1294: Exonyms: Ruotsi and Ryssa Jun 26, 2018
While a few places, by historical coincidence, have many exonyms (i.e. what a place is called by other peoples) when the differences are very stark, as with 'Germany', Deutschland', 'Allemagne' and 'Niemcy' all referring to the same place in different languages, there are usually historical reasons. Another example is that the Finnish name for 'Sweden' is 'Ruotsi', but rather than being from Finnish, as you might imagine would be the cause for this difference, it actually just derives from another (Old) Swedish word. 'Ruotsi' comes from 'roþs-' which related to rowing, and even in Old Norse the area was called 'Roþrslandi', which means 'land of rowers', relating to the Vikings. Moreover, this 'roþs-' is where 'Rus'—the base for 'Russia'—derives, which is consistent with the history of many early slavic states being controlled Germanic raiders.
While the history of a region is usually important for understanding exonyms, this is not necessarily the case, as with 'Austria'. Also, many of these vastly different exonyms are centred in Europe, as with 'Switzerland', but it is true of places elsewhere too, like 'Japan', which in Japanese is 'Nihon'.
1293: zuchetto and zucchini Jun 25, 2018
Make sure also to check out Word Facts' analysis of Arrival: /stonewordfacts/2018/06/the-linguistics-in-arrival.html
1292: Goals as an Adjective (LITW 5)
Slang has turned the noun 'goals' into an adjective. If you've missed this in the last couple of years, people have been using the word 'goals' in structures only fit for adjectives. In the photo below "her British accent is goals af", 'goals' is a predicate adjective (i.e. it follows the linking verb 'to be'. Notably, while someone can say 'her...accent is goals' or theoretically 'her accent is pretty', there is not the option to say the 'goals accent' in the same way as 'the pretty accent', at least for the time being. Moreover though, it precedes 'af' [as fuck] which is only possible for descriptors. It is also notable that while 'goals' is plural when a noun, as an adjective it has no grammatical number. This is the fourth segment on Word Facts entitled Linguistics in the Wild (LITW), and you can see the rest here.
1291: liberal Jun 23, 2018
There are many words which have evolved over time to mean something completely opposite, and while in contronyms like 'peruse'—which meant to read thoroughly and now means to skim—are not very important, some are. One such word is 'aryan', discussed here before, but one with less baggage though still relevant is 'liberal'. The original sense of the word is still preserved in 'libertarian', and espoused the notion that all people are free to have their own ideas and opinions in spite of external conditions, which merely influence the individual. Indeed, many derivatives of the Latin 'liber' relate to individualism, however today the idea of 'a liberal' tends to evoke ideas of someone socially leftist, who would believe that there are systems in place which necessarily influence action and thought, whereas libertarians and others on the right are no longer called 'liberals', but use liberal ideas in the traditional sense.
1290: Magyarab Jun 22, 2018
There are many old theories about sites in Africa having built by European travellers rather than natives which are Eurocentric and racist, so the idea that a Hungarian man by the name of László Almásy discovered a lost Hungarian tribe in Africa would seem to fit into this type, but actually it is thought to be true. The Magyarab tribe, the name of which is strikingly similar to Magyar is estimated to be descended from 16th century Hungarians who travelled to southern Egypt and Sudan when the Ottoman Empire controlled those lands, and some stayed, intermarrying with the Nubians. Genetic information, as well as many loan words, suggest that these people were in fact from central Europe, though today they speak Arabic. The name comes from 'Magyar' (Hungarian) and -Ab which is Nubian for 'tribe'.
Make sure to check out the new Word Facts Video: https://youtu.be/MuEqaI7W0hA. Support Word Facts on Patreon for new things and to help make the content better: https://www.patreon.com/wordfacts.
1289: Zuni and Japanese: Related? Jun 21, 2018
There is a great deal of genetic evidence to suggest that Native Americans are related to East Asians, but there is also some controversial evidence linking certain groups linguistically. The Zuni language spoken in the Pueblo area is a linguistic isolate, like Basque, and it is not considered related to any other American language, and even though most American ones are polysynthetic (leading to extremely long words) opposite to the analytic nature of most East Asian languages, there are some notable linguistic similarities between Zuni and Japanese. The linguistic data on its own was not enough to convince many people, but there were later genetic studies that claimed to support such a link. However, much of the explanation for this relates to the debunked theory of the Altaic language family.
Check out the new Word Theory, out today: https://www.patreon.com/posts/19437219
1288: Esquivalience Jun 20, 2018
Words have been added to dictionaries erroneously before, called 'ghost-words', but sometimes fake words are included to be able to later prove if there has been copyright-infringement. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) describes 'esquivalience' as "the willful avoidance of one's official responsibilities", which is certainly a useful word, but it completely made up. Given that ultimately what dictionaries do is to describe the same words that every other one describes too, it can be tricky to catch when some company has stolen any entries, but both Dictionary.com and Google have had entries for 'esquivalience', indicating that they took, at least to some extent, from the OED, having fallen into their trap.
