1312: German Calques Jul 14, 2018
German tends to be more flexible in allowing for English loan words than French for cultural reasons, but there are instances when this changes. Indeed, when people have attempted to create Anglish—an all-Germanic remodelling of English—they often just look to Modern German. For instance, French and English both use the word 'television' (or at least 'télévision') but in German the word is 'Fernseher'; the German word comes right from the same French word, at least sort of, as all of them mean 'far' 'seeing', but the French uses Greek and Latin roots whereas German just used a Germanic calque.
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1311: Counting Languages Jul 13, 2018
1310: Stroke as a New Conjunction Jul 12, 2018
If you say the Word Facts post about 'slash', you would know that it it extremely rare to find examples of new conjunctions simply because there are only so many ways they can be used, but it is possible. In addition to 'slash' as a conjunction which has same effect as 'and' but tends to connect less related ideas, there is also the conjunction 'stroke' which is also relatively new, only from the last decade or so. This tends to be used in similar ways to 'slash', though it may be more common to connect words, not on a clausal level. It is also more popular in the United Kingdom, as opposed to 'slash' which is more common in the US. As you may have guessed, both of these new conjunctions come from the punctuation mark: /, which does go by several different names.
1309: samuel Jul 11, 2018
While plenty of names from Biblical Hebrew changed and morphed in different ways to create a diverse array of derivatives such as with John and 'Jacob'. Others, however, have changed relatively little over the millennia and through different cultures. 'Samuel', for instance, either comes from שם האלוהים (Shem Alohim) or שמע אלוהים (Sh'ma Alohim) meaning "G*d has heard" or "name of G*d". This same shift from [ʃ] to [s] is also a factor with names like 'Simon'. Similar names to 'Samuel' exist all over Europe with very little difference, unlike those aforementioned others. However, it is unclear where the probably related Samantha comes from, though likely it is a Greek compound.
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1308: Stomp vs. Stamp Jul 10, 2018
With the exception reference to postage-stamps, the verbs 'stamp' and 'stomp' are more or less interchangeable; this is even true of phrases such as "stamp/stomp out" or "stamping/stomping grounds", which is much rarer of synonyms. The reason for this is that 'stomp'—even though it is more widely used—only came to be as variation of 'stamp' in the 19th century, and so all of those phrases with such interchangeability have used both. It is likely that soon 'stomp' will be included in more of its own senses, both as an ordinary verb and as part of a phrase, but 'stamp' is still widely used today, particularly outside of the US. Which would you use in those phrases?
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1307: Name-Variation (Jacob and Séamus) Jul 9, 2018
There are many names which are thought of as being distinctly regional in parts of Europe but are not unique, and share a biblical origin. This even happens with names that sound nothing alike, such as 'John' and 'Iwan'. This is true of many others as well, such as all the descendants of the Hebrew יעקב (Yaʻaqov). There are many common sound-changes which result in these names, such as the change from [j] in Hebrew to [dʒ] in English (usually written with Y and J respectively) such as in John from Yohanan, or Joseph from Yusef too. In Irish this sound usually becomes [ʃ] (like SH), in this case the other derivative: Séamus, similar to the difference in Sean and John. Usually, the Irish names are related to the French which helps to understand where this similar sound comes from, but also in this case the [m] in Séamus as well as the [s] comes from the Iacomus, which was a French variation of the Latin name Iacobus. [m] and [b] don't sound that similar, but actually they are pronounced with the same configuration in the mouth, only [m] is nasalized.
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1306: gardyloo Jul 8, 2018
People are not very good at simply adopting a word into another language without any kind of change; either spelling will influence how people speak (e.g. 'paella' in Britain), or more often accent and stress change. This is particularly common when a phoneme or combination thereof exists in one language but not another. When the French phrase "gardez l'eau" ("mind the water") was adopted as 'gardyloo' into Scottish English as an exclamation one would say before emptying a chamberpot out of a window (which was common-practice until as late as the 1940's), the pronunciation changed in many key ways. Scottish and French have different iterations of what is represented with the letter R—[r] and [ʁ] respectively—but also, English doesn't end words on the sound [o] on its own, and will use the sound [u]. The middle-vowel changes as well, but only slightly. There are countless examples of the way in which sounds change across even just these two languages, especially considering how much of English vocabulary comes from French (usually Old French) origin. Notably, 'gardyloo' is not related to 'loo' as in 'toilet'.
