1369: Learning off Old Materials Sep 10, 2018

Following of yesterday's post, a necessary element of living languages is that they change. So while this poses a challenge for revival efforts, this is most often an issue for people interested in studying a language with few speakers and or little documentation. Famously this was a challenge for those studying Dyirbal, which within a generation changed to become unintelligible, and records needed to be almost entirely remade, but even in popularly learned languages, this can can be a challenge. Usually, unlike with Young Dyirbal, the grammar doesn't change significantly, but enough of lexicon may alter that someone learning off of old materials may come across as stilted.

1368: Living vs. Merely Revived Sep 9, 2018

One thing that separates Modern Hebrew from Cornish is that it changed. Like any second language learner will know, sometimes the textbook-version of a language will be technically correct but sound odd to native language speakers. This is because languages are constantly evolving, and the writers of language learning tools can both only work so fast, and want to try to follow patterns more closely than otherwise. When efforts to revive a language take place, one thing everyone involved must keep in mind is that the original form of the language should not be identical to what's being taught. This, in large part, is why even when languages like Cornish or Latin are taught to people—including children—they are still considered dead, but Hebrew is living; only a living language can evolve.

1367: Rearranging Sentences around Pronouns Sep 8, 2018

English speakers have no problem with impersonal pronouns like 'it' such as "it is raining". While the word-order in most sentences with a predicate adjective (one after a form of 'to be') can be switched even if it sounded a bit peculiar or archaic to fit different syntactic structures, such as "a man is foolish who..." and "it is a foolish man who". This is not a hard rule however, because while many sentences demand an impersonal pronoun, just about any iteration of the above sentence is possible, such as in "foolish is the man who never reads a newspaper" (-August von Schlözer) though this may not be the most common.

1366: merry and mirth Sep 7, 2018

One of the reasons oft cited for the maintenance of English's inconsistent orthography is history, and while this leads to clues of etymology that would otherwise be difficult to recognize, sometimes it is less helpful. For instance, the word 'merry' is related to the word 'mirth'. Think about the meaning this should seem reasonable, and moreover, 'merry' is an adjective with an adjectival suffix, and seeing a noun with a nominal suffix from the same root should make sense. However, the spelling is not indicative of this, making the confusing spelling in English have less significance perhaps.

1365: Discrimination: Names Sep 6, 2018

There are many different ways to categorize verbs. There are head verbs, main verbs, infinitives, small verbs, etc, but sometimes even tricker to wrap one's head around is the difference between intransitive, transitive, and ditransitive verbs. The first cannot take a direct object, such as how nothing can be either 'smiled' or 'slept', and transitive verbs do have the ability to take one, sometimes necessarily for semantic reasons. Ditransitive are the rarest, and can take two direct objects such as 'gave' in "he gave the man the paper".

1364: Transitivity in Verbs Sep 5, 2018

There are many different ways to categorize verbs. There are head verbs, main verbs, infinitives, small verbs, etc, but sometimes even tricker to wrap one's head around is the difference between intransitive, transitive, and ditransitive verbs. The first cannot take a direct object, such as how nothing can be either 'smiled' or 'slept', and transitive verbs do have the ability to take one, sometimes necessarily for semantic reasons. Ditransitive are the rarest, and can take two direct objects such as 'gave' in "he gave the man the paper".

1363: Different From, Different To, and Different Than September 4, 2018

The word 'synonym' can sometimes be misleading, as while words may mean the same as each other according to a dictionary, one will likely be more popular, or hold additional connotation for a slew of reasons. For instance, on paper, 'different from', different to' and 'different than' are all essentially the same, but in practice this is not the case. 'Different from' has traditionally been the most common and the most accepted, so while 'different to' may mean the same thing, its relative rarity—especially in America—makes it sound jarring to some. 'Different than' is growing in popularity in part by exposure, but also that it can more freely allow another clause to follow, and therefore lends itself better to a variety of sentences and structures.

1362: Future of Spelling Sep 3, 2018

Back in the days of Chaucer or Shakespeare, orthography represented the way that people spoke at the time far better than English writers do now, due to very old conventions that may seem too far along to change. Nevertheless, there is some modification even today. Words like ‘through’ an led ‘though’ are often spelt ‘thru’ and ‘tho’ respectively. Moreover, American spellings still differ someone from British ones to be slightly ore apt. Even words like ‘queensboro’ for the so-named bridge in Queens, NY uses ‘boro’ rather than ‘borough’, with seemingly extra letters.

1361: Literary Influences on Estonian Sep 2, 2018

We can say that Shakespeare had a great deal of influence on English, but this is not nearly as significant as the influence that other poets and writers have had on other languages, like on Estonian. The modern standard dialect was heavily influenced by a reformer, Johannes Aavik, in the 1880's who thought that the language needed to be more beautiful and added more vowels to some of the words. He also created a dictionary of Estonian and included many words that he made up from no other etymological background than his own imagination. These words, even as common as 'naasma' ('to return') and 'ese' ('object') are still now widely used. For more on this, visit this link.

1360: Swine and Pig Sep 1, 2018

There are lots of fairly obscure words used to describe animals, including scientific names, terms of venery, or even meat-names sometimes. ‘Swine’ is different though, because while it is generally more general than ‘pig’ it is not the scientific name (genus of ‘sus’) or the name for meat, ‘pork’, or even the adjective ‘porcine’. ‘Pig’ though is also general, not referring to only one species, so ‘swine’ is a rare example of a synonym for an animal that doesn’t differ by its language of origins either.