Make sure to check out the new Word Facts Video: https://youtu.be/MuEqaI7W0hA. Support Word Facts on Patreon for new things and to help make the content better: https://www.patreon.com/wordfacts.
1287 Why 'Labor of Love' Sounds Odd Jun 19, 2018
In English, the term "labor of love" is common enough to not sound abnormal, but this really is an odd phrase. However, the reason this is used is because it was taken straight out of a translation of the New Testament. If you don't believe that, look at the other lines in the same sentence: "work of faith" and "steadfastness of hope""; it sounds off. This phrase, however, would be normal in Koine Greek, which is the original language. This is because there is a level of vagueness in genitives which relate to sources rather than actual possession, similar to the interchangeability between "bread made *from* flour" and "bread made *of* flour". In Koine Greek this is fine, and even in German wherein 'von' means both 'of and 'from' this is normal sounding enough, but often translations of the Bible will sound unnecessarily clunky for reasons like this, though perhaps even 'steadfastness from hope' would have been a clearer translation.
1286: Locative Pronouns Jun 18, 2018
Pronouns, both personal (e.g. 'he' and 'you') and relative (e.g. 'that') are one of the last places where grammatical case may be found in English. Sometimes the distinction is simply subject-possessive-object such as 'I-mine-me' or 'who-whose-whom', but there is more to this. The fairly obscure and usually only literary or found in certain expressions 'hence; thence; whence' (meaning 'from where') and 'hither; thither; whither' (meaning 'to where'), which follows the same patter as 'here; there; where', are the best and possibly only cases where there is locative displayed morphologically in English. Most of the time, speakers rely on prepositions like 'to' or 'from', and this is the case with the relative pronouns to in that most of the time people say 'to there' rather than 'thither', but it is still very occasionally used.
Make sure to check out the new Word Facts Video: https://youtu.be/MuEqaI7W0hA
Support Word Facts on Patreon for new things and to help make the content better: https://www.patreon.com/wordfacts.
1285: Committee of the Hebrew Language Jun 17, 2018
Unlike French, which has the Académie Française to regular French, Hebrew did actually need a committee to figure out how certain terms would be used. This is because it was merely a literary language for over 1,600 years, and in that time, societies had developed new ideas and new objects which needed to be added to the language. The creator of Modern Hebrew, Ben-Yehuda, order the establishment of the Committee of the Hebrew Language with the specific goal of modernizing where necessary, but he insisted that the gaps be filled, both grammatically and lexically, following Semitic systems, often taking from Aramaic or usually Arabic in order to maintain a predominantly Semitic character. As a point of information, this is not the same reason why certain words changed from Biblical to Modern Hebrew, such as 'anochi' to 'ani' meaning the pronoun 'I'.
Make sure also to check out Word Facts' analysis of Arrival.
1284: Parapraxis: Psychologists vs. Linguists Jun 16, 2018
Parapraxis is another term for a Freudian slip, i.e. making a linguistic error which is subconsciously motivated (humorously: "when you say one thing and mean your mother"). There is a large debate going on between linguists and psychologists on this subject; in a classical psychoanalytic reading (though there are plenty of new theories) the erroneous replacement word is drawn in this assumedly systematic way from words which are related—in general—semantically, with much more emphasis placed upon the meaning of the slip that other factors such as how it sounds. A more strictly linguistic approach to this problem—forgetting for a moment the different takes within the neurolinguistic and psycholinguistic fields—would consider more factors, such as how a word sounds, and more to the point, how it is stressed. Think about how you may have experienced a word on the tip of your tongue (ToT), believing it started with one sound, and actually it began with a different sound, but the sound you remembered featured somewhere in the word where the stress may have been placed (if you haven't done this in the past, don't worry, but maybe considering playing with this in the future).
Make sure also to check out Word Facts' analysis of the film, Arrival.
1283: Reduplication of Verbs (LITW 4) Jun 15, 2018
The headline "Sessions ‘Hate, Hate, Hates’ Kushner’s Prison Reform Plan, Pardon Push" makes use of what's called emphatic reduplication regarding the word 'hate'. Moreover, because English has very little inflectional morphology, such as the '-s' ending on 3rd person verbs, in the childly question "Do you like him, or do you like like him", it is unclear whether the verb is being doubly conjugated, or indeed has no conjugation, as happens in small clauses. This headline, which uses the verb in the 3rd person, answers this question. Indeed, it shows not only is the verb only conjugated once, but that unlike in phrases like 'fancy-schmancy', with the verb, the original stays at the end, and not the beginning. This is the third part in a new segment called Linguistics in the Wild (LITW), and you can see the rest here.
