1645: Language of Those who Avoided Colonization Jun 16, 2019

Colonization, whether medieval or modern, will likely have an effect on the language of the colonized, but this is not why many never-colonized places have little linguistic influence. In Bhutan, a country which has never been colonized, the official language is Dzongkha. This language is related to Tibetan, but will feature influence from the totally unrelated Nepali, which is spoken by some in Bhutan, but mainly Nepal, where the territory has never been colonized either. That said, the influence is minor—Dzongkha and other Bhutanese languages are pretty Tibetan—but the nations are not easily traverse due to mountainous terrain, and Bhutan especially has a weak economy, and does not have much trade with its neighbors. All of these other factors could play a role in language development, but often do not.

1644: French in Parliament of England Jun 15, 2019

It is hard—though not impossible—to overstate the influence of French on the English language. While French was spoken by the ruling minority, even Englishmen began to learn it after some time. In fact, right after his conquest of England, William the Conqueror established a council that would become the Parliament. It operated in French for nearly 300 years (AD 1066-1362), and even in the 14th century, this was thought by some to merely be rebellious to the French, with whom they were at war, rather than a permanent change.

1643: Parasitic -B Jun 14, 2019

Although certain silent letters in English are normal, like a terminal E, others, like 'pterodactyl's' P, or even 'thumb's' B draw some more attention. This terminal B in many words is a remnant of something that was originally pronounced, such a in 'tomb'. The problem is that it is [m] is so similar a sound and these types of sounds at the end of the word anyway are often not aspirated, so not pronouncing a [b] makes little difference. In other words like 'thumb', the B was never pronounced even in Old English, but it got attached due to association to other words like 'dumb'. This is occasionally called a parasitic -b.
See more on 'thumb' here.

1642: PIE root of thumb Jun 13, 2019

The word 'thumb' and 'tumor' have a distant etymological relation, but many other languages no longer share this root too. 'Thumb' is from Old English, but 'tumor' comes from Latin meaning 'to swell'. Indeed the Latin, Greek, Sanskrit words etc. for 'thumb' are each very different looking, but each of those languages, and many other Indo-European languages have that share this root and mean totally different things, like the Greek 'τύμβος' meaning 'burial mound, or the Sanskrit तुम्र (túmra), 'thick'. Each of these have different definitions, but they all relate to the same sorts of things: unevenness or swelling.
See more on 'thumb' here.

1641: Productivity of -Er: beetle Jun 12, 2019

The historical suffix '-le' can be used to form appliances, as mentioned yesterday, but it can also be used to form the words for animals. For instance, 'beetle' has this historical suffix, but it has no relation to the vegetable 'beet'. Instead, it comes from 'bite'. Really, this suffix meant something along the lines of what '-er' means today, thus the equivalent now would be 'biter': in Old English though, it was 'bitula'. This equivalence does not work as clearly with the examples given yesterday, 'thimble' and 'bridle'—in Modern English 'thumb-er' and 'bite-r' again—but '-er' can also used to form appliances etc..
See yesterday's post for more.

1640: bridle and thimble Jun 11, 2019

Both 'bridle' and 'thimble' have the suffix '-le' which historically was used to form the name of appliances. In the case of 'bridle', this comes from the 'bit' put into the horse's mouth. While the word would have originally been something like 'bittle', it has since changed into something that could not exist without the historical suffix and still be meaningful. In the case of 'thimble', again, the word has changed a slightly since the initial form, which came from 'thumb'. There will be more on this tomorrow.
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1639: Mongolian Writing Jun 10, 2019

Standardization of a language is usually seen as a progressive step in cementing history and increasing intelligibility, but this is not permanent. Classical Mongolian was standardized starting in the 17th century, but fell between Middle Mongolian and Modern Mongolian, so not only were the sounds rapidly changing making the older lettering system obsolete or inadequate, but this period was marked with great political changes. Classical Mongolian's orthography was highly standardized, unlike today, where there is some standardizations, but multiple writing systems are used, mostly Mongolian script or Cyrillic, or sometimes Chinese characters for the large Mongolian population in China. 
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1638: Easter and Pesach Jun 9, 2019

As discussed before, 'Easter' and 'Pesach' don't have etymological relations, but this is not true of the words for Easter in every language. In Greek, for instance, Pascha (Πάσχα) comes from the Aramaic 'Paskha' (פסחא), which itself comes from the Hebrew word that is Pesach. However, 'Easter' is thought to have come about lexically from the Germanic goddess 'Ēostre', but the only source that attests this is from St. Bede. Reconstructionist work of other Germanic languages have bolstered these claims, but it is still somewhat in question.

