1217: Done Goofed etc. Apr 9, 2018

Sentences like "the boy done good" may sound not only non-standard but incorrect, but actually in some dialects of English it is acceptable and systematic. Moreover, the same sentence in Standard American English, "the boy did good" would also use the same verb with a follow up "...didn’t he?" when in fact these verbs serve two different purposes. In this sentence 'done' is a lexical verb (a.k.a. 'main verb' or 'full verb') while 'did is an auxiliary verb. Much like how a plural 'you' is considered standard, even though 'y'all' or 'yous' etc. would probably be easier to differentiate and understand, 'done' as a lexical verb is helpful for (in this case) disambiguation. This sort of idea was also explored with the use of 'hisself'.
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1216: Periphrastics: Roundabout Speech Apr 8, 2018

People tend to know when use 'more' and 'most' for the comparative and superlative, and when to use '-er' and '-est', because it relies upon phonetics, but there is some discrepancy. While no native speaker would say 'beautifuler', 'lovelier' and 'more lovely', for example, are both acceptable ways of speaking, even though 'lovelier' is more conventional both historically and linguistically. When a full phrase is used such as 'most happy' or 'more funny', it is referred to as the periphrastic.

The periphrastic refers to anything that, to put it simply, is stated in a phrase when it could be one word. This also happens with verbs, such as 'let's talk' versus 'let's have a talk', or 'he pushed the door' versus 'he gave the door a push', which can be stylistically useful, but does not have any defined linguistic benefits necessarily. These commonly involve 'have', 'do', and 'give', but also 'take'. If you have examples with other words, write it in a comment.

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1215: Name-Variation (John and Elisabeth) Apr 7, 2018

It is not uncommon that older, popular names will have regional variations when given to children over a large area. For instance, the Germanic 'Johan' and 'John' also appears as the Romantic 'Jean', 'Juan', and 'Gianni', the Celtic 'Sean' and 'Iwan', and the Slavic 'Ivan' and even 'Honza', which all ultimately derive from the Hebrew 'Yohanan', relating to the name of G*d. While the phonetic differences among these do have some randomness, they can illuminate the similarities among certain phonemes. With the name 'Elisabeth', which in Scottish is 'Elspeth' or 'Elspet', the difference switching from [b] to [p], or at least 'b' to 'p', it shows how in certain environments—such as following an [s]—the two are more or less identical. Furthermore, [θ] (written as 'th') exists in relatively few languages including English, so it should not be surprising that a Scottish variation includes a [t] instead.

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1214: boychik: Adopted Adopted Words Apr 6, 2018

English has a great deal of borrowed words; not only is nearly 60% of this language's vocabulary of Romantic origin (even if many of those words are restricted for specific fields like law and science), but also because unlike French and other languages, there is no one official body of linguistic regulation. Of course, other languages have plenty of adopted words as well, including lots from English given its global presence. The word 'boychik' (meaning 'young man') stands out among these however because not only is it a loan word in English from Yiddish but also it comes from a loan word in Yiddish from English. The word entered Yiddish from the English word 'boy' and the Slavic suffix '-chik' which is diminutive. Later, 'boychik' entered English as a slang term in Jewish English.

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1213: Before ‘Orange’ Apr 5, 2018

It was mentioned during Color Week how before English had the word ‘orange’ to describe the fruit, there was no word for the color either. This is only half true, so what would have been clearer would have been to say that before this, there was not a unique word for ‘orange’. Up until the word was borrowed ultimately from a Dravidian language via Sanskrit and Old French, people got by by saying the equivalent of ‘yellow-red’: ‘geoluhred’ in Old English. Indeed, ‘orange was only first recorded in the 16^th century (or 13^th century as a reference to the fruit), but clearly people were not partially colorblind until that point. It is a good example of how people will learn to get by regardless of limitation to communicate the same ideas.

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1212: Hebrew's Origins Apr 4, 2018

It is hard to give a year for when any language began. With French for instance, there are certainly periods when there was rapid change between Latin, Vulgar Latin, then Old French and so on, but any linguist would be hard-pressed to give an exact year, let alone a month or even a day. The one exception to this for any natural language is Modern Hebrew, which began on October 13th, 1881, when Eliezer Ben-Yehuda and his friends decided to only speak to each other in Hebrew. up until then, there were over 1,500 years of linguistic inactivity, except in rituals and other special circumstances, in the same as Latin might be thought of today. Ben-Yehuda created the Committee of the Hebrew language, and wrote the first modern dictionary for the language, and often he is credited as the source for revitalization. He realized the importance of a national language for the purposes of solidarity and nationalism (in this case Zionism). This was as a replacement for Yiddish, which was—at the time—assumed to be the language for the future Jewish nation by his contemporary Zionists.

