1275: Fusional Languages Jun 7, 2018
There are many languages which derive the majority of the grammar from one language, and possibly the vocabulary from it too, but have many influences from other languages, but are not quite as mixed as creoles. These are fusion languages, and these include Germanic languages of English and Yiddish, among many others, the former containing many words and affixes from French Latin and Greek, and the latter having influences from Hebrew, Aramaic, Polish, Russian. Other languages like Icelandic and Hebrew have relatively little influence from outside sources.
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1274: Truly Untranslatable Jun 6, 2018
While it has been discussed on this blog before than no concept is truly untranslatable, there are certain phrases which will not have the same sort of significance in one language as it will in another. Words in this group include 'apartheid', which directly translates to 'separation' (lit. 'apartness') or 'shoa' which is Hebrew for 'catastrophe' but is a common synonym alongside 'holocaust' found in English. There are more lighthearted ones too such as names for holidays, like 'Ramadan', which here comes from a word meaning 'be hot' but obviously has a lot more meaning than 'be hot' conveys in English. This is all the case because those terms have value in a way that does not carry over, and so even though the translation for those words is not possible in order to capture the full gravity, they can always be adopted.
1273: Participles: Versatility Jun 5, 2018
Participles are one of the most versatile lexical classes in English, and can contribute to or act as nouns, verbs, adverbs, adjectives, and prepositions. Words like 'running' in 'running is fun' for this reason are even sometimes called verbal nouns because grammatically it acts like a noun, but could be replaced with 'to run'. Moreover, because of their adjunct-like qualities, they can act as adjectives such as in 'the running man' and combine with nouns to form compounds like 'groundbreaking' or in the case of KFC "finger-lickin'". Some, as mentioned before, can act like prepositions; this happens when the relative pronoun is omitted from a relative clause, such as "the box containing (i.e 'with') the supplies" as an alternative to "...which is containing" or "which contains"
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1272: Global Languages: English and French Jun 4, 2018
There are two reason that while more than twice as many people speak Russian natively than French (254M to 118M), and likewise there are more than double the number of Chinese speakers—when including all dialects—to native English ones (1.4B to 547M) as of 2015, both English and French are considered more international than Russian and Chinese respectively. Of course there is nuance to this, Arabic, Russian, Hindi-Urdu and Chinese and to a lesser extend Spanish are lingua franca over large regions but not so global as English. This is changing as certain economies grow, but the fact that English and French are still official languages somewhere on 6 continents makes it more global, and will more often be the common denominator, so to speak. Moreover, although Chinese dialects may be a more common first language, English is still the most-commonly taught second language in the world, and French, particularly in Africa and Southeast Asia, is close behind.
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1271: National Languages: Colonies Jun 3, 2018
Historical reasons for picking a national language have been discussed here before, but there are also other dimensions which former colonies had to grapple with. Some former colonies chose to stick to the language of the past colonial power, as with Nigeria or India, because there were so many languages spoken that it acts as a lingua franca; this is similar in Malaysia where, though the majority speak Malaysian, the government did not want the Malay to be unequally powerful, and all three countries use English. In other countries, such as Indonesia, having a distinct national language was deemed necessary in order to promote national unity against foreign powers, even though at least hundreds of languages are spoken there. Some countries opt for no official language, and will allow for more regionalism, or will use a de facto national language, such as is the case with the US.
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1270: Aizkora Controversy Jun 2, 2018
The Basque language is mysterious in that no one knows its origins, and it has no relatives, but this is true of the genes of the native speakers. Studies of the DNA of Basque people show that they likely predated any other native Europeans, with signs that they mixed heavily with Neanderthal. Where this crosses over linguistically is that it was observed that there is a word family of terms deriving for the word for 'stone' that relate to different tools, leading linguists to theorize that this feature of Basque dates back to the the Stone Age. This is now very contested, but the so-called aizkora controversy which states that words including the following all go back to the word 'haitz' (stone) for prehistoric culture:
(h)aizkora (axe)
(h)aitzur (shears)
(h)aitzur (hoe)
aizto (knife)
(h)aiztur (tongs)
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1269: Types of Compounds Jun 1, 2018
There are two types of compounds that are found in English. The first are the most common, and also they are the easiest to create on the spot. Synthetic compounds are words made up of the meaning of the sum of their elements, such as 'bookshelf' which is a shelf for books, or even German's famous rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz which is just a string of nouns (beef labelling regulation and supervision law). On the other hand, idiomatic compounds are made up of parts which only make sense as a whole, such as 'butterfly'. This is similar to how idiomatic sentences like "it's raining cats and dogs' only make sense when looked at as a whole.
