1504: Greater Impact Grimm's Law (g.l.5) Jan 24, 2019
Over the last few days this blog has talked about the linguistic aspects of Grimm's Law, and while these may seem minor, at the time even to a non-linguistic community this was earth-shattering. While the notion of the Indo-European language family was posited as early as 1786, some of the most conclusive evidence came with Grimm's Law. This suggested that there was once a common language, culture, and genealogy to most of the peoples across Europe, and some of the Middle East and India, which, in an age of legalized racism and colonialism did not sit well with many people. However, as discussed in the post about the term 'aryan', this idea was quickly adopted by both sides of any extreme view on the issue.
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1503: Push or Pull Chains (g.l.4) Jan 23, 2019
No one is quite sure about why sound shift like those described in Grimm's Law took place. What this means, however, is not that people are looking for social and cultural factors as to why this happened, because language doesn't necessarily change from those sorts of influences. Instead, looking at the chains like:
1) [b] → [p] → [f]
2) [d] → [t] → [θ] ([θ]as in 'THin')
3) [g] → [k] → [x] ([x] is also CH found in German)
it is a matter of figuring out whether the newer forms changed first and other sounds had to replace the gap, or whether it was the other way around, and some sounds had to change in order to differentiate words that now sounded the same. It is largely thought to be the former, but ultimately both sides can be argued for.
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1502: Tracing Languages Systematically (g.l.3) Jan 22, 2019
The idea of comparing an older form of a language with the more modern one, it’s possible to get a sense for what sounds and other features change and what stays the same, but this is only useful for specific examples. However, with the acceptance of Grimm's Law, it became possible to systematically estimate language change over time. People could make educated guesses as to how, if there were certain ways that languages would tend to split systematically, then linguists could predict the earlier steps and create a proto-language. This was how Proto-Germanic was recreated, but also even more ambitious theories, like the recreation of Proto-Indo-European. These same principles were used in the creation and acceptance of fairly robust proto-languages from all over the world.
1501: Sound Shifts over Time (g.l.2) Jan 21, 2019
As mentioned yesterday in the first of the in the Grimm’s Law series, Jacob Grimm noticed a pattern of related terms across Indo-European languages wherein certain vowels could shift over time, in predicable ways. Some of the most important pattern found:
1) [b] → [p] → [f]
2) [d] → [t] → [θ] ([θ]as in 'THin')
3) [g] → [k] → [x] ([x] is also CH found in German)
These trends helped to show the way in which older Indo-European have shifted over time, certainly from ancient languages to more modern ones, but the two major shifts in German sounds, as not only will a different dialects separate from each other and become new languages over time, but even a language on its own will eventually become unrecognizable to itself. For this reason, while the examples yesterday compared Latin to German, this also helps to show how English and German have split from each other over time, such as the English ‘penny’ and the German ‘Pfennig’.
Over the rest of this week, there will be posts about how this helps to date languages, trace proto languages, as well as track how languages change from each other generally, and much more, so make to follow to stay tuned, and support Word Facts on Patreon.com/wordfacts.
1500: Grimm's Law Intro (g.l.1) Jan 20, 2019
This is the 1,500th Word Facts blogpost! Thank you for your ongoing support and feedback.
Jacob Grimm is perhaps best known for his work with Grimm's Fairy Tales, but he also was a linguist, still renowned today. In 1854 he put out the most comprehensive German Dictionary to this day, and he also discovered what is now know as Grimm's Law. This phenomenon began with the observation that many stop consonants in languages like Latin and Greek would become fricatives in Germanic languages, such as 'penna' (Latin) and 'pteron' (Greek) that are 'feather' and 'Feder' in English and German respectively. This expanded the way linguists looked at language families and language development generally, and the academic and social consequences of this will be looked at through the rest of this week.
As decided in a vote on Patreon.com/wordfacts, posts over this next week will be on the topic of Grimm's Law. Please consider supporting Word Facts yourself, either through Patreon, or even just sharing these posts and youtube videos.
1499: Irish Elision Jan 19, 2019
The Irish language is not difficult to learn on the basis of grammar for another speaker of an Indo-European language speaker at least, but on the matter of pronunciation it is a different story. In terms of spelling there will likely be some confusions, but more than that, Irish Gaelic contains a considerable amount of elisions: when two sounds merge into one, or certain vowels get dropped. This is true in English in contractions like 'I'm', or how 'in-' changes depending upon the preceding consonant. In Irish however, this can occur with vowels before a stressed vowel, with any initial vowel, or following a pause. There are also instances of elision occurring for the indicators of certain features like grammar, which makes each utterance faster to say, but harder to get a grasp of for the sake of learners.
Tomorrow's post will be the 1,500th, so stay tuned for the special week on Grimm's law, and support Word Facts on Patreon.com/wordfacts
1498: Impossible Definitions Jan 18, 2019
In linguistics, there are many unknown and perhaps unsolvable questions, such as what a word is, what a language is, and how it is that something is considered grammatical or not. Nevertheless, one can still make claims about how certain word orders are grammatical in a given language and not another. This apparent contradiction may come from many sources, but aside from the fact that some notions are simply traditional, the issue here is that sometimes, as with the case of grammar, everyone understands that it exists, but disagree on how. In other cases, like the concept of a word, which some would indeed say does not exist, it is either spoken about as simply a shorthand, or people will talk around it and use units like phrases or morphemes.
In two days, the 1,500th post will be up, and will be the start of a whole week on Grimm's Law. Make sure to follow to stay tuned.