1211: Double Entendre Apr 3, 2018

Language is fraught with ambiguity. Philosophically this is because nothing can ever be fully communicated only verbally, but this is also because there are some words that can be different parts of speech, or words that are only one part of speech, but that have different definitions that can be included in the same contexts. Linguists call this syntactic ambiguity and lexical (or semantic) ambiguity respectively, but most lay folk call it double entendre. For instance, the question, "how did you find that music?" only features 'find' as a verb (though it can also be a noun) but asks two different questions: "how did you discover..." and "what are your feelings toward...". The linguistic pivot, so to speak, comes from lexicon, so for reference, this double entendre is said to be lexically ambiguous. This is also true in "I got to sleep late" which pivots on 'got' where it can mean "I could sleep in" or "it was late when I went to bed", and indeed has two possibly opposite meanings.
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1210: How to Standarize? Apr 2, 2018

Standardiszed languages are conceptual, to be sure, but they are not pulled out of thin air. Often it will be fairly logical how the standardized version comes from various capitals of a nation, such as that for culture, politics, or economy; for example British English comes from Britain's capital (if not for all of those things, then at least for the latter two). With German, the standard version comes not from Berlin, but from Vienna (historically, southern Germany and Austria), because the Habsburgs from Austria used it for commerce. There is a similar situation for Italian, which standarized only very late in the game; before then, every region had its own dialect (at times essentially a language) but a blend of the Florentine (Tuscan) variety became official because of the area's economic significance, certainly, but also because writers like Dante, and many linguists wrote in and recorded this variety, when Italy looked to standardize the language, it was easier to use the variety that had been studied the most.

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Goodbye: An End to Word Facts

APRIL FOOLS

 APRIL FOOLS

APRIL FOOLS

Don't worry, Word Facts will continue indefinitely.

There is an order of adjectives, but also an order of adjuncts. To be clear, anything that is not syntactically necessary for the meaning of a sentences is an adjunct, so adjectives are technically adjuncts too. However, while prepositional phrases can be moved around a bit more easily than adjectives relatively, there are still comparable differences. For instance, adjuncts for physical descriptions have a less close relationship than ones that describe other qualities, so one can say "the student |of linguistics| |with three children|", but not "the student |with three children| |of linguistics|".

1208: Lost Strong Forms (be-) Mar 31, 2018

In Modern German, it is common to see past participles begin with 'ge-' or 'be-' just as '-ed' would be used in English. However, because English is a Germanic language, not only do the German words also end in the very similar '-t', but a number of English participles begin with 'be-' as well. Some strong verbs have morphed over time such that they have lost certain forms, such as 'shave', which retains 'shaven' participially, but also has 'shaved' in the past tense (rather than 'shoove', as it belongs to the same class of verbs as 'take'). This loss is present in the participial forms of other words too; although 'held' from 'hold' is already not a common form for the past tense or participial (it is the same for both), the original participle was 'beholden', as it belongs to the same class as other verbs like 'fall' (befallen).

If you can think of others that still have this, or have lost certain forms over time, please include it as a comment.

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1207: Germanic Strong Verb Classes Mar 20, 2018

There's a lot to say about strong verbs, but one thing that is comes up from time to time is the similarities and differences between them. Most strong verbs are said t be regular, in that hey follow a pattern but clearly 'ride, rode, ridden' is a different system to 'sing, sang, sung'. In fact, in English there are seven systems identified for them. Generally, these differences usually regard either the etymologies or phonology, such as the '-i-, -a-, -u-' (sometimes '-i-, -u-, -u-') mentioned before which come before a nasal consonant, such as is the case with 'sing' and 'swim'. All of the other ones (six out of seven categories) also have the participial form with '-(e)n', like 'freeze, froze, frozen' or 'shake, shook, shaken'. Often, because there is such variety of these systems, they are thought of as not having regularity, but this is not true.

These will be discussed more here in coming days.

Read all of the series that finished yesterday about the perception of colors and language.