1268: Irregular Spelling: Yiddish May 31, 2018
There are a lot of reasons why english spelling is so irregular, but one of them is that historically some words were adopted in (more or less) their original forms but not pronounced the same as in the native language. This happens still, especially with place-names. Nevertheless, English is by no means the only language to do so. While some languages such as Finnish borrows a lot of new words from English, the spelling always changes to fit the orthography, in other cases, such as Hebrew loan-words in Yiddish they retain their original spelling. In fact, because of this, the letter ת (taw) in Hebrew is usually pronounced as [t] but in Yiddish its an [s] among other differences, such as אמת (true) pronounced 'emet' in Hebrew but 'emes' in Yiddish. This is also a problem for reading Yiddish, because while Yiddish always represents vowels, Hebrew does not often.
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1267: The Origins of Literary Finnish May 30, 2018
One thing which is often overlooked is that while there are a number of languages which are privileged in being taught more frequently than others, this is partly for practical reasons. Less than 10% of all languages have a standard written form, and far fewer have any sort of literature. This is an ongoing problem for man researchers now, but it means that sometimes, a language's literary history can be said to begin with only one person. This is true of professional linguists now, but in the past this was the work of proud writers, often poets, as is the case for Modern Italian, Modern Estonian, and Finnish. In the latter case, it was not just the case that people were originally using older form of the language as with the other examples, but that people were only writing in Swedish: a language not even related to Finnish. This changed in 1870 with the book Seitsemän Veljestä by Aleksis Kivi, who ironically has Swedish parents.
1266: Why 'Go' is Irregular May 29, 2018
The two most commonly used irregular verbs in English are 'to be' and 'to go', but both of them have conjugational forms derived of multiple words. Many so-called 'irregular verbs' are regular within less common systems of conjugation (see the video below here), but 'go' to 'went' follows no system. In fact, 'went' was originally the perfect form of 'wend' which is related to 'wonder' and 'wind'. It follows the same patter of 'lend-lent' and 'bend-bent', meaning that 'wend' is a regular verb, but 'go', which used to be regular too, no longer is. For a comparison with the even-stranger "be-am/are/is-was/were-been" click the link here.
1265: the bees knees May 28, 2018
There are a lot of theories about where the phrase "the bees knees" referring to something outstanding, but as with many folk etymology, there is a bit of logically weeding to be done. One theory is that it comes from Italian immigrants to America saying 'business', but this doesn't work for two reasons: the phrase has been around for far longer than Italians were coming to the US, and it originally had the meaning of 'a small thing' so 'business' would not make sense as an derivation for it. Other theories include things such as how it would be related to the collection of pollen, and other biological ideas, but these don't hold up for similar reasons. The prevailing theory is that it went from meaning something small to something great on the pattern of other phrases like "the cat's pajamas", 'flea's eyebrows', 'the canary's tusks', and "the cat's whiskers", though not all of these slang terms from the 1920's have lasted the test of time.
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1264: Aptagrams May 27, 2018
Anagrams are quite famous, but there are multiple varieties. Palindromes are similar but there are also so called aptagrams, which is a semantically relevant anagram. A few famous examples include 'moon starers' for 'astronomer', 'notes' for 'tones', and 'dirty room' for 'dormitory'. The list of those is fairly short, but it can be expanded to cross-language anagrams, such as 'ars magna' (Latin for 'great art') as an aptagram for 'anagrams'. Debatably, the best of all of them is "twelve plus one" and "eleven plus two" which not only is relevant being within the field of mathematics, but is also accurate.
