1447: 'The' in Countries' Names Nov 27, 2018
'The' in the names of countries does happen sometimes, but it is usually purposeful. In the case of 'The Netherlands', it is named so because of the flat area, especially compared to the German highlands, even though in German the name is simply 'Niederlande' without the article before. With Ukraine, often said as 'the Ukraine' in English, this is because the name derives from the meaning of 'borderland' and so while 'the Ukraine' has never been official, it caught on and stuck. In the case of the Philippines, there is less of a reason now, but originally the Spanish name was Las Islas Filipinas, and so while now no name for the nation includes overt reference to the islands, there is a sort of covert reference.
1446: Origin of 'humble pie' Nov 26, 2018
It's not such a bad thing to be humbled generally, but 'eating humble pie' used to actually refer to food. The 'humble' in question came from an earlier 'numbles' or sometimes 'umbles' which denoted the entrails of a deer. These would be given out to the lowest status people to eat, so while for a wealthy or noble person to eat numbles pie would be a humbling experience, this word was only used in the phrase as it is today because of similar sounds and later misunderstanding completely. There will be more on this tomorrow.
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1444: acadia and cajun Nov 24, 2018
In the US and Canada, many of the place names either come from native words, are named after places in the Old World, or were named as a description of the land; in at least one case however, it may be all of those. The name for the French colonies in North America (mostly modern-day Quebec and some surrounding areas) was called 'Acadia' ('Acadie'). It is not totally certain where this comes from though. Likely, this comes from the ancient Greek city Arkadía (Ἀρκαδία) described in pastoral poetry. However, it is also not unlikely that the word comes from the native Mi'kmaq word 'akadie' meaning 'fertile land'. In situations like this, one could have reinforced the other, depending upon the initial intentions, but no matter what, this is also where the word 'Cajun' comes from, as the Louisianan French mostly migrated from Canadian colonies, but kept the name.
1445: shrewsbury and shropshire Nov 25, 2018
Though not always the case, it is common that English counties will just be named for their county towns' names. Often this is with adding the suffix '-shire', as with 'Oxford' to 'Oxfordshire', or 'Worcester' to 'Worcestershire'. There are exceptions, both to the suffixes and to the names totally, but in a few cases the county may still end in '-shire' but the county town is unrelated. Usually this is because of the historical county town no longer holding power, but in the case of 'Shropshire', there is not nor has there ever been a 'Shrop'. The demonym is 'Salopian' and the county town is 'Shrewsbury', but initially in Old English the county was 'Scrobbesbyrigscīr'; note that 'sc' in Old English is [ʃk] (like SHk). While 'Salop' comes from the Norman interpretation of this name too, 'Scrobbe'—which was probably a personal name—only became 'Shrews(bury)' through the sounds changing somewhat over a long time.
1443: -ic and -ous Nov 23, 2018
The number of adjectival or nominal suffixes may sometimes feel gratuitous; in theory it would only be necessary to have one or two. However, unlike with ‘depth’ and the newer ‘deepness’, not all of these are so flexible or so random. For instance, ‘sulfurous’ and ‘sulfuric’ both mean, broadly speaking, ‘of sulfur’, yet these two are not totally interchangeable. In the names of chemicals, ‘-ic’ denotes a higher valence for the element; that is to say it denotes how easily it can combine with other particles. This is true of lots of other elements as well, where ‘-ous’ is used for both general use and for denoting lower valence, but ‘-ic’ is for a specific type.
1442: rust and rustic Nov 22, 108
Suffixes can have lots of different meanings, but due to English's history, sometimes they can seem quite random. For instance, '-ic' is a productive adjectival suffix that can be added to nouns like 'artist' and 'artistic', or 'sulfur' to 'sulfuric' (more on this tomorrow). In the case of 'rust' and 'rustic' however, there isn't a relation. 'Rust' comes from a word meaning 'red' and is shared with many other words that relate to clay-like dirt, including 'rubric', but 'rustic' does not. However, while 'rust' was from a Germanic root, 'rustic' comes from the Latin meaning 'countryside', related to 'rural'. It is possibly that these words share a very old derivation, but either way, the appearance in English is only coincidental now.
1441: Semantic Transfer: point and prick Nov 21, 2018
People are very good at finding patterns and other relations such that any overlapping connotation an idea has can be tacked onto the relevant word. Like how 'point' can denote a specific position, ideologically or physically and geographically, but originally had the meaning of something that tapers sharply, 'pick' came from 'prick'. Indeed, both 'point' and 'pick' mean 'something being pointed to' or 'something being pricked' (i.e. gestured at by poking). This sort of semantic transfer will naturally happen over time in any language.
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1440: -lect: Formal Combining Forms Nov 20, 2018
There are many times when a commonly used word will lead to the creation of other words. For instance, 'alcoholic' lead to the combining form '-aholic' which relates to any type of addiction, such as commonly 'workaholic', but this can also be done with any other noun. That is slightly informal, but that informality is not always the case. In linguistics, the combining form '-lect' from 'dialect' can be tacked onto other words in order to indicate that it relates to anything dialectal. For instance, 'basilect' is the academic term for the least prestigious (or at least little-prestigious) dialect for a given language.
1439: catch 22 Nov 19, 2018
Sometimes, a pop-culture reference will make its way into common parlance. With the word 'catch 22'—which grammatically is not two words when used as such—can refer to a paradoxical situation or logical fallacies depending upon the idea at hand. It comes from the title of a 1961 book in which the main character pretends to be insane to avoid combat, but his actions are taken to prove his sanity. However, it is possible that many of the people who would use this phrase have not read the book, as now the reference is no longer just a reference, and can exist in its own right.
