2164: Collective Plurals Nov 17, 2020
While English has a number of single-syllable collective nouns that have the same plural and singular forms (sheep; fish; folk), this used to be somewhat more systematic. While some of these patterns are still true for certain regions, weights, measures, and units of time did not use -s. This is mostly retained in more traditional dialects, and would look like “4 pound_ of flour,” “the rope was yard_ long”, or “over 3 year_ ago“. This can also be true of strong nouns such as ‘foot’ but in any case overall this process, starting in the Middle Ages, effected nouns to be treated as plurals of count nouns rather than collectives [mass nouns].
2163: Germanic Plural Endings: How -R is Related to -S
In English, non-rhoticity—the loss of /r/ before a consonant or at the end of a word—initially was process that affected by [s] only, thus leading to ‘bass’ from the Old English ‘bærs’, among others, as explained in the video about English vs. American R’s. A process not so conceptually different to this also establishes the connection between the Dutch plural ending -s and the Scandinavian -r plurals, but the process went the other way around. This is to say that the most common pluralizing ending across Germanic languages today is -s but that it has become an -r in Swedish, though to be clear there have always been Germanic inflectional endings of different varieties, including commonly -en (e.g. ox-oxen; Haus-Hausen), internal vowel changes (e.g. tooth-teeth), and -er (Buch-Bücher). Indeed, the -s ending that is now the overwhelmingly dominant form in English was only used for a many masculine nouns, and not for feminine or neuter, making up less than half therefore but still a plurality. So effectively as English used -s more to to others being pushed out, Swedish used plural -s less due to the rhoticity.
2162: Deponent Verbs Nov 15, 2020
Latin, a language whose grammar is notoriously simple to learn (...) has passive-voice deponents: verbs which are passive in form but active in meaning. For instance, the normal active ending for 1st person singular is -o (present tense) or -āvī (perfect aspect) but these do not exist for verbs like 'loquī' (to speak), 'verērī' (to fear), or 'blandīrī' (to flatter) and so on. In these cases, it would look like:
'loquor' (I speak) or 'hortātus sum' (I have exhorted) which would normally indicate the passive. These verbs have lost their active forms to history, and so given there is only one form, there is no way to use them to indicate the passive; one would need to opt for a synonym. It is not the only one to feature these verbs of course, but the list of these others is not too long either, including North Germanic languages like Danish, Ancient Greek, and Sanskrit.
2161: Urdu & Hindustani Nov, 14, 2020
"Is urdu a language?" is not a question I would ask at the tenser parts of the India-Pakistan border, but the answer is not immediately clear, and so worth asking. Urdu is the national language and lingua franca of Pakistan, and many describe it as the Persianized form of Hindustani, but it is also recognized by the constitution of India. Through contact with the Muslim territories to the west, the Indo-Aryan language draws heavily from Persian, especially for its upper register, and is written in the Persian script. Likewise, Hindi, especially in the west around Delhi, has the same basic structure and base of vocabulary (about 99%), but draws from Sanskrit for its higher register and uses the Devanagari script. There is a significant level of mutual intelligibility between the two.
2160: lady & lord Nov 13, 2020
These days, ‘lady’ connotes nobility or otherwise upper class, well-mannered, or even just particularly feminine qualities in a woman, but it originally meant ‘bread-kneader’. That said, even if baking bread is not necessarily what would be thought of with a ‘lady’ today, even in Old English ‘hlǣfdīge’ (loaf-kneader) nevertheless denoted a woman to whom homage and fealty was paid, as in the wife of a lord. This word was also strongly associated with the Virgin Mary, and hence many plants and also ‘ladybugs’ are named from this source. The first half of the word ‘hlǣf-‘ is associated with ‘loaf’ and ‘dīge’ while indicating action, is related to ‘dough’ and also ‘dairy’. The reduction now to ‘lady’ is not so odd considering the there was a common assimilation of the suffix ‘-ig’ in Old English to ‘-y’ in Modern English, but the -f- did not drop out until the 14th century, around the time when the word had gained connotations to higher society and chivalry. Indeed, it was not a form of address for a normal woman until the late 19th century. ‘Lord’ comes from ‘hlafweard’ meaning similarly ‘loaf-guard’, related to ‘warden’, though keep in mind this word was not so common until the Middle Ages before which ‘dryhten‘ was prefered. Moreover, tying this all together, the Old English for ‘servant’ was ‘hlafæta’ or literally ‘loaf'-eater’.
2159: 'Frau', Meaning 'Lord' (*frawjǭ) Nov 12, 2020
Yesterday’s post discussed the odd pronunciation of ‘women’, but consider that most Germanic languages do not use this word. The German ‘Frau’, Dutch ‘vrouw’, Swedish ‘fru’ and so on all come from the same root *frawjǭ meaning ‘lady’, as in the female form of ‘lord’. More on this word tomorrow. Indeed, this root word referred to nobility but also normal women not unlike ‘lady’ does today. The Old English ‘frōwe’ for instance was connected to the OE ‘frēa’ meaning ‘lord’ or also ‘husband’. It is also related to the Russian пра́вый (právyj) meaning ‘right’ (also connected to words for a judge or a master), related to пра́вда (pravda), as in the infamous newspaper meaning ‘truth’. This Russian word is also related to the Latin ‘prōvincia’ (territory; dominion) and might help to elucidate why the connection to lordship exists.