1359: False Linguistic History Aug 31, 2018

Linguistics—like any discipline—is a subject to bias and agendas. It has been discussed before how many early philologists tried to relate Hebrew, Greek, and Latin for religious reasons, but scholars also tried to relate New World languages to other European languages. By comparing selectively chosen words and few aspects of grammar, some early linguists made claims that some of the early inhabitants of the Americas were, for instance, Norwegians. While is some historical basis for this idea, this is not true to that extent, and is simply Eurocentric in nature. Most linguists at the time dismissed many of these types of idea, however.

1358: Numerical Punctuation Aug 30, 2018

Like the quotation mark, the symbols (.) and (,) in mathematics used for separating numbers visually are used differently in different cultures, even though it was not always this way. In most parts of Europe, the (,) is used to separate decimals from whole numbers, and the (.) is used to separate groups of 3-digits to make long numbers easier to interpret; in the US and Britain this is the exact opposite. The reason for this is that multiplication sign (•) was commonly confused for (.), but since English people still largely used (X) for showing multiplication, the British continued with this practice, as is typical for most places outside of Europe.

1357: Reversed Order of Adjectives pt. 2 Aug 29, 2018

As mentioned the other day, adjectives can be placed after a noun in English for various reasons. Sometimes is structural but sometimes it's lexical, such as in the difference between 'a special someone' (adjective first) and 'someone special' (adjective final). This level of flexibility is unusual, given that nouns are not often modified this way, and relative and personal pronouns aren't modified at all usually. There are a few theories as to why this would be, but given that this is true for similar pronouns like 'anyone', 'everyone', and 'everything', it is generally chalked up to the relative dissociation that people feel to these compared to other nouns.

1356: tart Aug 28, 2018

Nice or sweet things historically are often corrupted lexically to refer to women, and are often demeaning. 'Sweetie', and 'sweetheart' are good examples, and even even the word 'whore' is related through an Indo-European root to the Latin 'carus' meaning 'dear'. 'Tart' might seem as if, like 'honey' or other words for things that taste sweet, the word was applied to women as related to the food, but it is actually believed to be a shortening of the word 'sweetheart', despite initial similarity.

To see a Patreon exclusive about the word 'dear' and 'darling (and much more), you can become a patron and see it here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/dear-darling-8-15775404?utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook&utm_campaign=postshare

Why Smells don't have Names

1355: scent and sense Aug 27, 2018

Phonetically, the words 'scents' and 'sense' can be difficult to distinguish, but this is also characteristic of the words' history. The word 'sense' comes from the Latin 'sensus' (participle of 'sentire') meaning 'feeling', originally denoting touch but then being expanded to all senses. 'Scent' also comes from 'sentire'—which explains the [t]—but in Old French it came to mean 'to smell'. No one is quite sure why there is a C in the spelling. Throughout history, smell has taken a backseat to other senses, which you can learn about in the video below.
https://youtu.be/3zz9Hf2KUbg

1354: Reversed Order of Adjectives pt 1 Aug 26, 2018

The order of adjectives in English is usually talked about as a mostly consistent process, and no matter what, the adjective comes before the noun; the few exceptions like 'attorney general' are all from French. This idea is usually true, especially in simpler constructions, but it is not difficult to find structural ways around this. First, there are linking verbs; "the dog is happy", but other verbs have similar abilities, such as 'declare' "he declared the situation safe". This is only a sample of the way that exceptions to this idea exist in English, and this will be explored further over this next week.
Check out the latest Word Facts Video (or the other 14): https://youtu.be/4eUju3z57Ng and support Word Facts on Patreon for a podcast and even more about language: https://www.patreon.com/wordfacts

1353: Passival pt. 4: Head Verbs Aug 25, 2018

With words to describe observation in English (e.g. 'smell'; 'look'; 'feel') there is an unusual ability that they can describe both the action of the observer and the observed. For instance, "he felt the cloth" uses a standard sentence-structure, but "the cloth felt soft" refers to the man feeling, but is not grammatically passive. Compare this with "the man touched the cloth" but not *"the cloth touched soft" and you will see just how strange this quality is. This is another example of the passival, a type of voice that is active in construction but passive in meaning.

1352: Syntactic Ambiguity: Adverbs Aug 24, 2018

English usually has a pretty strict order for its sentences, but adverbs and other adjuncts can move about just about anywhere in a sentence. Sometimes this changes the meaning, such as in the famous example: "only I love you" versus "I only love you", but in most sentences where the meaning is unaffected, the tendency is to place only as early on as possible, usually right before the verb. However, as was shown clearly above, there can be varied meanings and misunderstandings are bound to occur. Generally, adjuncts are most effective and clearly understood when placed just before the emphasis. In "I saw her only once" versus "I only saw her once", the former indicates that there was only one occurrences of seeing her whereas the latter allows for the possibility that she was perceived in other ways: heard, felt, or otherwise.

Check out the latest Word Facts Video (or the other 14): https://youtu.be/4eUju3z57Ng and support Word Facts on Patreon for a podcast and even more about language: https://www.patreon.com/wordfacts

1351: Syntactic Ambiguity: Same Meanings Aug 23, 2018

Lexical and syntactic ambiguity have been discussed here several times, but there are ways for a sentence to be syntactically ambiguous but only have one essential meaning. In the sentence, "I went out to lunch", it is not clear necessarily whether 'lunch' is a verb or a noun. In this case 'to' can indicate that 'lunch' is an infinitive verb, or be a preposition and refer to 'lunch' as a place where lunch is eaten. There is no way to be sure, but ultimately it is the same meaning.