1427: embassy and ambassy Nov 7, 2018
Looking at the history of spelling in English, there is a tendency for spelling to be less consistent in some ways over time. This happens especially when it is difficult to draw certain distinctions, either concerning affixes or other sounds that would otherwise follow a pattern. This is the case with 'embassy' but the related 'ambassador'. Historically the word was written 'ambassy' but as this word changed, 'ambassador' did not change with it. However, even if they do represent different sounds (and this is not necessarily the case) the two do sound very similar before an [m].
1426: East Germanic Languages Nov 6, 2018
Today there are only two main branches of Germanic languages, West Germanic and North Germanic, but there used to also be East Germanic languages. Unfortunately for scholars, the only one of which written samples are found is Gothic. Certainly there were other Germanic languages known to be spoken in Estonia and parts of Russia, but these were all usually German or Yiddish speaking immigrants. There were theoretically dozens of identified tribes who could have used different East Germanic languages. In this way, while the concept of "write or die" exists now in academia, this same principle applies to languages.
1425: baron Nov 5, 2018
Over time, the meaning of words often reverses. These contranyms like 'liberal' and 'peruse' often goes unnoticed. 'Baron' is another of these terms. It originally referred to a type of lord in British nobility, but the term referred to the lowest order. Now, it doesn't refer to land-owning nobility, but instead a very important person in business. Not only has the connotation moved away from nobility, but a baron nowadays is by no means thought of as the lowest order in business, and is usually assigned to quite successful, influential people.
1424: Short and Long Scales Nov 4, 2018
The values of numbers are absolute, but the scales and terminology are not always the same. Largely this is cultural, and is part of the reason that the day, or even geometric circles are divided the way they are. Even with larger numbers there are two scales: the long and short scales. These use a base a base-ten system, so are roughly similar, but the short scale—the more common of the two—uses powers of one thousand (i.e. a 'billion' is a thousand millions) whereas the long scale uses powers of a million. In this scale a 'milliard' is a thousand millions, and a 'billion' is a million millions, so it increases with 'million', 'milliard', 'billion', billiard' etc. This is no longer popular in English, but some languages like German use this system.
1423: Candelabrum or Candelabra Nov 3, 2018
Even though English adopts so many words as easily as it does, no language tends to adopt the morphology with it. For all the words with Latin plurals, like 'flagella' to 'flagella', there are many more words that have become anglicized. However, there are a few for which neither is quite true, such as 'candelabra'. The traditional singular is 'candelabrum' with 'candelabra' as the plural, but in practice it is often singular, with 'candelabras' as the plural. This is now the more common usage, with it now becoming standard. This is true of other words like 'bacterium' and 'datum', but not necessarily to the same extent.
1422: hebrew and the letter h Nov 2, 2018
It is argued that there are no irreligious words that have come to English directly from Hebrew. This is because of geographic distance, but also because for most of Hebrew's history, nothing that could be called English today existed. These factors combined mean that any few words there are usually went through languages like Greek first. Interestingly, neither word for 'Hebrew' in Old French—the language from which the English word was directly loaned—or the original Hebrew '‘iḇrî' had the [h]; most French words don't allow this anyway, but 'Ebreu' wasn't even spelt with one. Nevertheless, both the late Greek and modern English words, relevantly, do. There isn't a specific reason for this—there never really would be—but it could just have been a switch from a glottal stop to an [h], which isn't historically uncommon.
1421: chauvinist Nov 1, 2018
It isn't uncommon for words to come from names like 'john' or 'dolly', but usually these have to be very general. A few specific words, however, come from very particular source, such as 'chauvinistic'. This word, describing an extreme, blind sort of patriotism, as characterized by Nicolas Chauvin, a Napoleonic veteran, in the play 'Cocarde Tricolore' (1831) by the Cogniard brothers.
1420: Real Words from Sci Fi Oct 31, 2018
It's much easier to introduce meaning to an old word than to make a new one. This is true of words in the sci fi genre that have since become common parlance. A few words like this include terms like 'deep space', 'zero-gravity', and arguably 'robotics'. All of these come from fictional works in the 1930's and 1941, and to varying extents, scientists have embraced all of these in an official capacity. The reason that 'robotics' is debatable here is that 'robot' is a much older word, but the first known use with the suffix comes from Liar!, written by Isaac Asimov. In this way, it is a bit like how Shakespeare created words.
1419: practitioner but no practition Oct 30, 2018
The suffix '-er' is very productive, meaning that it can lead to the creation of many news words. With words like 'practitioner' however, this is a sort of overproduction, because there is no 'practition'; there is the term 'practicer', but this is not quite the same as 'practitioner' really. In this case, 'practition' never existed, but 'practician' did. The problem here is that 'practician', which is a synonym of 'practitioner' as it refers to a person, is the origin, but it is not as simple as just adding the suffix in the ordinary way, as this would have been redundant. Rather, it is just a way in which language evolved over time, not always so sensibly.
1418: Verbal 'friend' and Nominal 'react' Oct 29, 2018
Usually, a top-down approach to language change doesn't work; it's why people still end sentences with prepositions for instance, or indeed why we don't speak Old English. It could be argued that this can happen when something popular enough introduces a new way of using language. Famously, 'friend' is now a verb due to Facebook, and while 'befriend' is still used for non-virtual connections, its use is quickly adopted and now quite pervasive. It is not all Facebook's doing however, as the usual phrase was "added as a friend" and things to this effect even on the website; likewise, the increasingly popular nominal 'react' (as in sort of a codified reaction) is now in use, but not because this is how the website began to speak about the feature. In this way, the perpetuation of these words is now encouraged by the website in a way that traditional grammar-books could envy, but it didn't begin with Facebook alone.