2158: Pronunciation of 'Woman' Nov 11, 2020
The spelling of ‘woman’ is sometimes controversial due to its assumed relation to the word ‘man’, but even just for how it represents pronunciation it should ring a few bells. For the singular, this is fairly straightforward insofar as the ‘-man’ pronunciation is consistent with other unstressed forms of this like in ‘foreman’, as /mən/. In the first vowel of the singular (woman), this actually began as /i/ (as in ‘wee’) due to the origin with the word ‘wif’ (woman; wife). This got gradually rounded, referring to the posture of the lips and pronounced further back, referring to the posture of the tongue: wʊmən. Regarding the plural form furthermore (women), while it is spelt like the plural of ‘men’, it is not the latter vowel that changes, but that the first vowel becomes [ɪ] (as in ‘in’): thus wɪmən. A nonstandard variant of this, particularly in parts of America does actually change the latter vowel: wʊmiːn; this distinction may however actually be less clear due to the stress of the word.
2157: America's Geographic Easter-Egg—Point Udall Nov 10, 2020
The easternmost and the westernmost in the US are named Point Udall; this is a surname, but it isn't named after the same person. By travel distance in the territorial US, the westernmost part of Guam was named after Arizona congressman, Morris Udall, who was on the House Subcommittee on Insular and International Affairs. Meanwhile in 1968, the easternmost part of the Virgin Island meanwhile is named for his brother Stewart Udall, also a congressman from Arizona. It was explained that the "America's day would begin and end at a Point Udall".
2156: Canaanite Shift Nov 9, 2020
When languages split from each other, often the change comes from sound shifts. These, like the Great Vowel Shift in English, or Grimm's Law encompassing Germanic languages are quite broad in scope, but this isn't always, or even usually the case. The Canaanite Shift describes a process wherein [a] became [o] in long syllables. This affected Northwest Semitic languages like Hebrew and Aramaic, but not South Semitic like Arabic. For instance Tiberian Hebrew שלום (šalom) and the Arabic سلام (salām) share a root meaning 'complete; peace' but differ in the stressed vowel. This shift was so productive that this affected inflections, i.e. it affected the morphology and not only the roots of words, such as the plural ending [at] in Arabic or [ot] in Hebrew:
"Girls; daughters": بَنَات (banāt) versus בָּנוֹת (bānōṯ)
Or with present participles, such as
“Writer; the one writing”: كاتب (kātib) versus כותב (kōṯēḇ)
2155: Rhode Island Just Changed its Name Nov 8, 2020
This week has seen much political change in the USA, but what is getting less publicity perhaps is that Rhode Island just changed its official name. Up until now, it was known as "Rhode Island and Providence Plantations". During the British colonial period, Rhode Island only referred to one island, now called Aquidneck Island and the Providence Plantation was the remaining land, not ulike how Maine is named for the mainland, since most people lived on the coastal islands there. Back in those times, plantations related to farms, certainly, but was another word for colony and in this case had nothing to do with slavery. The fact is, however, that enough people felt uncomfortable with the word through unfortunate historical connotations that it was changed in the election.
2154: Monastic Sign Language Nov 7, 2020
Several different Christian monastic groups take vows of silence, but these people need to communicate, and as a result, so-called monastic sign languages arose. Some, like the Franciscan and Benedictine monks' vows were only bound to certain places or times of day, so only limited vocabularies were developed, perhaps also used as memory aid when also speaking. The Cistercian and Trappist sects however took vows of complete silence, and so developed more thorough systems, but unlike modern sign-languages, these were still bound to the spoken language such that Cistern monks from France use mostly French syntax, and those in the US use mostly English syntax for instance, so because of this they are often not considered languages but lexicons. Some systems began in around the 10th century, and are still practiced today in the case of the case of Cistercian and Trappist sign.
2153: Names for 'Greece' Nov 6, 2020
Greece has had a long and influential history globally, but many countries use totally different names for the country. Essentially there are 4 categories; the most common comes from the Latin 'Graecus', who took the name from the tribe there, now commonly used around Europe and Asia. Then there are names derived from 'Ionia', another tribe, used particularly in the Middle East and Central Asian region, such as the Arabic اليونان (al-Yōnān), Hebrew יוון (Yavan), and Turkish 'Yunanistan'. The other common name, and the one used by the Greeks themselves Ἑλλάς (Hellas), such as in Mandarin. One exceptional name is from Georgian საბერძნეთი (Saberdzneti) meaning "wise people's country". Notably, the word for the Greek residents of Turkey does not follow the Turkish name for the country, and is 'Rumlar' meaning 'Romans' relating to the days of the Byzantine Empire, whereas for Greeks from Greece they say 'Yunanlar'.