1497: kaput and capot Jan 17, 2019
1496: Arab Spring Started in Winter. Jan 16, 2019
The Arab Spring was so named for a season, but it began in December of 2010. Much like how the combining form '-gate' started from Nixon's 'Watergate' scandal but are now affixed to other scandals like 'deflategate' and 'pizzagate', the Spring in question here was actually in 1968. The Prague Spring was a revolution in Czechoslovakia, and though again it started in the winter, largely took place in—and largely was reported during—spring. Certainly the Arab Spring took place partially during the springtime, but the name is from an older pattern.
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1495: Diphthongs Vs. Spelling Jan 15, 2016
When two vowels combine together in one syllable, it's a diphthong, but orthography doesn't always represent this. For instance, while writing one vowel to correspond with one sound should be easy enough, in words like the English 'I', what is actually two sounds [ai] is represented with one (note that 'eye' accomplishes this). In German, where spelling tends to be more standard, that same sound is represented by writing <ei>, and so that is maintained, but the sound [i]—as in 'key'—in German is usually written with two letters [ie], even though this is not a diphthong. Ultimately, in any language with a written history, tradition will supersede reason at times.
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1494: 'great scott' and 'scott free' aren't Scottish Jan 14, 2018
The Scotland is famous for many things, but neither 'great scott' nor 'off scott free' relate to the country or its people. The former is simply a standin for 'G-d', though these are pretty common, especially in Victorian English speech. In the latter case, there is a common misconception that the word comes from the Dred Scott Decision, but actually it comes from the Old Norse 'skot' meaning 'payment' or 'tax'.
1493: Thai Numerals Jan 13, 2019
Thai, like many other East Asian languages has its own writing system, but unlike many other writing systems all over the world that do not have distinct symbols for numerals, the Thai system does. The numerals follow a base-ten system with the Arabic numerals, but this should not be surprising since they both followed from the same Hindu origins. However, while not represented in the numeration, the name for the number 1, nèung, changes to become èt when it is at the end of other numbers, like 11, or sìp èt (literally: ten-one).
0: ๐
1:๑
2:๒
3: ๓
4: ๔
5: ๕
6: ๖
7: ๗
8: ๘
9: ๙
1492: Birth Rate vs Fertility Rate Jan 12, 2019
Often used in statistical modeling, 'birth rate' and 'fertility rate' are both useful terms to describe demographics, but are not quite synonymous. A fertility rate is calculated to be the average number of children born to women ages 15-44 in their lifetimes. 'Birthrate' is often misused to describe this statistic, but it refers more specifically to the number of live births per 1,000 people in the population every year. Clearly these are used in similar situations, but the numbers look quite different.
1491: Pronunciation of ת Jan 11, 2019
Over thousands of years, Hebrew has transitioned from a living language to a liturgical language to again a living language, and while the language has stayed remarkably similar, there are some dialectal differences. There are many different features, but one of the most famous is of the pronunciation of ת. Sephardi (of Spain & North African) Jews pronounce it always as a [t], whereas Ashkenazi (Central & Eastern European) Jews pronounce it as an [s] in the middle or at the end of words. It is thought however, that both of these pronunciations are non-traditional, and like Yemenite Jews, originally it represented something like [θ] (as in THin). Therefore, both dialectal pronunciations involve the tongue moving forward or back respectively.
https://youtu.be/jTKKSf35LSE
1490: little and leprechaun Jan 10, 2019
Regarding the word 'leprechaun', the word is thought to come from 'lú' meaning 'small', and the latter half comes from the same root as 'corp'; read more about it in the link here. The first form, 'lú' is Old Irish, a Celtic language, but it is closely related to many words from Germanic languages, like the German 'lütt and lützel' or the West Frisian 'lyts', which all have the same vowel, even though it is written differently across the two language. Indeed, the original Old English 'lȳtel' is related, but that vowel isn't used for English anymore, so the similar one in 'little' is used instead today.
1489: "Let Them Eat Cake" is Wrong" Jan 9, 2019
The phrase 'let them eat cake' or in French "qu'ils mangent de la brioche" (it should actually be 'brioche' in English not 'cake', but it's more culturally appropriate) is attributed to a great princess—often thought to be Marie Antoinette—but this is not possible. This phrase was used in Rousseau's autobiography, written when Antoinette was nine years old; he never specified the princess, and many belief it was completely anecdotal, but history was not favorable to Antoinette, and neither is pop-culture here.
If you want more about history, watch the new Paleolinguistics video that just came out:
1488: Why Money is 'Notes' Jan 8, 2019
For more on how things came to be, watch How Writing Began
1487: Declaratives and Word Order Jan 7, 2019
As mentioned in another post, some adjectives are able to come after the noun they modify due to certain verbs, which is weird for English. This happens when the verbs are 'declaratives', as discussed in the video here, and essentially this happens when someone uses the language to make a change happen in the word, such as 'He declared the action unlawful'. It acts a bit like a linking verb, but depends on the declarative verb.
1486: How to Differentiate Language Families Jan 6, 2018
English belongs to the West Germanic language family, which belongs to the Germanic language family, which belongs to the Indo-European language family. All of this is fairly straightforward, but in other types of classifications—such as taxonomy with its "domain; kingdom; phylum; class..."—there are different names. One might expect linguists would be very happy to create new words or new definitions, but commonly this doesn't happen. However, for clarity, this is often talked about in the terms of 'primary language families' and so on, with primary language families not having any further relations, such as the Indo-European, Afro-Asiatic, and Kartvelian language families respectively.
Save the date: January 19th for the 1,500th post special. Vote here on what you want it to be here:
