1237: Translation Relation (re 'Shuld') Apr 29, 2018
Words have multiple meanings, but unsurprisingly, this leads to the problem of not being able to translate things from one language to another on a one-to-one level. Sometimes, and perhaps even more often, this will be random, but nevertheless there can be the ability to gain some insights about a cultural (or at the very least linguistic) zeitgeist. For instance, the German word for 'debt' is 'Shuld, but that word is also the same for 'guilt' and less commonly though still acceptably 'fault'. Again, this could have also happened in any language, but it could be noted that Germany has a payment surplus and the nation has very little private debt compared to other European countries. See yesterday's post for more on this idea of translation relation.
To see some hypothetical Word Facts, visit Patreon.com/wordfacts. Check out the latest Youtube video too: https://youtu.be/T18K38h2ZHc
1236: Linguistic Similarities Across Languages ('Leichter') Apr 28, 2018
Looking at other languages—particularly Romantic and Germanic ones—offers a great deal of insights about English. Take the German word 'leichter' for instance. In English it would translate as 'lighter', except that while the '-ch-' in German is pronounced with the velar fricative, this is not the case in English anymore; the '-gh-' however used to represent this same sound, before it was assimilated. Not only does it show related (or at least historical) similarity in pronunciation, but also, both 'leichter' and 'lighter' refer to 'light' as in lacking significant weight, and light as in 'easy', and 'leichter' is related to 'beleuchten' which refers to the sense of 'light as brightness'. This semantic similarity shows how words, even across languages and across cultures, may often share connotations due to (somewhat) universal connotations, and likely in this case also due to cultural and linguistic similarities historically.
To see some hypothetical Word Facts, visit Patreon.com/wordfacts. Check out the latest Youtube video too: https://youtu.be/T18K38h2ZHc
1235: (Possibly) Confusing Clauses Apr 27, 2018
English clauses can have multiple verbs for a variety of reasons, but there will not be two finite (that is to say conjugated verbs) together. The possible confusion at first glance is that "what she does is (to) run" is acceptable in English, and clearly has two finite verbs ('does' and 'is') side by side. Moreover the tense marker 'to' is optionally omitted, so it can appear that there are even more. However, there are two different clauses here, one of which is a relative clause "what she does" and the other is a verbal phrase "...is to run", which may be more easily reconstructed all together as "to run is what she does" or even "running...". This topic was a fan-question; if you have your own queeries, do feel free to send a message or write a comment.
To see some hypothetical Word Facts, visit Patreon.com/wordfacts. Check out the latest Youtube video too: https://youtu.be/T18K38h2ZHc
1234: sample and example Apr 26, 2018
There are plenty of words that sound alike but by random chance happens to have a similar phonetic composition as another word with a different meaning and etymology. These such homophones including 'dear' and 'deer' are fun but are not especially insightful. What tends to be more linguistically rich is looking at words that have one origin and have since split. For example, 'example'—as with most words beginning with 'ex-'—comes from Latin 'eximere' meaning 'take out', however, while 'ex-' is often a prefix, it actually does not relate to 'ample, but does have the same root as 'sample'. This diverged from the Old French 'essample' as a noun, however in many ways, 'sample' as a noun can usually be replaced by 'example', though it might sound a little weird.
To see some hypothetical Word Facts, visit Patreon.com/wordfacts. Check out the latest Youtube video too: https://youtu.be/T18K38h2ZHc
1233: Reduction of Relative Clauses Apr 25, 2018
To see some hypothetical Word Facts, visit Patreon.com/wordfacts. Check out the latest Youtube video too: https://youtu.be/T18K38h2ZHc
1232: Are Filler Words Actually Words? Apr 24, 2018
When does a noise or a pause become a word?
Historically, linguists did not consider 'uh' or 'um' to be words because they were not seen to be "intentionally produced", and there is necessarily syntax for them. However, there is a great deal of evidence to suggest otherwise. First, from a logical standpoint, if these filler words were unintentional, there would not be different versions in various languages and various dialects; not only is there a dialectal difference between the more American 'um' with the British 'erm' or 'em', but there is the Chinese 'nage' and 'zhege', or the Japanese 'eto' and 'ano' to name a few. And furthermore, referring back to a post on Word Facts the other day, there are places where these fillers are more likely to appear, meaning that there is some argument for their having a syntactic role as well. Considering that 100 years ago, 'the' and 'a(n)' were considered adjectives rather than being their own class of articles, it is certainly imaginable that one day there will be another lexical class in English. What do you think?
