1225: Stative versus Dynamic 'be' Apr 17, 2018

There are many forms of the verb 'to be', but there are just about as many uses too, including the equatorial 'be',  the 'be' for locative predications, the habitual 'be' to name a few, but none of those relate to psychology as much as the dynamic (and its opposite: stative) 'be'. Of the latter two, both of them relate to predicate adjectives, but in different ways. The dynamic 'be' is used for adjectives that can—semantically—be thought of as impermanent qualities, such as 'humorous', 'sarcastic', or 'angry', whereas stative adjectives describe (you guessed it) the state of something, such as 'tall', 'stone' or, debatably, 'intelligent'. In both cases, the sentence can be phrased as "subject is (adjective)" as in 'the comedian is funny' or 'the statue is stone', like any other predicate adjective. The difference however, is that while one can say "he is being funny", one cannot say "the statue is being stone", or arguably "she is being intelligent"*. How this relates to psychology, perhaps, is that some will emphasize the difference between "I am angry", and "I have anger", claiming that the former—even though it is technically dynamic—gives the speaker the sense that it is stative, and puts people into a state of ascribing qualities to themselves that are temporary. This is highly debated as well, so please write down your own thoughts
*I could not find any strong examples, but if you have any thoughts—or better yet, examples—I'd love to hear them.

1224: Most Writing-Systems come from 1 Source Apr 16, 2018

Think of an alphabet other than the Latin script, and what comes to mind: Cyrillic? Greek? Hebrew (Assyrian)? Arabic? Ge'ez? Brahmi? Devanāgāri? Pallava? Khmer? the list goes on and on, but one thing that these and many others have in common is that they are all ultimately descended from the ancient, Phoenician writing-system. There are literally dozens of writing systems that have some roots with the Phoenician alphabet (it's called that but technically it's an abjad), with a few notable exceptions being Chinese, Korean, and anything from the Americas, including Cree, which was nevertheless was invented by someone who had the Latin script. This means that as foreign-looking as something written in Hindi or Khmer looks to someone writing in English, the alphabets all go back to the same place. Sometimes this is obvious, such as what became ה in Hebrew (Assyrian) became h in Latin, but other times it may look like more of a stretch. Carrying on from yesterday, there will be more about writing systems in the coming days.
Today, a radio-style video about an alternate history of English was released on Patreon, so check it out: https://www.patreon.com/posts/how-english-have-18200654?utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook&utm_campaign=postshare.

1223: Why the Abjad Works for Hebrew Apr 15, 2018

While theoretically any alphabet can be used to represent any language, given that there is some arbitrarity to all of them, some are more fitting for certain languages than others. For instance, the Assyrian alphabet used to write Hebrew (and Yiddish) primarily is an abjad meaning that vowels are not written in, at least necessarily. However, this does not mean than English words cannot be written in with this system, such as
איי לייק ביג באטס אנד איי חנות לי
graffitied on a wall in Israel reading a transliterated—not translated—"I like big butts and I cannot lie". However, the reason that an abjad is especially fitting for Hebrew is that while it has 9 vowels (five short; four long) any unstressed short vowel becomes the centralized schwa /ə/. This is in contrast to Yiddish where—like in the very similar German—vocalization is more important, and this is reflected in the writing which uses Assyrian letters, but more fully uses the vowels: א,י,ע, and ו.
To see some hypothetical Word Facts, visit Patreon.com/wordfacts. Check out the Youtube too: https://youtu.be/Kgg5P7IIzvk

1222: Slang from French: It's not all Formal Apr 14, 2018

While generally words of French origin in English are seen as more formal, usually, there are a few exceptions to this. Many times, there are examples of a division between Northern and Southern English lexicon wherein the former will contain more Old English or Scandinavian-derived words, and the latter will contain more from Norman French, due to the history of invasions in Britain's history, but occasionally this is reversed by chance. For instance, 'poke' can be used to mean 'sack' in the North, which comes from French and is related to 'pocket', as well as 'rammel' ('garbage') for example. Notably, 'scallions', called 'spring onions' in the South, is considered merely dialectal in the UK but is standard and dominant in North America, because 'spring onions', while considered part of Standard British English, is quite new as a term. It should be clarified also that the Northern variations with French origin are often not part of even the standard for the regional dialects, and would not be used in formal settings as much if at all.

