also the stressing of the word is different than it would be with 'slow cooker'. This is also true of other words like 'sweet-meats', which unlike meat with sugar added (i.e. 'sweet meat') is a specific product. Feel free to add your own examples in the comments.
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1158: Semiotics and 'Virtù' Feb 9, 2018

Part of the reason that translation can be so difficult is that translating something word-for-word does not work. Not only does this attempt fail for idiomatic phrases, which is the most obvious example, but also, since one word can have multiple connotations in one language but not another, sometimes executive decisions about cultural importance or semantics have to be made. In Machiavelli's "The Prince" for instance, the word 'virtù' describes the quality that a good leader should have, but can be translated easily a few dozen ways, including as 'virtue', 'strength' and 'power', but also 'cunning' etc. The reason that there is not a one-to-one correspondence across languages is partly cultural, but at its core it is because all language is arbitrary; there is no more sense in calling pig-meat 'pork', than there is to say 'schweinefleisch', which is why they both mean the same thing in different languages. This observation is key in semiotics, which is the topic for the most recent Word Facts Video, out today: https://youtu.be/ETRNxrPVDvI