1206: Lost in Translation (Color Week: 7) Mar 29, 2018

While it is fairly straightforward to translate English's 'green' to French's 'verde' [1] as words to describe nouns, what is less easy is the words to describe colors. English has words like 'light' and 'dark' which refer to the relative amount of white or black in the mixture; because that is fairly technical, it is often (though not always) easily translated, but other modifiers like 'warm' and 'cool' are harder to pin down exactly. While reds and yellows are easy to identify as warm, and blues are cool, combinations thereof, such as various shades or purples may be more interpretive, debatably. Other languages, such as Hanunó'o have adjectives that translate to 'wet/fresh' and 'dry' to describe colors, that is simply not done in English. Furthermore, there are plenty of colors that are compounded for the effect modification, such as 'forest green'. Sometimes, these cultural differences make direct translation difficult.

Today is the last day of Color Week, thank you!

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1205: Practice with Seeing (Color Week: 6) Mar 28, 2018

Concerning whether or not people can see colors they have no word for, one common and fairly logical idea is that it comes down to training. While certain people like W.H.R. Rivers had ideas that related to evolutionary biology, and thought that cultures with fewer colors were less physically advanced, a less racist response could simply come down to training; people taught to look out for more different colors could just train them selves to see more than otherwise, even if everyone is physiologically the same. This is the same explanation for how people who speak Guugu Yimithirr have an innate sense of cardinal directions. There are some flaws to this idea however. Firstly, it is possibly to see something and not have a single word to describe it, either using approximations or adjectives (such as 'light'), and also plenty of people (including English speakers) use nouns in lieu of colors all the time, such 'rose', 'violet' or 'orange'.  If we include these ones, pretty much everyone will be on the same footing and the Sapirian- or Whorfian-type notions that language determine the way one is able to think are harder—though by no means impossible—to argue.
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1204: Non-Basic Color Categories (Color Week: 5) Mar 27, 2018

Following from yesterday's post about the somewhat arbitrary nature of confirming what hues go along with what basic color categories, it might also lead to the question of why a language would have a term for a red—or any other color—at all. This is not to say that it should be strange that languages develop words for this, but that peoples will associate certain groupings of shades and hues to the same few colors in the first place, across cultures (more or less). Of course, there are also color terms outside of the basic color categories, such as English's 'vermillion', 'scarlet', and 'magenta', but these are not the most general. Indeed, consider being in a paint store where it is possible to see squares with thousands of different colors with all sorts of names such as Benjamin Moore's "Magic Potion" (a sort of violet). However, 'Magic Potion', and moreover even the umbrella term 'violet' can both exist under the umbrella of 'purple'. Indeed, even if someone saw—for physiological reasons—Magic Potion as something more like the similar 'Mauve Desert' (also available from Benjamin Moore) they could both be lumped under 'purple'. No one knows exactly how other's will interpret colors visually, so language has to approximate and generalize, and not every individual's nor every languages color will be identical, even if it translates as something usually the same.
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1203: Color-Groupings across Languages (Color Week: 4) Mar 26, 2018

Though language is one of the best ways we have to communicate, because people cannot convey an entire thought-process ever, there is always some ambiguity of the meaning of signs (words). Many—thousands if not more—shades exist that could be denoted with a basic color categories [2], so for instance, a scarlet may be different from a tan red and both are different to fire-engine red, but all could still generally be called ‘red’. One could ask then: how do people know what to assign ‘red’ to?—and more importantly for our purposes—will this differ from language-to-language?
To answer the first question (without getting into biology, neurology, or much childhood’s language-acquisition), the answer is that assuming, controversially, that people can all see the same way regardless of language, people only have to get used to grouping different shades from trial-and-error when learning language from infancy. The second question is more simple answered: yes. Statistically, for example, the range of what a French ‘verde’ (‘green’) conveys is different to the range of colors understood by English’s ‘green’. People are not limited or enhanced by speaking French in this case, so much as translations are not exactly 1-to-1, simply due to cultural norms.