To see some hypothetical Word Facts, visit Patreon.com/wordfacts. Check out the latest Youtube video too: https://youtu.be/T18K38h2ZHc
1231: Passival pt. 3 Apr 23, 2018
There are a lot of ways to use the passive voice in order to deflect blame. For instance, "mistakes were made" does not reveal who made said mistakes. However, a few verbs allow for this hidden agency to be carried across without the passive, per se. 'Broke' for instance in "my pencil broke" is active in the way that it is formed, but it's passive semantically, because pencils cannot break themselves. This is another example of the passival, which is a generally overlooked and fairly rare middle voice in English. Also, it might be interesting to note that while 'broke' and some other verbs can be active, passive, and passival, intransitive verbs cannot even be passive; no one could say "he has been died" nor "she has been slept" because those verbs do not take objects ever, and in this situation, the subject is also the object.
Check out the video that came out today!
1230: When to...Pause Apr 22, 2018
Do people think in terms of individual words, or clauses as they speak?
The answer is that, while of course people think of the actual words, people largely think in terms of clauses. That is why most pauses will happen between clauses, but not between, say, an adjective and a noun. However, while so called 'major-delays' (around a second) may happen between clauses without sounding abnormal, if a speaker used one between words it would sound extremely choppy, and often speakers will paraphrase or go as far as to ramble in order to remain fluent until the end of a clause. So called 'minor-clauses' still do exist between words if the speaker is searching for the word, but again, this will rarely be more than .6 seconds. There will be more about this in the next few days. Stay tuned tomorrow for the next Word Facts videos.
To see some hypothetical Word Facts, visit Patreon.com/wordfacts. Check out the Youtube too: https://youtu.be/Kgg5P7IIzvk
1229: Where Long Vowels (may) Originate Apr 21, 2018
English does not distinguish phonetically between long and short vowels, but plenty of other languages such as Hebrew do. There is still some level of mystery about how long vowels develop, though for that matter, there is no one reason that short vowels should be presumed to be a constant nor a default. One theory as to why Hebrew developed long vowels is that in many words with glottal stops, the glottal stop was lost which left either two of the same vowel next to each other (which is essentially what a long vowel is) or otherwise the first vowel was assimilated into the second (vocalic elision), and this would result in the latter vowel lengthening. For instance, the word שעונים /ʃeʔo'nim/ loses the glottal stop and becomes [ʃoː'nim] (the ː represents a long vowel). This would not explain vowel length for every language, and especially not the middle length in languages like Mixe.
1228: English Right-Hand Rule Apr 20, 2018
There is a reason why negative affixes are going to be prefixes in English is the same reason why derivational affixes such as '-al', '-ness' and '-ate' will be suffixes. English has what is called the "English right-hand rule" which states that usually, the right-most element is the head of the word, and will determine the syntax and or meaning. This is true of most adjectives, compounds where the first element acts almost like an adjective, and affixes. With the latter, negating prefixes such as 'in-', 'un-' and 'non-' all can be attached to adjectives (among other things) and the word will still remain an adjective (or whatever else) whereas the aforementioned suffixes will all make a word of one part of speech become a word of another lexical class. This is the case with most affixes in other Germanic languages as well, though there are a few notable exceptions within each, and is one of many significant reasons why English will not be considered a Romance language despite strong influences from vocabulary.
To see some hypothetical Word Facts, visit Patreon.com/wordfacts. Check out the Youtube too: https://youtu.be/Kgg5P7IIzvk
1227: Why England has so many Dialects Apr 19, 2018
Compared to the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, or South Africa, the UK has many more dialects. The reason for this is because English has been spoken there for longer, but that has to be interpreted in two different ways. The first is the more obvious: there was more time for the dialects to diverge as any tend to do naturally, and have more or less influences from other languages like Danish, Norman French, and a few Celtic languages. However, the second, and less obvious reason, is that what we think of as English now comes from a variety of different dialect groups, and while they merged to a great extent, it was not complete. Why so many dialects in England often goes all the way back to Old English, and the Northumbrian, Mercian, Kentish, and West Saxon dialect groups that developed into regional dialects of modern UK English. Many of the syntactic features that differentiate the various Northern, Midlands, and Southern dialects today date all the way back to Old English or Middle English.
Click here to see the source for the photo.
1226: Cases are from Verbs Apr 18, 2018
Even though case is reflected on nouns, and sometimes adjectives and determiners, verbs assign case. In all languages—except for one very famous example which will come up here some time this week—verbs can either be transitive (i.e. there can be a direct object) or intransitive (there is no direct object), even if it is a similar meaning. For instance, 'kill' is a transitive verb, and one can say "he killed her" but 'die' is an intransitive verb and no one can say "he died her". In ergative-absolutive languages, these are especially important because they change the case of the "subject" as well. All of these cases are determined by the verbs, and this is still considered to be the case in situations where the verb is omitted.
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.