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1305: Hebrew Grammar is Increasingly Analytical Jul 7, 2018
It has been discussed on this blog how some Indo-European languages are becoming less synthetic over time, which is to say that less morphology is used, and this is instead replaced with markers, such as things like modal or auxiliary verbs instead of affixes. This is because, in part, it is thought that Proto-Indo-European was very synthetic, and there's only one way to change therefore. However, this trend, while not ubiquitous, is also present in languages of other language families, such as Modern Hebrew. A notable quality of Hebrew as well is that it tends to resemble Indo-European languages in a way Biblical Hebrew did not, with changes to word-order, but also morphosyntactic features, following this same trend as mentioned before. There are any number of reasons for this, but some have speculated that Modern Hebrew has gained this influence in part from contact with other languages with new learners and creators, as it is a historically new language in many ways.
1304: Dense Phoneme-inventories: Archi Jul 6, 2018
In general, languages tend to not have too many similar sounding phonemes, because it makes sounds difficult to differentiate. However, some languages have a lot of phonemes; Rokotas has 11, English has 45—though this can vary when including different accents—and Archi has between 100 and 108, which is not the most of any language, but it is a lot. What separates Archi from !Xóõ which is considered to have the most phonemes is that !Xóõ has tones and clicks, which increases the variety for what is allowed in words, and therefore would lower confusion. For instance, Archi has a strangely high amount of velar lateral fricatives, which is essentially an L but pronounced with your tongue in the position to produce a K; if you aren't used to it it may be an uncomfortable feeling. Moreover, there are either 6 and 6 of these depending upon if one also counts the similar ejectives, and these only differ very slightly, though it will affect the meaning of a word. So, with its over 1.5 million derivations from each verb, and unusually large phoneme inventory, Archi is not a language you might want to try to pick up quickly before a holiday.
1303: Archi Verbs: 1,502,839 Derivations Jul 5, 2018
Not many language-learners enjoy writing out the various tables for the morphology of more inflected languages. Some languages are certainly worse than others, and morphological structures which also use infixes in a compounded manner such as you can see with Turkish are a particular nuisance. And while there are some tough languages to understand therefore, perhaps none use such complex morphology as Archi, which for 1,502,839 forms may be derived from any given verbal root. Practically speaking these will not all be used, but due to problems like this, the question of what a word is becomes even more complicated; English is said to have the largest lexicon, with between 300,000 and 500,000 words, and though, again, most will not be used by any given individual, this is not even a third of what can be derived from any one Archi verb. Ultimately, what a word is comes down to the individual language at times.
1302: Philosophical Languages Jul 4, 2018
People may regard philosophy today as full of niche jargon, and rather exclusive therefore, but there was a time in history when people invented whole languages for it. These philosophical languages were developed, primarily in the 17th century and into the 18th as a way to create something which would be universal, though at the time European intelligentsia would all use Latin anyway, so a language which no one spoke natively was already used for academic use. Further irony was added by the fact that people constructed many different "universal" languages, including Leibniz, Bacon, Wilkins, Kircher, Comenius, and Dalgarno. Nevertheless, these philosophical languages were not supposed to make cross-cultural dialogue easier ultimately, but instead it was usually supposed to use symbols and other graphs in order to represent ideas more concisely. These, obviously, did not catch on for long, but there are hundreds of thousands of pages with examples of this.
