1350: Declaring a Language Dead Aug 22, 2018

A language can be considered dead when only one native speaker remains. This may seem like nothing more than a technicality, but the somewhat-counterintuitive idea highlights a great deal about how language is used. While that last speaker—or anyone else for that matter—could teach the language to others this wouldn't be natively learned and would therefore be approached with a level of dissonance; it wouldn't be the language of one's thoughts. Moreover, languages are principally for communication, so not only can this no longer be achieved fully, but there could be no reasonable expectation for change in the way that truly living languages morph over time.
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1349: Additions to German Compounds Aug 21, 2018

German is known—fairly or unfairly—for having long nominal compounds. These are by no means the longest words possible in a language, nor are they any different from English compounds grammatically, but they do allow for something which does not happen in English. Occasionally, certain German compounds will insert an extra sound, often [s], [e], [n] or a combination of the, in between two elements being compounded together. For instance, 'Maus' and 'Falle' become 'Mausefalle' ('mousetrap'), 'Bauer' and 'Brot' becomes 'Bauernbrot' (farm-bread), and 'Staat' and 'Polizei' becomes 'Staatspolizei'. Although these are sometimes inconsistent, they do make it easier to pronounce frequently-used German compounds rather than inserting a glottal stop as would likely happen otherwise.
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1348: Hakuna Matata Aug 20, 2018

The kiSwahili phrase that was popularized in the West by The Lion King, "hakuna matata" does mean "no worries", but if one were to try and translate 'no' into kiSwahili, the word might appear as 'hapana'. This is because some languages distinguish between 'no' for quantities, and as an exclamation, such as in the German 'nein' ('no', the exclamation) and 'kein' ('no' for quantities), or the above example from kiSwahili where 'hakuna' is only for quantities. Other languages, like English (no) and Finnish (ei), use the same word for both.

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1347: salem Aug 19, 2018

In the United States, and other places with deep-rooted colonial histories, the names for towns, cities, and other areas come largely from either being named after somewhere older, native names, or being named after the physical geography (e.g. there are as many as 41 places in the US called 'Springfield'). However, there are also 26 Salem's, most notably of the Salem Witch Trials in Massachusetts, and the capital of Oregon. While there are places in Europe with this name, these are few and all with small populations. Rather, 'Salem' comes from Genesis, said to be another name for 'Jerusalem' and from the same root as 'shalom': 'peace'. In the mid-19th century, the Baptists and Methodists began using the term to refer to their meeting places, and so the name stuck in a few towns and cities, almost all of which are in America.

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1346: wild goose chase Aug 18, 2018

If one were to look up the etymology of the phrase "wild goose chase" by looking into the word 'goose', that would probably be a wild goose chase of its own. The term actually referred originally to a sport in which a line of horsemen would follow one rider, in a way that was thought to resemble a flock of geese—or other birds—that fly in a way to utilize wind-drag. Moreover, the 'wild' in question is a bastardization of the earlier 'wold', which referred to a type of woodland.
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1345: kaiser Aug 17, 2018

Even though the Norse were never colonized by the Romans, there was still linguistic influence that the Romans had on the West and North Germanic tribes. In the early centuries of the Dark Ages in Europe, Latin—or recognizable variants thereof—was still spoken in former provinces of Rome. The Norse people were in close contact with some of these peoples, most notably creating the Normans: French speakers descended from Vikings. This is how the title ‘Kaiser’ is the Germanic title for an emperor (and not ‘König’) has roots in Old Norse—‘ keisari’—but comes from the Latin ‘Caesar’, with related words in Middle English and Dutch too.

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1344: but Aug 16, 2018

The conjunction 'but' is now used is so many ways that to define it any other way than as simply 'introducing clauses to be contrastive'. The word originated in Old English as 'be-ūtan' meaning 'without' or 'except', and it took a while for it to be used to introduce new clauses with the frequency it can now. The line in Shakespeare's Macbeth that ends with "that but this blow might be the be-all and the end-all here, but here, upon this bank and shoal of time, we’d jump the life to come" contains the two usages in question, the former sounding far more archaic and perhaps rarer than the latter, but in its early-days, that was the more common sense.
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Is Math a Universal Language?

1343: Importance of Non-Regular Verbs Aug 15, 2018

Of the top 10 most commonly used verbs, all of them are either irregular or strong verbs. Some of the ones on this list: be; have; do; say; get; make; go; know; take; see; come; think have been discussed here before, but notably 'have', 'make', and some others only became strong later, going from 'haved' and 'maked' becoming 'made' and 'had' respectively. The regularity of regular verbs requires less memorization and allows for easier adoption from other languages, but strong verbs that are used often enough for the forms to be simplified and reinforced are some of the most constant and reliable verbs in English.