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1263: Brown Willy or 'breast swallow' May 26, 2018
Brown Willy is a hill in Cornwall which comes from Cornish meaning 'breast swallow'. This is neither the first thing named 'willy' to come out of Britain, as their first-ever tank was named 'Big Willy', nor is it the only place in the UK named after a breast, as that list includes other hills and even 'Manchester'. The name in Cornish for the hill in question today is 'Bronn Wennili' (effectively "hill of swallows"), however people tend to change words foreign to them into something more familiar lexically (bronn --> brown), or phonetically (wennili --> willy), both of which happen to be demonstrated here.
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1262: Churchillian Drift May 25, 2018
Anyone can be misquoted posthumously of course, but it is quite rampant regarding those of political figures and other famous people throughout history. There are many reasons for this, ranging from relatively innocent general ignorance, or it can have certain political effects. However, there is a point when it might enter the general populous, after a real quote was attributed to the wrong person, or it was entirely fabricated, when the term 'Churchillian Drift' may be applied, so named after so many false quotes were attributed to Winston Churchill. An example of Churchillian Drift is that there is little evidence to suggest that Mark Twain said "golf is a good walk spoiled", since the first known record of anyone saying it was some 38 years after he died.
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1261: Clusivity May 24, 2018
English lacks a lot of the semantic variety that pronouns in Spanish have. To start, English has neither a distinction for formal pronouns nor second person plural, both of which are present in Spanish, but there are still many more facets which neither language have. Clusivity is a feature of language in which something can either be inclusive (of interlocutors, tense etc) or exclusive. For instance, 'we' is both inclusive and exclusive; it has the ability to include everyone—either literally each human, or just a speaker, addressee, and third person—or it can exclude the addressee, such as in "we like you" where 'we' does not include the listener. Other languages include this distinction, and will have three first-person pronouns, which may be wholly distinct pronouns, or sometimes will coincide with the informal and formal forms for the first person.
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1260: English's Mysterious Abundance of Synonyms May 23, 2018
Arguably, English has more words that any other language, though this is not to say that English speakers use more distinct words than other peoples. A common, though overstated, reason for this is that there are so many loan words, and words of foreign origin, but this only goes so far. For instance, the fact that English has an abundance of both Germanic and Romantic vocabulary might explain why there are 'big' and 'large' (which when originally adopted from French meant 'wide; long'), but this does not account for 'small' and 'little' (and questionably 'tiny') which are Germanic.
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1259: Discovering a Language from a Parrot May 21, 2018
All languages are from humans, but one was retrieved from a parrot.
Alexander von Humboldt, known for many things including his work with electricity also spent a great deal of time in South America, as well as documenting native groups from the Amazon. There was one tribe which was said to have been eaten by Caribs (cannibals) but there was a parrot that survived. Humboldt went with someone who spoke, Maipures, a similar language to the extinct Atures and learned around 40 words from the parrot. Along with the Maipures speaker, he was able to reconstruct a small amount of the language.
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1258: Creoles vs Languages May 20, 2018
What separates creoles and pidgins from whole languages with heavy influence from other languages?
Some languages are very pure in their grammar and vocabulary, such as Icelandic which stays incredibly true to its Germanic roots, and other languages take elements from all over, such as Haitian Creole, which uses French as the lexifier language (i.e. where it gets its vocabulary) but with a lot of influence from West African languages. However, what separates a language like Haitian Creole from a non-creole language like Yiddish, is that while Yiddish has a lot of influence from Hebrew and Slavic languages in its vocabulary, phonology, and morphonology (which includes affixes and things like that) but its core vocabulary is Germanic, and so is the grammar. This definition has historically raised a lot of questions about English.
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1257: How to Verb a Noun: Phrases (LITW 2) May 19, 2018
The question for today: how do you verb a noun?
Well as any native English speaker should realize, that is merely a rhetorical question, but it is still an interesting and perhaps entertaining notion. Unlike in Salish, because English syntax relies almost exclusively upon word-order, placing any word, including a noun, adjective, or even preposition in the position of a verb, it will become a verb. What this leads to is a sort of test to see if something is one word or multiple. As you can see in the attached photo, "social justice warrior" (so long as you can overlook the hyphen-misuse) is used as one verb, even though it appears as three words. However, because of the social and linguistic connotations, it has now developed meaning as one word (usually a noun, though here a verb).
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