1637: Shavuos and Pentecost Jun 8, 2019

Christian and Jewish holidays naturally have some relation in terms of dates—though often not in purpose—and this weekend is one such example. This weekend fall the holidays of Shavuos (שָׁבוּעוֹת) and Pentecost (Πεντηκοστή), which both are marked from the number of days after Pesach and Easter respectively. However, unlike with Pesach and Easter, which have no etymological similarities in English (though they do in Greek), Shavuos and Pentecost both are named for time. In the former case, the word literally means 'weeks' as the holiday falls 7 weeks after the second night of Pesach (50 days from the first night), and in the latter case 'Pentecost' means 'fiftieth', as part of a phrase meaning 'fiftieth day', as it is the 50th day after Easter. Have a happy holiday!
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1636: US State Abbreviations (LITW 9) Jun 7, 2019

As can be seen in this map of US women's suffrage from 1919, the state abbreviations are not what they are today. In fact, there were no official abbreviations until 1963, though the post office still accepted many common ones. Moreover, the problem was not that there needed to be clearer abbreviations necessarily, but to make sure that there are was enough room for the postcodes and city-names together: up to 23 characters. Initially, there was also a conflict with the US Government Printing Office (GPO) and the Coast Guard's respective abbreviations; the GPO adopted the Post Office standard, but the Coast Guard has not, which leads to some discrepancies.

For more Linguistics In the Wild: check out this link: LITW

1635: fatigue Jun 6, 2019

Though fatigue means 'tiredness', this is not what is meant in the phrase 'military fatigues'. These both come from the same French word, but both of these nouns have very different connotations today. In French 'fatigue' has always meant 'weariness', so the continued sense of this is not surprising, but this then applied to occupational, and in particular military labors in general, and then uniforms later on in the 18th century. Interestingly, the words 'weary' and 'wear' appear to have this same relationship, especially in light of the phrases "worse for wear" and "wear and tear", but the two are not related.

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1634: glove Jun 5 2019

As discussed yesterday, the word for 'glove' in many Germanic and Romantic languages is 'want', with language-specific twists. However, English's is obviously different, but it still belongs to it's own family of related words. 'Glove' dates back to Old English, but goes back all the way to Proto-Indo-European, from 'ga-' which signified collections, and 'lāp-' meaning 'flat', though not related to the English 'lap'. In Scots the word is 'gluve', and the Icelandic 'glófi'. Even in Middle English the word for a palm of the hand was 'lofe'.
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1633: gauntlet Jun 4, 2019

It is not uncommon in English words that end in -et to find they come from French, and this is especially true of older words, because it is a French diminutive suffix, like in 'ballet' or 'pocket'. 'Gauntlet', for instance, is a long glove, particularly in armor. Indeed, the word for 'glove' in French, then and now, is 'gant', but this comes from Germanic origin. The word in German for a 'glove' is 'Handshuh' (literally 'hand-shoe’), but it wasn't always so literal. In Frankish the word was 'want', and this is still true in other Germanic languages like Dutch, Danish, and Swedish more or less. It is less common that a Germanic word would enter a Romance language than the reverse, but even Medieval Latin got the word for 'glove', 'wantus', from this.