2152: man Nov 5, 2020
One of the oldest and certainly significant root across all Indo-European languages is 'man'. For sure it has broad-reaching senses that gave us many modern derivatives, but not only is it unclear where it comes from, but also across Germanic languages it pushed out an earlier word 'wer'. One theory on its origin connects it to another root *men- giving 'mind' and more obviously the Latin 'mēns', hence 'mention', 'admonish', 'demonstrate', and 'automatic' through Greek, but other linguists contest this idea. Another theory points to Germanic mythology involving a figure known in Latin as Mannus who was the progenitor of people, known in the language as *Mannaz. Either way, it was used as a generic term for humanity and the pronominal use—still seen in German 'man' for 'one'—before it pushed out 'wer' (hence 'werewolf') as a word for 'man' (as in male) by the 13th century. This process is similar to the generic Latin term 'homo' (hence the French 'homme') pushing out 'vir' for specifically male. In all these words though, it also had the sense of 'husband'.
2151: don and doff Nov 4, 2020
The verbs 'don' and 'doff' as ways to describe the wearing or disrobing of a piece of clothing may seem a little old fashioned or even formal, though in actual fact these used to be mostly literary. They actually derive from a contraction of 'do on' and 'do off' and show that an older use of 'do' in Middle English meant 'put'. These contractions were only regionally used outside of literary archaism until the 19th century when they were brought back into regular use, but by that point, the original sense was slightly less clear since 'do on' was not a normal phrase.
2150: ser/estar: Why Differ? Nov 3, 2020
The Spanish verb 'ser' is notable for a lot of reason, but both it and its counterpart 'estar'—meaning 'to be'—come from the Latin meaning 'to sit' (sedēre) and 'to stand' (stāre) respectively, which may help to explain why 'ser' is for permanent things, and 'estar' is more often for transient uses. This is not actually so rare to see verb meaning 'sit' or 'stand' used existentially. While in some languages this is standard, even English has the phrase "that sits well with me", though this is obviously not exactly the same. In the case of 'ser', the verb is irregular partly because some forms come from the Latin 'sum', always having meant 'to be', namely present tenses, the imperfect, and the preterite tenses.
2149: Celtic Mutation, & Vowel Harmony Nov 2, 2020
Learning a language and its irregularities can be a real frustration, but some languages make this harder than others. Hungarian, Finnish, and Turkish feature so-called vowel-harmony, where the vowels near each other change regularly depending on the how affixes are attached (and there are a lot). For instance in Hungarian, -nek/-nak are the same dative suffix, but change depending on the vowel in the root word.
város város-nak 'city'
öröm öröm-nek 'joy'
On the opposite conceptual end, Celtic languages have mutations, meaning—as in the chart below—that based off of the surrounding words there is consonant mutation. For example
coeden goeden nghoeden choeden
meaning 'tree' in Welsh are all different forms of the same word, depending on what comes before it, and this process is how words are formed normally.
Celtic Vowel Mutations (imagine: public domain)
2148: 'merely vs. 'only' Nov 1, 2020
The difference between 'mere' and 'only' is qualitative, with both referring solely to what is specified, but 'mere' exerts a judgement that it can be no better than that, at best. In the past however, it referred to purity, coming from the Latin 'merus' meaning ‘undiluted’. The sense of lacking contamination has technically remained, though these days people would likely opt for 'exclusively' in order to convey (merely) high quality, which is no longer possible with 'mere'.
2147: A Parisian Menu with Actual Zoo-Animals Oct 31, 2020
It didn't have to be Halloween to enjoy "Cat à la Rat", or "Wolf's Leg, with venison sauce". The French are known worldwide for their fancy gourmet foods—snails and frogs notwithstanding—but there is a Parisian menu from 1870 that shows zoo animals on it. This, as a historical record, shows the way in which people reacted to the Franco-Prussian war, the siege on Paris, and the starvation it caused. Some more items include Elephant Soup, Kangaroo Stew, Stuffed Donkey Head, Antelope Terrine, and English-Style Camel...
2146: país, land, or country Oct 30, 2020
English is a language classes as Germanic, with some 60% overall Latinate vocabulary and yet both often it seems to go its own way. Its grammar is far more analytical than either, but even in the simple things like vocabulary, most Germanic languages use a word like 'Land' for 'country', whereas many Romance languages use a word from the Latin 'pagus' (countryside) like the French 'pays' or Spanish 'país'. The word in English instead comes from a word meaning literally 'lying opposite (i.e. land)', from the Latin "(terra) contrāta".
2145: Icelandic Cursive: ð, æ, and þ
There are certain letters including ð, æ, þ, ƿ, and ʒ (all represented in the lower case) which used to exist in English writing but no longer do. That said, three of these ð (like in 'THe'), æ (as in 'At'), and þ (as in 'THin') are still used in Icelandic. This raises the question: how are these written in cursive. Especially considering that Æ/æ was actually from Latin unlike the other Germanic ones, despite its current name 'ash' coming from the ash tree Germanic rune ᚫ which preceded it has a longer history. There are examples in the photo below from an Icelandic document from the 1920's. Indeed, all letter of these letters and more would have cursive form, especially since this was more popular in the past.