1417: West Germanic Mutual Intelligibility Oct 28, 2018
Ask a monolingual speaker of Dutch, German, Yiddish, Frisian, or even Afrikaans could probably understand a good amount of what a speaker of any of the other three was saying as these are all West Germanic Languages. However, when it comes to English, which is also West Germanic language, there is not that same intelligibility. The vocabulary is saturated with far more French- and Latin-based words, and even North Germanic words. However, this is not the only reason. It is generally the case that isolated peoples' languages will develop very separately, but moreover, those Germanic tribes who settled Britain did so, often before the other languages split off from each other. This is how Frisian is the closest related language to English today, and yet a Dutch speaker would have an equally difficult, perhaps even easier time understanding.
1416: What isn't a 'Textbook Language' Oct 27, 2018
1415: Loanwords with Different Meanings Oct 26, 2018
Just because something is a loan word does not mean that it has the same meaning or at least connotations. This happens for a variety of reasons. Sometimes it is because the original meaning is not relevant as a loanword, as is the case with 'kamikaze' (read more at the link). The Japanese meaning had nothing to do with war necessarily, but in English it got adopted to describe a military practice that had previously no single word to describe it. In other cases, words can gain or lose emotional meaning without being totally mistranslated. For instance, 'mensh' ('מענטש') in English refers to a good, commendable person, where as in Yiddish it only means 'person', with no innate quality implied, but often these loanwords are either misunderstood, or bilingual speakers use them for emotive effects and misinterpreted.
1414: V and W in Foreign Proper Nouns Oct 25, 2018
There are lots of Indonesian words with the letter V, but many of these are foreign loan words. Those that aren't, like the place-names 'Java' or 'Sri Vijaya' are natively pronounced with the V as the sound [w]. The name Java especially however gets mispronounced by English speakers due to the spelling, but the opposite is also true of words from, for instance, Polish and German wherein English speakers often pronounce W as a [v] even in proper nouns, like Warsaw, which is natively pronounced [varʂava].
1413: Rhoticity's Relationship with Vocality Oct 24, 2018
Rhoticity is defined as the quality of r "pronounced before a consonant...and at the ends of words" but this slightly problematic. The idea that in non-rhotic dialects r is not pronounced is only true in that an r is not articulated, but it is not completely deleted either. For instance, Standard British English is more vocalic than Standard American because rather than inserting a consonantal r, speakers of British English would simply lengthen the amount of time that the vowel is produced. This has the effect that the ratio of time spent producing vowels is higher in British English than American in general, so the perceived r is certainly noticeable, and does has an effect on pronunciation that would not otherwise be present.
1412: Why Languages Have More Consonants Oct 23, 2018
There is no innate rule or biological limitation, but languages will have more consonants than vowels. Even in extreme cases as with Andoke—a Columbian language—there are 10 consonants and 9 vowel qualities, which is still the majority. The reason for this, in part, can be seen in the fact that there are very few fronted rounded vowels (try moving your tongue in position saying 'tea' but round your lips as you would to say 'too'). This vowel, and others like it, do exist in other languages, but are sometimes difficult to distinguish, both by the listener, but also the speaker. Some languages have as few as 2 vowel qualities.
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1411: Indonesian Loanwords Oct 22, 2018
An estimated 42% of Indonesian loanwords are from Dutch, but some 21% come from English. The Dutch controlled Indonesia for 123 years so the first statistic makes sense, but no English speaking group has had that same ability. While it is true that it is often difficult to decipher whether loanwords are originally Dutch or English as these are both so similar, these English loanwords came almost exclusively from foreign media and a global emphasis on trade which is English-based. It is so useful that not only is it used for trade but vocabulary has also seeped its way into everyday speech.
1410: brute and guru Oct 21, 2018
It is not uncommon that certain pairs of sounds will replace each other over time in some etymologies. This tends to happen for instance between [b] and [p], but with enough time it is possible to have some shared etymology that hinges on [b] and [g]. For instance 'brute' is related through a Proto-Indo-European root to 'guru'. 'Guru' is from Sanskrit but cognates in other languages like the Ancient Greek βαρύς (barús) help to show some of the transitions over time. The relation between [t] and [ɾ] makes enough sense given that this happens in English (e.g. 'butt' with [t] but 'butter' with [ɾ] in American English). The [b]-[g] relationship is less typical but over enough time and across languages this is not so unsurprising to have big differences somewhere. It is really only a coincidence that in English 'guru' denotes a sort of expert but a 'brute' conveys insensibility or idiocy.
1409: brute and brutus Oct 20, 2018
1408: Development of Affirmation in Romance Languages
Latin doesn't really have a word for 'yes', and yet modern Romance language that descended from Latin do. In Spanish the word 'sí' and in Italian the very similar 'sì' also means 'yes', but the former comes from the Latin 'si' meaning 'if' and the latter derives from the Latin 'sīc (est)' meaning 'thus (it is)', so are therefore unrelated. Moreover, in French, 'oui' comes from 'hoc' meaning 'that', and moreover Occitan uses the word 'òc'; likewise the Portuguese 'isso' also comes from a Latin word for 'that', but a different one. In this way, Spanish and Italian's words for 'yes' sound the closest but are really not at all related. The etymology of the Romanian 'da' is debated, with some saying it is from a Slavic origin while others say it comes from the Latin 'ita' which means 'therefore'. As you can see, none are really from the same origin even though they (may) all be from Latin.