1632: The Alphabet's Pronunciation: U and Y Jun 3, 2019

The names for the letters in many alphabets like in German or Estonian etc. more or less mirror the sounds being represented: not so in English. Though the story is complicated for each letter, most shifted away from the simpler pronunciations in the 15th century, but in a few cases it happened later. It wasn't until the 17th century that U was pronounced [iu] like in 'few' (or simply 'ew'!) rather than just [u] as in 'too'. The only one that isn't known for sure is the pronunciation of Y; in German it's 'upsilon', like the Greek ɛ 'epsilon' and in French it's 'igrec' meaning 'Greek I', but the English name for the letter is more removed and less certain. There will be more on the whole alphabet's pronunciation soon.

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1631: dreidl Jun 2, 2019

Following yesterday's post about the folk-etymology surrounding dreidls, if someone needed further evidence that they're not of Semitic origin, it would be as easy as going to ask a child. 'Dreidl' (דרײדל‎) comes from 'dreien' meaning 'to turn', like the German 'drehen', but in Hebrew the word is 'sevivon' (סביבון), and this was invented by the 5 year-old son of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda who had invented Modern Hebrew. It is based from the Semitic root meaning 'to turn', but at the time, another word from Hayyim Nahman Bialik, "kirkar", was in use, based on the root for "to spin" but this did not catch on in spoken Hebrew. Many other words were used in Yiddish dialects too, based on Germanic or Slavic words.

1630: Dreidl Markings Jun 1, 2019

A dreidl, spelt in a variety of different ways, is a kind of top found traditionally in many different European cultures. In Jewish traditions however, they are 4-sided with each side having a different letter: נ (Nun), ג (Gimel), ה (Hei), ש (Shin). These stand in for Yiddish words, here transliterated; the Nun for 'nisht' ("nothing"), Hei for 'halb' ("half"), Gimel for 'gants' ("all"), and Shin for 'shtel ayn' ("put in"). These are more or less translations of the German equivalents, but these days many think of them as coming from the Hebrew phrase, transliterated, 'nes gadol hayah sham' ("a great miracle happened there"), and even in some parts of the word the Shin is swapped for a פ (Peh) to mean 'here' instead, but this is not true. More will be discussed about this in tomorrow's post.

1629: humongous May 31, 2019

Most people will probably have experienced jumbling together two words by mistake while trying to articulate one. In the case of 'humongous', the process through which it came about isn't exactly like that, but it isn't totally like a normal compound either. The word originated in the 1970's, and is thought to be a blend of 'huge' and 'monstrous', but as should be evident, the term did not emerge just from those two words, as it the stress and syllable structures are not totally the same. It is believed that 'humongous' was influenced from the same stress-pattern as 'stupendous'. Though there are plenty of compounds and portmanteaus in English, not all of them maintain each element as it originally was.

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1627: R: a Dog's Letter May 29, 2019

Much of the way that people know how languages sounded in the past is simple analogous descriptions. For example, writers in both Latin and Middle English would liken the pronunciation of R to the growling of dogs, indicating that the sound was trilled, unlike in Modern Standard English. In fact, a name for the letter R in Latin was 'littera canīna' which is literally 'the dog's letter'. This might sound silly, but these sorts of things have helped to further linguistics.
For more about R, read this.

1626: podcast May 28, 2019

Historically, the influence of rhyming has led to the creation or modification of many words along the way.  While as a trend this is less common today than at other times in history, this still happens plenty. For instance, the word 'podcast' was created deliberately to sound like 'broadcast'. It is true that it is a contraction of 'iPod' and '-cast', but it could have just as well have been called something more general or fitting like 'webcast' was, but it wouldn't have sounded as catchy.

1625: worry May 27, 2019

Since emotions naturally have physiological responses to them, many words have some relation across both. Just like, 'clam (up)', 'choke (up)', and 'verklempt' the pressure and muscular tension that one feel when emotional translates into the language too. In the case of 'worry', the approach is a bit more historical, but the effect is the same, as in Old English, 'wyrgan', meant 'to strangle'. A worried person might feel strangled, but actually the word only started applying to emotions in the Middle English period when the word came to mean 'tear at the throat' and then less harshly 'harass'. In fact, 'worry' could only be used as a verb, and therefore in the context of 'worrying someone' until the 19th century, and the word is still used to describe dogs and other animals gnawing and chewing.