To see some hypothetical Word Facts, visit Patreon.com/wordfacts. Check out the Youtube too: https://youtu.be/Kgg5P7IIzvk

1221: People Make Sense of Bad Grammar Apr 13, 2018

People do not just freeze at ungrammaticality, and try instead will try to make sense of things. This is how talking to someone newly learning a language may say something like "I likes it" or a baby may say "I holded it" and this is not impossible to understand, though it is obviously ungrammatical. A prime example of this is most of the entries in the book "English as She is Spoke", the title alone of which shows just this very idea. The famous line "...he speak the frenche as the Frenchmen himselves. The Spanishesmen believe him Spanishing, and the Englishes, Englishmen." In the obvious places where there are linguistic issues, generally what would need to be supplemented to make it sound normal would be words that are phonetically similar (somewhat), and usually syntactically similar to what is already there. In this way, language is less a formula and more a set of clues for interpreting signs.
To see some hypothetical Word Facts, visit Patreon.com/wordfacts. Check out the Youtube too: https://youtu.be/Kgg5P7IIzvk

1220: Eggcorns are Phonemic (Often) Apr 12, 2018

A few examples of eggcorns (i.e. errors in phonetic-/spelling-reproduction that still make some sense) vary from the original phrase because of voicing. For instance, "nip it in the butt" rather than "...bud" or “old-timer’s disease” instead of "Alzheimer's disease" hinge upon [t]/[d]; the only difference between those two sounds is that the vocal cords vibrate for [d], but everything else is the same. Looking over many lists of eggcorns available online, there is a noticeable trend of eggcorns which only deviate from the original word or phrase by one sound, making them what linguists call a minimal pair. Other common sounds that are the source for these mishearings is [n]/[m], such as with 'medium strip' instead of 'median strip'.

To see some hypothetical Word Facts, visit Patreon.com/wordfacts. Check out the Youtube too: https://youtu.be/Kgg5P7IIzvk

1219: Accents in Sign Languages Apr 11, 2018

Just about every feature of spoken languages is present in sign-languages, with the obvious exception of vocalization. Sign-languages have morphology (with one wild exception), and there is still syntax, as one would probably assume. However, less intuitive but nevertheless true is that sign-languages also have accents. For instance, sometimes the words that are used in a certain region that has a standardized version (such as American Sign-Language) will not follow the conventional guidelines. At other times, such as with New York signing, it tends to be done faster than that in the Midwest or the South of the United States. Moreover, there are even stylistic differences, such as with US Southerners who are more likely to touch their chests and jaws as they sign. All of these together make up some of the different ways accents reveal themselves in sign languages: here, it was only American Sign Language, but the ideas can be applied broadly.

1218: Inflection for Proper Nouns Apr 10, 2018

In heavily inflected languages like Kalaallisut (a.k.a West Greenlandic), names change in form where necessary for case. For instance, the capital of Greenland, Nuuk in English, is also 'Nuuk' in the ergative case, but in the locative (i.e. locations like "in Nuuk") becomes 'Nuumi'. This is also true of names for people etc.. With English however, there is a general aversion to modifying proper nouns. Partly this is because case is limited in English, but even where there is case such as the genitive -'s following an [s] or [z] in a coda, the word doesn't change, such as "chris's (dog)". The other reason is that it is conceptually odd; the other common inflectional morphology in English is with the plural, but it is uncommon for there ever to be a plural proper noun. For more on this, see the video about proper nouns out today.

https://youtu.be/Kgg5P7IIzvk

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.

Make sure to check out the new Word Facts Video: https://youtu.be/MuEqaI7W0hA

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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.

Make sure to check out the newest Word Facts Video: https://youtu.be/Ay9PNWwcQwo
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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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