1202: Russian Blues (Color Week: 3) Mar 25, 2018

Russians blues are quite famous among cat-lovers and (some) linguists, but for a very different reason. Russian has two basic color categories for what would both in English only be 'blue', which fascinates (some) linguists. The word 'siniy' (синий) roughly translates to the English for 'blue', but the word 'goluboy' (голубой) translates to 'light blue'. Of course, this is expressible in English, and also there will be some variation from speaker-to-speaker about what is considered which in the same way as there may be variation about how to consider any transitional color like vermillion, but some research, such as that of Jonathan Winawer, has suggested that Russian speakers are marginally faster at detecting distinctions of blues compared to English speakers. The reaction-times for seeing blues of both Russians and English-speakers evened out, however, when they were given more tasks. The experiment had a small sample-size and only looked at bilingual Russian speakers too, which was the exact reason that people criticized the perhaps-revolutionary research of Berlin and Kay, which popularized the study of colors as they relate to language, though the study has existed for some time. Winawer's research is quite popular among a general audience generally but many linguists and anthropologists are skeptical.
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1201: Nominal Color-Replacement (Color Week: 2) Mar 24, 2018

It was discussed in the first post of Color Week that blue is usually the last color to receive a basic color category, but it is not as simple as that. This should be clarified to mean that it is introduced consistently late, because it is very common for words for browns, oranges, and grays to come later, or before, so there is some variation to that. Often, this is because until then, speakers of a language with fewer basic color categories will use nouns or some other adjectives to fill in for those such words; it is very common for words equivalent to 'water' or 'sky' to fill the gap of 'blue', or certain flowers for other colors etc. in the same way that English speakers might describe scents by their relation to other scents, becasue there are few basic terms for scents in English. Even English's 'red'—the only color for which a Proto-Indo-European root is found—is derived etymologically from words meaning 'earth' and 'clay'. Moreover, the words for 'orange' and 'gold'—the colors—are still very obviously from 'orange' and 'gold'—the fruit and metal—the former of which English only adopted several centuries ago. This, and the fact that some languages have a spectrum not of light-and-dark but of wet-and-dry colors begins to show that people will still be able to communicate easily enough without certain terms. The effect of this, however, will be discussed tomorrow with regard to the blues in Russian.

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1200: Basic Color Categories (Color Week: 1) Mar 23, 2018

This is the first post of Color Week to celebrate the 1,200th post! Thank you for your support and please share.
The term "basic color category" is used to denote a word that acts as an umbrella term for a specific group of colors, such as 'red', 'yellow' and 'green', which encompass many different shades and hues. It is rare that a language would have more than about a dozen of these—English has 11 and Russian has 12 (which will be discussed during this week)—but some languages only have 2 or 3. With those languages with only a few basic color categories, the categories will almost always fall into 'light', 'dark' and then next will be 'red'. In fact, there is a noticeable trend to the order in which a language will gain each category with 'red' being the first and 'blue' usually being the last. An early explanation of this was that people could not see the color blue as thoroughly without a word for it, and peoples such as even the Ancient Greeks would only be detecting greens and other similar colors beforehand. If this were true, it would support the idea that language has an effect on the relationship between neurology and physiology. However, recently people have also noted that blues are less common in nature, and do not act as natural warnings in the same way that plants and animals flaunt reds as meaning 'dangerous', so there would have been less of a need for this practically, but not a lack in the actual vision. Both of these ideas will be challenged and supported on the blog over the next 6 days.
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1199: Suffix Verbs (Turkish Copula) Mar 22, 2018

Some ideas can be conveyed without a verb, and examples of this often relate to copula verbs (i.e. verbs that connect other words, such as 'to be'). African American English and Latin both regularly omit them in general, and some languages like Russian and Hungarian omit them in specific contexts (in this case it is with the third person) but there are more than the two options to either have the verb present or omit it. In Turkish, which is a highly agglutinative language, the copula is included not as a verb in its own right but as a suffix, even though it is still meaningful. One of the ways that this is relevant is that Turkish has vowel-harmony meaning that the vowels of a affix change depending upon the vowels of the stem, and this happens for the copula in Turkish. Also, other verbs including Turkish's negative copula can take suffixes, but the positive copula cannot, even though it carries essentially the same meaning. It is possibly the only irregular verb in Turkish, and for non-Turkish speakers may be the first encounter with suffix-verbs.
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1198: Defective Verbs pt. 4 (Classic Greek) Mar 21, 2018

This is the fourth and final post in the short series about defective verbs. While just about any language will have defective verbs, due to random change over long periods of time, Classical Greek only has defective verbs, which is to say that no verb can be used for all nine persons (in addition to singular and plural, Greek has a dual number for pairs of objects). This is not to say that it is impossible to express certain things because certain verbs only happen to conjugate for certain persons—anything can be communicated in any language, even if the means are different. Either verbs will not have a form for certain numbers like duals or not exist in certain tenses for semantic reasons, or otherwise, one verb will be used in certain contexts, and another will be used in others to communicate the same meaning.

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