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1301: LGBTQ-linguistics: An Overview Jul 3, 2018
In sociolinguistics, there is an entire field called LGBTQ-linguistics which looks into the different ways that people of that community speak dialectically. Originally termed 'lavender lexicons', this fielded is focused on looking at differences between people in the LGBTQ-community's speech, and the social conditions which cause them. For instance, gay men use what is called the 'gay lisp' wherein /s/ and /z/ are produced for longer and at a higher frequency, as well as certain vowels being produced by raising the tongue higher than a straight man would tend to. Notably, lesbians tend to do the opposite, but the difference is less pronounced for women in general. These differences have often been attributed to having social-groups composed mostly of women in the case of gay men and vice-versa for lesbians, but also, like any dialect, it is used for identification, to show one's belonging to a certain group. There is much more to say on this topic, including transgender speech as well as lexicon, politicization, and how these traits change over time, but this is just a brief outline.
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1300: New Modals: finna Jul 2, 2018
As has been discussed on the blog before, there are certain categories of word which tend themselves easily to the creation of new terms, and others which don't. It is usually easy to make new verbs that become widely used, but some types of verbs, such as modal verbs especially relevant for today are not. These verb include 'would', 'could' and 'might', and have very clear and deep-rooted Germanic links, changing little over time. A new word however, 'finna' is an example of a rare, new modal verb. The origins of the word come from 'fixing to' in African American English as an equivalent to 'going to', and indeed morphed into 'finna' on the same pattern as 'gonna' and 'wanna'.
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1299: What is the Closest Descendant of Latin? Jul 1, 2018
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1298: california Jun 30, 2018
Looking at old map of the Americas, Spanish speaking colonists originally believed California (including Baja California) was an island, after sailing up only part of the Gulf of California. For a very long time, this was the accepted geography, and while there are certainly interesting cartographical ramifications, that is for another blog. What is relevant is that because it was considered to be an island by the Spanish, and the name 'California' was given based on a fantasy-island in the popular romance novel "Las Sergas de Esplandián'. In the island in the novel, the island was one east of Asia, and populated by black women, similar to the Amazons in this mythology way. This was not the case of course, but the name stuck.
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1297: Oligosynthetic Languages pt. 3 (ConLangs) Jun 29, 2018
In this third and final post in this short series about oligosynthetic languages, which you can see more about in the link. All Oligosynthetic languages classified as such are all invented languages, generally with the idea of simplicity in mind. A few examples of these include Ygyde, Sona, and Newspeak. Toki pona is a language developed with only 120 words, though now an additional 3 have been added. This language relies on a great deal of inferences, context, but also compounding such that a word like 'coffee' might appear as something equivalent to 'hot brown liquid'. This language however was created not in order to be for complicated communication, but for easy-to-learn language for business and other activities like that.
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1296: Oligosynthetic Languages pt. 2 (In Nature) Jun 28, 2018
It was discussed yesterday how the highly, even unrealistically minimalistic variety of languages known as 'oligosynthetic' could probably not exist in natural languages, but there was a time when some thought otherwise. Languages including Nahuatl, spoken by the Aztecs and their descendants, as well as Blackfoot, also known as Siksiká, have at one time or another been claimed to be oligosynthetic in some way or another. These ideas are now discredited, and these languages, like most in the Americas, are considered to be polysynthetic. Polysynthetic language may appear from first glance to be opposite to oligosynthetic languages, given that they have extremely complex morphosyntactic systems, but actually both rely on a level of compounding which would put German or Turkish to shame.
Examples of what could be considered oligosynthetic languages will be the topic for tomorrow.
1295: Oligosynthetic Languages pt. 1 Jun 27, 2018
Depending upon how much information can be added to words in a given language morphologically, for example with verbal suffixes that show the information about the subject such as in Spanish, a language is places on a scale; if a language is analytic then there is little morphology, and the most a language can be is polysynthetic. However, there is one group which uses even less morphology, but these only exist in made up languages. A so called oligosynthetic language is one with very few morphemes whatsoever, but it is necessary to point out that this also includes words, as well as affixes and anything else, so a language like Mandarin, with almost no affixes is still not oligosynthetic because it has many words that exist on their own. Oligosynthetic languages are therefore considered to be only theoretically possible, and would require a level of compounding which is not necessarily practical for day-to-day usage, as this might amount to even more combination than using a polysynthetic language!
There will be more about this tomorrow, looking at some examples.