1282: Language Families: Altaic Jun 14, 2018
Certain terms, such as 'language family' can often be vague; it is often unclear when it refers to groups of languages as specific as West Germanic of which there are around six, and others like Indo-European, which includes scores of languages. Another proposed large family of language-families was the now-discredited Altaic languages, including Turkic, Tungusic, and Mongolic families, as well as the disputed Koreanic, Japonic, and Ainu languages, thus covering most of central and northeastern Asia. The former three families are inarguably more similar to each other than to the others, but even so, people have claimed that the similarities are only due to geographic relation and cultural contact, rather than having common origins, citing the fact that earlier forms of all the languages are quite dissimilar. Even though the theory has virtually no support from linguists today, the theory is still often cited in writings about languages such as Turkish or Mongolian by non-linguists. Nevertheless, it is sometimes hard to know where to draw distinctions among various languages and families thereof.
Make sure also to check out Word Facts' analysis of the film, Arrival.
1281: Determiner Phrases: Greek Proper Nouns Jun 13, 2018
In English, there are no determiners which agree with proper nouns overtly; unlike nouns such as 'table', no words such as 'the' are necessary with names, so "Mike saw Ike" is fine, but one would need to include a determiner in "Mike saw the table". This is discussed in one of the Word Facts Video. However, in some languages such as Greek, this is necessary, such as in the transliterated:
Irthe o Pavlos kai o Giannis sto
wherein 'o' in front of "o Pavlos" and "o Giannis" literally means "the Pavlos [Paul]" and "the Giannis [John]". Other features like this have historically made certain translations clunkier and less colloquial than necessary, though for some contexts such as religion, this may be desired.
1280: Critical Period Jun 12, 2018
Children have an astounding ability to learn languages. Not only are they better at discerning between sounds in a way those over the age of around 5 can, their neuroplasticity allows them to learn—theoretically—as many languages as they are exposed to. This period of around 4 to 6 years is known as the Critical Period, and though it affects most areas of learning, it has been found that as one ages, languages are not stored in the brain in the same way, and that one's first languages will often be linked to emotions, whereas the languages one learns later, especially well into adulthood, tend to rely on following systems and logic. Of course, this is somewhat of a generalization, but you can certainly expect that should one curse in pain, that will likely be in her first language.
Make sure also to check out Word Facts' analysis of Arrival: /stonewordfacts/2018/06/the-linguistics-in-arrival.html
1279: Non-Human Pronouns: Pirahã Jun 11, 2018
As was discussed during Gender Week, the assigning of gender to nouns usually is just an extension of the words for what determiners and adjectives agree with the words for 'man', 'woman', and possibly other objects, but these often get even more specific. For instance, many languages have specific pronouns and gendered declensions for water and other aquatic things, or commonly food. Pirahã has, essentially, 3 pronouns which translate into English as 'it'; one for animate non-human non-aquatic things, one for animate non-human aquatic things, and one for inanimate things. While grammatical gender tends to be framed in terms of nouns, (and adjectives and determiners), or in verbs Afro-Asiatic languages, the main focus in non-linguist English speakers is pronouns, but looking at other languages, there is an incredible amount of variability.
1278: Stress in Language Jun 10, 2018
Although there are ways to predict the stress on a syllable from phonology, a lot of that process also comes from the conventions of the language itself. In a 3-syllable hypothetical word that existed in Finnish, French, and Hebrew, it is extremely likely that the stress would be on the first, second, and third syllable respectively, because this is how those languages place stress in a polysyllabic word most of the time. In fact, this is less predictable in English, but because it is often the case that the words from Old English are stressed on the first syllable today, whereas those deriving from Old French or Latin will be stressed on the second syllable. The reasons why a language will have this stress-pattern is not exactly clear.
1277: Affixes on Loan Words: -ous Jun 9, 2018
There are a lot of affixes in English which are able to attach them selves to a lot of words, but some are less productive. For instance, the suffix '-ous' can affix itself to words like 'danger' or 'courage', but this is not always where it will be present. In this situation, it is a suffix, but many if not most of the word where it is found cannot be parsed because those words were adopted wholesale from French (mostly Old French), and Latin, such as 'horrendous', 'enormous', or 'tremendous'.
Make sure also to check out Word Facts' video which came out today with an analysis of the film, Arrival.
1276: The Vowels of 'Rhythm' (LITW 3) Jun 8, 2018
There is a rumour " 'rhythm' is the longest English word without a vowel" and disregarding the 'y', it does show the way that English-spellers view vowels. 'Rhythm' is two syllables not one, so assuming the 'y' represents the sound [ɪ], there would seem to still need to be another vowel somewhere in pronunciation to make the middle of the second vowel. This comes down to what is called 'syllabic consonants', and this can be thought of like the [ə] in words like 'the' or 'gum' (sort of). However, in words like 'rhythm' and 'column' the vowel is even shorter and less prominent, such that it it thought of as only being a byproduct of moving from one consonant to the next while still breathing out. So, while the number of syllables doesn't change, there is some truth in saying there are fewer-than-expected vowels, though certainly not zero.
