1563: Dictionaries and Lexicography Mar 26, 2019

Dictionaries and wordbooks have been around for thousands of years, perhaps beginning with the Sumerians, but these were usually bilingual. However, these often were just lists of word, rather than to include definitions; this is true also of the earliest English dictionary. Indeed, dictionary making only became a science, lexicography, in the 20th century, when the study of how words are used—and not just the fact that people use them—became not only more standardized, but also expectations for lexicographers to study etymology, comparative linguistics, and phonetics increased.

1562: ladybug and ladybird Mar 25, 2019

The insect known scientifically as Hippodamia convergens, or more commonly just 'ladybug' or 'ladybird', or in the past 'ladycow' and 'ladyfly' has a number of names, often relating to other animals. Indeed, the only unifying part is 'lady-', which comes from the Virgin Mary. This might seem a little far fetched, but when compared to the German Marienkäfer—literally Mary-beetle—it should seem at least more common. As for the difference between the mostly American 'ladybug' and mostly British 'ladybird', the British form is older but it is not clear why the element in question is '-bird'. Support Word Facts on patreon.com/wordfacts

1561: Bias in Comparative Linguistics Mar 24, 2019

As mentioned in yesterday's post, comparative linguistics—or the method of comparing languages in order to understand the history of their developments—is not totally an exact science. This is particularly true because there is no standard or scale for seeing how languages will always change; one sound in one language can transform in a totally different way in another so the process can be described only after the fact. This means that looking for similarities in one language requires the linguist to have a good understanding of the whole language family, and if this is not the case there will be implicit bias.

1560: Proto-, Pre-, and Old in Practice Mar 23, 2019

In the field of historical linguistics, there are many terms to describe older forms, or hypothetical forms, of a language, but this is often as much convention as it is description. The qualifiers 'Proto-', 'Pre-' and 'Old' are often used to denote different stages of the development of languages, with the first referring to the oldest common ancestor of multiple languages, and the other two denoting older forms of a specific language, but with 'Old', as in 'Old English' more attestable. However, there is no exact science when it comes to predicting older languages, and sometimes these definitions don't totally hold, as in 'Old Norse' and Proto-Norse', which are both attestible. 
For more on Historical linguistics, watch this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8wxfur1HwI&t=5s

1559: ogre and orc Mar 22, 2019

As mentioned in yesterday's post, the term for 'ogre' comes from a Roman god of the underworld, Orcus. The similarity between [k] and [g] have been explained before, but notably this switch did not occur for the other descendent, 'orc'. It is likely, however, that this is because 'orc' was reinforced by the 'orcneas', or that it was taken from Latin or Italian more directly. Notably, the word only meant 'monster' in a generic way until Tolkien popularized the word with the specific meaning it has today in the Lord of the Rings.

1558: Names for the Roman Underworld Mar 21, 2019

In the Roman and Greek mythological tradition, many of words for the underworld taken from other names. For instance, in the Etruscan and Roman pantheon of gods, Orcus—which later gave its name to the modern 'ogre'—was a god who punished oath-breakers, and Pluto was the god of the underworld, and both of their names were often used to refer to the whole underworld. Moreover, later in history, Orcus' role was equated with Dīs Pater, and this name too was used to denote the underworld. These same trends existed in many other Roman traditions, and Greek ones as well.

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1557: Turkic Consonant Development Mar 19, 2019

In the series on Grimm's Law, it was discussed how there was a progression of certain consonants over time in Germanic languages, such as from [b] → [p] → [f], but this pattern is by no means a given. In Proto Turkic for instance, the [b] at the beginning of verbs would often become an [h] in modern Turkic languages. This is because these Turkic consonants are often contrasted between weakly articulated ones, called lenis consonants, and more strongly, clearly articulated ones, called fortis consonants. 
For more on Grimm's Law, see here: https://stonewordfacts.blogspot.com/searc

1556: What's the Oldest Classical Language? Mar 18, 2019

There are thousands of documents that are thousands of years old, but most of these aren't much use to people who aren't experts studying the language. This is not always the case, such as with some forms of Greek resembling the basics of Ancient Greek, but arguably the oldest language in continuous usage is Tamil, spoken in the south of India, with a literary tradition spanning thousands of years, with extensive, notably secular works, dating from as far back as the 5th century BCE. Some of this can still be roughly understood with Modern Tamil, making it a contestant for the oldest classical language in continuous use, unlike Hebrew.

1555: europe Mar 17, 2019

Asia and Africa were named for smaller regions in each continent, but Europe was named for a Phoenician Princess in Greek Mythology, Europa. Some have thought that the word is actually a composite of the Greek elements meaning 'wide' (εὐρύς) and 'eye' (ὤψ). This was not a reference to the eyes of the inhabitants, however, but was more of an expression denoting the idea of expansive, sort of like the phrase "as far as the eye can see". There have also been connections drawn to a Semitic root meaning 'West', or evening (i.e. the place where the Sun sets), such as the Hebrew 'Ma'arav' (West) and 'maariv' (evening). This is also where 'Magreb', a large region of Northwest Africa comes from. This all is more hypothetical, but it is bolstered by the fact that 'Asia' and its namesake 'Anatolia' comes from a word meaning [land of the] East, not only in Greek but also Semitic languages like Hebrew and Assyrian.
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1554: chaperon Mar 16, 2019

When we think of the word ‘chaperon’ today, it is will almost certainly refer to a person, but this was not always the case. Indeed, even in an old-fashioned, dated sense of the word denoting a person who would look after one woman in particular to make sure she didn’t do anything deviant, this refers to a person. However, in he Middle Ages and onwards, the word simply denoted a type of hood with shoulder covering, that was quite fashionable. Over time the sense of being covered and protected transferred to a person.