1438: froggie Nov 18, 2018
Now, a pejorative for French people, though fairly harmless now, is 'froggie'. It is said to have come from the common trope of French peasants eating frogs, but this was not the first use of the pejorative 'froggie' in English's history. Earlier than this, it was used to refer to the Dutch, as they were caricatured as swamp-dwellers; this changed after the Anglo-Dutch Wars, after which point France became Britain's main enemy, rather than the Dutch.
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1437: Names for Scotland Nov 17, 2018
Some countries end up with lots of different names across other languages, including Germany and Scotland. However, with the former case, this is only because the names of different historical tribes ended up being used to describe the whole country, but the situation with Scotland is more complicated. It can and has been called 'Scotland', 'Pictland', 'Caledonia' and 'Alba': all in English. Some of these names, particularly 'Pictland' and 'Scotland' were given based off of the inhabitants, but also the other two were exonyms given by the Romans. Even if this weren't the case alone, Scotland has had many waves of inhabitants, and so many names.
1436: Germanic Roots: walk Nov 16, 2018
English is a Germanic language, but this doesn't mean that all words will have a cognates with other Germanic languages; even words of Germanic origin may not share the relation. For instance, 'walk' is a word with Germanic roots, but in any other Germanic language the translation doesn't even sound similar. In German and Yiddish the word is 'spazieren', in West Frisian 'rinne' (related to 'run') and in just about all of them, a word with the same root as 'go' can be used in relation to walking in a way that is uncommon in English. This is because 'wealcan'—the root word from Old English—originally meant 'to roll' and sometimes 'to wander'. Technically therefore it is of Germanic origin, but it this does not mean that there is a 1-1 correspondence with translations in Germanic languages.
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1435: Mnemonics pt 2: Lyrics Nov 15, 2018
Ever wonder why it can be so easy to memorize favorite song lyrics compared to straight speech? Some of this is probably from the frequency with which people listen to music, but as mentioned yesterday, abbreviations as mnemonics are not simply more to remember and can be helpful. Like with initialisms, it is easier to remember something in a pattern in part because it is easier to see when something is missing from the pattern. This is true of stories as well. Stories today only rhyme usually when they are written for children, but historically epic poems were dominant because oral histories were best, and very often, conveyed lyrically to help with memory, as a way to both break up text into small units and to create a metrical and or musical pattern. In school these methods may also be employed to differentiate important speech from other forms of talking.
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1434: Mnemonics pt 1: Abbreviations Nov 14, 2018
Mnemonics can take lots of forms, but these usually verbal cues—which help with memory—are also just another thing to remember. These can range from simple initialisms and acronyms [1] or be more complicated rhymes and even full lyrics, but these are all easier to memorize than straight speech, and this latter category will be looked at. What all of these do though, even if it may be more to remember, is to provide a sort of rhythm, and moreover provides a way to check if one of the elements of any given initialism is forgotten. After all, these are treated grammatically as distinct words, independent of their wholistic meaning. Indeed, the majority of these initialisms are three letters, even when they shouldn't be, like with DoE (Department of Education), as three is better than two for creating a distinct and memorable pattern.
1433: Definitions for Language Families Nov 13, 2018
English and West Frisian are in the same language family as they are the most similar languages to each other, but Old English would have been a lot more similar. Moreover, around 60% of English's vocabulary is Romantic in origin, and yet English is not considered to have descended from Romance languages. This is somewhat of a quirk of the definition for language families as languages are not considered to be part of the same language family if one is the origin but no longer is spoken. Moreover, the grammar and syntax is far more important for determining the language family than vocabulary.
1432: Effects of Latin Participles Nov 12, 2018
It is because of Latin participles that there is a 't' in 'commit' but an 's' in 'mission', even though they come from the same word. In Latin, it was common that if the stem of a verb ended in a 't' that the participial for would have an 's' there instead. There is no particular reason that this happened, but it affects many languages now. For instance, in English, 'compromise' is a noun and also a verb, and stressed the same way too. In German though, 'Kompromiss' is only the noun, and the verbal form is 'kompromittieren', and indeed comes from this same Latin pattern
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1431: Received Pronunciation Nov 11, 2018
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1430: Oh: Too Meaningful to Define Nov 10, 2018
There are words invented specifically to not have a real meaning, called ghost-words, but some natural words are hard to define. 'Oh', for instance, is an exclamation used to show just about any emotion, including anger, surprise, and joy. Moreover, it is a discourse marker, used to indicate meaning that may relate more to the context of the conversation than to the conversation itself. In this way, 'oh' doesn't really have any definable meaning, and relies solely on the context to imprint meaning onto it.
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1429: Jewry vs. Israel Nov 9, 2018
Over the last century, the term 'Israel' has gained a new meaning, as it refers to the modern nationstate. Before this, it usually denoted 'the Jewish people' or would refer to the ancient kingdom. However, to clear up this newfound confusion, the term 'Jewry', which has existed for hundreds of years, can be and often is used. Indeed, after the land was set aside in the 1920's, the usage of the term 'Jewry' soared, and it clears up the confusion that the term 'Israel' can cause. This can be seen in the graph below.
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1428: Simplification in Language Nov 8, 2018
There are languages with over a dozen genders, languages with 4 or more voices, with clicks, with lots of cases, or with tones, but in general these are rarer than the alternative. Of course, some languages are simpler than others and still complex, but it is usually the case that these features don't exist or indeed fall out of fashion because—by and large—people don't mind phrases that are just as meaningful yet slightly longer, or indeed may even lose some nuance. Even this is true of pronunciation; it is possible that a language could be tonal and have clicks and every other distinguishable sound possible, but while this language would be very quick to articulate, it would be very arduous to learn.