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1342: Woke Aug 14, 2018

The word 'woke' as a pejorative has become fairly popular in the last decade, and in particular with the widespread use of the Internet, but it's use as a term for social awareness dates back much further. The earliest-known use is from 1962, found in a list of words one might come across in Harlem at the time. This indicates that 'woke' in this sense was used in presumably black communities even earlier, though at that time, there was much less of an ability for the word to enter popular lexicon than there is now.
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1341: math and aftermath Aug 13, 2018

The first entry for 'math' in many dictionaries begins with the definition as a verb meaning 'to mow' rather than 'mathematics'. By frequency 'math' as 'mathematics' is used more often, but there are more words derived from the meaning as 'to mow', so it is number one. Included in these would be 'day's math', 'undermath' and 'lattermath', all of which are nouns, and all are fairly rare. The only one that is more common is 'aftermath', which is not related to 'mathematics' at all, and refers to a field after it has been mowed.
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1340: mint and money Aug 12, 2018

The production of coins goes back millennia, and it is because of these old traditions that certain currency-related words exist as they do today. Even though they do not look particularly similar, both 'money' and 'mint' (as in coining) come from the same word; originally named after the goddess 'Juno Moneta', because it was in a temple to Juno where coins were minted. Each word evolved somewhat divergently, but there is still some notable resemblance.

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1339: Why Latin was Liturgical Aug 11, 2018

Latin, especially Ecclesiastical Latin, is often associated with Christianity, but it took a non-Roman to do it. Back in the early centuries of Christianity, the religion spread throughout all of the Roman Empire, and this included Berbers of North Africa. The Roman elites at the time stuck with Greek as the liturgical language, but in the 2nd century North Africans used Latin. The 14th Pope, Victor I (pope 189-199) was a Carthaginian Roman, and in many ways introduced Latin to Christianity, which subsequently became the dominant liturgical language in Europe for more than a millennium.
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1338: Acrostics Aug 10, 2018

There are a lot of similarities between initialisms and acronyms, but also there is sometimes confusion between those and acrostics too. While all of them take the first letters (or slightly more) from a series of words and create a mnemonic, what separates them are the outcomes. Initialisms are the simplest wherein only the letters are said, such as F.B.I. and acronyms make up their own words. Acrostics are very similar to acronyms in that it makes a word, but only one that already existed.

1337: leech Aug 9, 2018

Historically, leeches were an animal that doctors and physicians often used medicinally. In Old English in fact, the word for 'doctor', 'remedy', and 'leech' were all the same: lǣċe. This is only because a word thought to approximate *lēgios was the Proto Indo-European for 'doctor' or 'medicine', and this was then applied to the animal 'leech', as these were a popular type of medicine. Indeed, while similar-sounding words for doctor crop up over lots of these such Indo-European words today, in most Germanic languages and Romanian, the name was applied to the animal.

1336: Jamais-vu Aug 8, 2018

People have all sorts of shorthands for laypeople to express the less-usual psychological processes that one may experience, including ‘déjà-vu’, ‘tip-of-the-tongue’ or ‘baader-meinhof phenomenon'. Related to all of these is the less-commonly used ‘jamais-vu’, which describes the feeling of familiarity to something completely new. This is not strictly linguistic, and is sometimes associated with amnesia and epilepsy, but often people will describe this sense as it relates to newly learned words, or words repeated ad nauseam.

1335: Welsh in Patagonia Aug 7, 2018

The best ways to preserve a language spoken by a population are to have relative isolation and institutions to support it. This is how Welsh is still spoken in a Patagonia, where the community has resided for 150 years. In the towns of Trelew and Trevelin there are three schools taught at least partly in Welsh, which gives the community a boost in terms of making sure that the language won't simply die out, and will have some more practical uses. While it is true that just about all of that community also speaks Spanish, the relative separation that that region provides from larger areas also makes the language less likely to be abandoned by that one community, unlike what may happen in a larger city.
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1334: Overt Prestige Aug 6, 2018

People change the way they speak to fit in with small groups, as was described yesterday, but the reverse happens as well. If one way of speaking, be it pronunciation, lexicon or whatever else, those overtly prestigious variables can help to make anyone sound of higher status, whatever that might mean in the context of the conversation. Going back and forth between manners of speaking is called ‘code-switching’. Women are far more likely to chance the way that they speak to use overt prestige than men, as traditionally there were fewer ways for women to elevate their statuses if they were not in the workforce.
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1333: Covert Prestige Aug 5, 2018

Accents are relatively easy to impersonate, but they also change subconsciously. As people move around in different groups, be it by age, gender, socioeconomic, geography, etc., the way they would speak changes to become more accommodating. The variable here is "covert prestige": when way of using language is seen as more useful in a certain group. Politicians are often criticised for modifying their accents or lexicons depending upon where they are, but most of the time this goes on unnoticed by the speaker. Another key factor for triggering this switch is formality, and this will be talked about tomorrow.
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1332: Palindromes Aug 4, 2018

As this is the 1331st Word Facts post, the focus of today is on palindromes.
Conceptually these are pretty straightforward: something with the same spelling read in either direction; it is usally a word, but can refer to numbers, music, etc.. There are also other forms of constrained speech which use lines of symmetries, such as word-squares, which is an acrostic that reads the same left-to-right as up-to-down. One famous example found in Pompeii even depicts a word-square that is also a meaningful palindrome from Latin, generally thought to mean something to the effect of "the farmer uses a wheel for his work".
SATOR
AREPO
TENET
OPERA
ROTAS

Normal palindromes, however, can be single words, like 'civic', phrases like 'racecar', numbers such as 1331, or be whole sentences, such as Peter Hilton's "Doc, note: I dissent. A fast never prevents a fatness. I diet on cod". To see more about the etymology of this word, check out this link.
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