1553: schnapps Mar 15, 2019

English has a lot of words for alcohol, spirits, booze, liquors or whatever you want to call it, but at least one was lost over time due to specificity. In English, 'schnapps' refers to a particular type of liquor sweetened with fruits and other natural ingredients. However, in many other Germanic languages, it simply refers to any type of liquor. This is because the word 'schnapps' comes from the same root as 'snap', and has the same meaning as 'dram', as in a dram of liquor. 
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1552: Birds of a Feather Mar 14, 2019

The phrase “birds of a feather flock together” Has been around for a very long time. It can be accounted for and examples from the 16th century, but another times it would appear as this “byrdes of on kynde and color flok and flye allwayes together”. However, some translations of Plato include this phrase, so it could be even older in some form or another. In any case, the line relates ‘feather’ to the whole image of a bird, but rhymes better than ‘kind and color'.

1551: hussey Mar 13, 2019

Several English words simply denoting women over time have changed to gain many negative connotations. This is true of 'hussy' which comes from a contraction of 'housewife' in Middle English. This by itself is not so strange given the number of other historical examples for which this similar process happens, but what is strange is that there are now two different words. 'Housewife' as the compound used in Modern English is a restoration of the original. The linguistic term for this sort of split is doublet.
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1550: judaism and islam Mar 12, 2019

Buddhism is named for the 'Buddha', Christianity is named for 'Christ', and Judaism is named for 'Judah', not because he was the favorite son of Isaac in the Bible, but because it was the last Jewish kingdom and 'Judea' was the name outsiders learned. However, 'Islam' did not gain its name from something like this. Instead, the word comes from the root S-L-M and means 'submission' or 'surrender'; it is also related to the Arabic 'salām' (سلام), and the Hebrew 'shalom' (שלום) which mean 'peace'.
Watch the new video that came out yesterday about the definition for a language: https://youtu.be/4CM7-BMO3vk

1549: elbow and ell Mar 11, 2019

Elbows could be associated with other sorts of bending bows, but what they shouldn't be associated with is ells—etymologically speaking—as in a 90º bend: L. While that is one meaning of 'ell', the 'el-' in 'elbow' comes from 'ell', the meaning in this case is different; it actually is an old unit of measurement, which, like the cubit, was the length of one's arm: about 45in/114cm, or more traditionally, 6 wide handbreadths. It should be noted that like 'longyards', 'longtons', 'longmiles', and 'long-hundreds' and their non-long counterparts, a handbreadth is not the same as a wide handbreadth, as otherwise an ell would only be 24in.

1548: Disproportionally Learned Languages Mar 10, 2019

English is by far the most learned second language (L2) of any language in the world, but because it still has quite a large amount of native speakers (L1), the ratio of L2 to L1 is not the greatest. It is difficult to measure that in particular, but the highest ratio in this category would probably go to Swahili, which has nearly 5 times as many second language speakers than native ones. For comparison, L2 English speakers only outnumber native speakers by about 1.6 times.
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1547: The Problem of No Proto-Sino-Tibetan Mar 9, 2019

While the Sino-Tibetan language family is the second-most widely spoken language family, it does not have an accepted proto-language created from it in the same way as has been done for the Indo-European language family. On the surface this might not sound like a problem, but the issue is that while lower branches of the family have been reconstructed, such as Lolo-Burmese, there is still not a conclusion as to which languages belong to certain families, or which are isolates. This means that many efforts to classify certain subgroups are really just estimates that might vary from study-to-study.

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1546: bald Mar 8, 2019

Unlike many other Germanic like the German and Yiddish 'bald' meaning 'soon', the English 'bald' is actually not related, and comes from a Celtic source. In Welsh, and indeed for a long time after the word was used in English, it did not mean 'bare' as it does today, but referred to a white streak, especially on a horses face. It was only much later that it related to a patch of hairlessness.

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1545: The Most Tonal Languages Mar 7, 2019

Languages native to every continent, except for mainland Australia, have some tonal systems or another, but some of these are simpler than others. While plenty of these only have one or two distinctions, the Hmong language has at least seven or eight tones. Some languages in Asia have six tones, so this isn't significantly higher than those necessarily, but with distinctions between words like pitch, length of vowels, or even case-endings, people tend to opt for simplicity, or are limited by the average person's ability to listen, remember, and reproduce all of the distinctions. Ultimately, even though it does allow for more short words, distinctions like tone are unnecessary enough to have somewhat of an upper limit.

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1544: Vittle vs Victual Mar 6, 2019

English spelling often is not clearly related to the pronunciation, and while this is an acknowledged nuisance, there have been times when this is done, if not intentionally, then incidentally counterproductively. In the past for instance, the word 'victual' was written as 'vittle', and given that 'vittle' does rhyme with 'little' and 'tittle', this pattern makes a lot of sense. However, 'victual' with the addition of the notable C especially mirrors the original Latin 'victualis'. In Latin however, the sounds represented by the spelling would have been more or less pronounced.

To see more about the history of writing, click here: https://youtu.be/dntJLHmkfhw

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