Word Facts

English speakers are not terribly comfortable with using 'it' for humans older than infants . People elect to use other terms, such as 'they', to be neutral —semantically, not grammatically—when the pronoun needed is the subject (and 'them' for objects) of a given verb, but relative pronouns tell a different story. 'That', among other things, is the non-human equivalent of 'who' for relative clauses, e.g. 'the chair that rocks is used by the man who rocks (in it)". Nevertheless, it is nothing rare to see 'that' used for people, such as in the title of the 1999 work "The Woman That Never Evolved" by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy which, uncharacteristic for feminist literature, could be said to use a non-human pronoun for 'woman', though likely nobody would take a stance serious. This did not cause controversy because it is rather a non-issue in terms of political correctness, even if some prescriptivists dislike its use. Th

Old English, and English in general, has had a lot of influence from Old Norse , but far more influential in the development of English was far more significantly affected by Norman French . Still, the Normans themselves were greatly influenced by—if not as much Old Norse—the speakers of Old Norse, which is to say the Vikings, a.k.a. the Northmen or the Norse men. It is from this phrase, in fact, that not only Norway got its name, but also ‘Norman’ came to be at all. To be more specific, the Old French ‘Normant’ is derived from the Old Norse ‘Northmathr’ meaning ‘Northman’. This happened when the Viking, Rollo became the duke of Normandy; his grandson was Guillome (William) the Conqueror. You can now support Word Facts on Patreon for new things and to help make the content better: https://www.patreon.com/wordfacts

'He', 'she', 'they', 'he or she', and alternating between 'he' and 'she' are all options for general 3rd person singular referents, all with their respective problems. 'They' is both favoured and criticised for its vagueness, which can employed purposefully even when the gender of the antecedent is known as to make it clearer that the statement should make the listener imagine something hypothetical, e.g. "imagine your creepy male friend thinking you owe them something" (-Solomon Georgio). Other times, such as in this line from an Indian police chief, "a 4-month-old baby cannot move things from their face, and, basically, it suffocated", transitioning from a specific idea to a more general one (i.e. a particular baby to babies in general) will call for 'they'. This example is particularly noteworthy, because it uses 'they' and 'it' for a person whose sex is assumedly known . This occu

Hard and soft consonants do exist, and lay people use the terms quite extensively at times to describe sounds in English, but this this is not accurate. Other languages—famously Russian and other Slavic ones—have hard and soft consonants, the difference being that soft consonants are palatized and may sound therefore as if they are followed with a [j] (like the Y in 'yellow'). When people say that something is a hard consonants in English—which is not an applicable technical term in this case—it can mean lots of different things. Sometimes it refers to spelling and not phonetics, such as the G in 'giraffe' being considered soft as opposed to the G in 'gun' which would then be hard. At other times, it can reflect the different allophones of, for example, /t/, which can be considered to be the same sound, but will be more sonorous in words like 'top', than in 'pot', but neither of these examples are how linguists would use the words. If you have

There is a growing demand for genderless words, and not just in English. In some languages, like German, this often appears as using forms derived from participles rather than using gendered nouns, and speakers of Spanish are beginning to use '-x' rather than the gendered '-o' or '-a', for instance. In English, which does not have grammatical gender , there is less of a need for this, but in the few cases where lexical entries differ based upon gender, such as 'actor' and 'actress'  the way that people make this genderless is usually just to opt for the masculine form. Effectively this makes the word 'actor' seem as grammatically neutral, or simply is lacking gender, as with other jobs like 'clerk', even though actor began as masculine. Its masculinity doesn't really matter though, as many words that were once gendered like  'gangster'  (originally feminine) or 'incognita' either become genderless or stop bei

Given that 'Roma' is only starting to replace 'Gypsy' in regular speech recently, it might be surprising that linguists knew that the people must have migrated from India—not Egypt as the term 'Gypsy' suggests—as far back as the 17th century. In 1782, Johann Christian Christoph Rüdiger published "On the Indic Language and Origin of the Gypsies" (originally in German), citing many a 1755 dictionary and more importantly Job Ludolf, who, in 1691, reportedly was the first person to actually compare Romani to other languages , and established that it was not Ethiopian nor Coptic (Egyptian). Earlier claims that Romani dialects descended from Coptic languages come from people like Andrew Borde, the earliest known documenter of Romani, who transcribed and transliterated merely 13 sentences, and called them Egyptian. You can now support Word Facts on Patreon for new things and to help make the content better: https://www.patreon.com/wordfacts

Words like 'everyone', 'anyone' and 'nobody' are all considered to be grammatically singular, but sometimes this is not semantically accurate. It is reasonable that 'anyone' etc are considered singular, given that the determiner alone tends to act as a singular (e.g. 'any dog', 'any chair' etc) because 'every' and 'any' and the rest all refer to one unit selected out of a whole group. In both meaning and grammar then, it is singular. In other constructions however, such as "everyone, children or adults, who gets lost or is in danger should know the Morse code for SOS " [1] (taken from a Dear Abby from 2000) uses the grammatical singular as is evidenced by the conjugated 'gets' and 'is' but clearly refers to two elements at once, which furthermore happen to be plural themselves. Likely, without the 'everyone', it would appear as "children or adults, who get[] lost or [are] in danger.

Latin didn't have indefinite articles, like 'a' or 'an' in English, and it didn't really have definite articles either. Latin did have demonstrative pronouns (which could also function as deictic pronouns ) such as 'ille, illa, illud' (masculine, feminine, neuter (m, f, n)) meaning 'that' which became ' il' and 'la ' (m and f) in French, as well as other similar definite articles in other Romance languages, because the function of those pronouns is similar to articles. However, French and other Romance languages also have indefinite articles now, such as 'un, une' (m, f), but these don't come from pronouns. Instead, they come from 'unus, una' (m, f) meaning the cardinal number 'one'. This occurrence is not only restricted to the Romance languages either; Old English didn't have indefinite articles either, and the word instead comes from 'ān' which meant 'one'. It is fairly logical th

One feature of words in certain languages such as German that can help to make make the distinction between words easier to understand is that assimilation there does change when there is compounding. For instance, an 'sp-' and 'st-' in the middle of words are pronounced as [sp] and [st] respectively, but at the start of words they become [ʃp] and [ʃt] (like SH). This assimilation, however, is maintained when there is a prefix, or if it is the second element in a compound, even if this requires a glottal stop. Therefore, while the affixes are not a different word, nor are compounds multiple words, the individual elements are mostly preserved. This does not happen in languages like French.

Adjuncts, as discussed yesterday , are phrases that are not grammatically necessary. Nevertheless, an adjunct in one clause will not necessarily be an adjunct in another. For instance, in the sentence, "He found the salt on the table", "on the table" is an adjunct since the sentence would be grammatically complete as simply, "he found the salt", but if the verb were substituted for 'put', nothing would be unnecessary in "he put the salt on the table", because 'put' requires three arguments: a subject, a direct object, and an indirect object (a complement). You can now support Word Facts on Patreon for new things and to help make the content better: https://www.patreon.com/wordfacts

Adjunct—phrases that modifies or qualifies something in a sentence but is not grammatically necessary—are fairly common in especially given that there is not necessarily a limit on how many can be used. This does not mean, however, that these will be treated the same way syntactically. In the sentence, "Bill is a student of linguistics", "of linguistics" is an adjunct, and so is "with glasses" in "Bill is a student with glasses". However, while one could say "what (field) of linguistics is Bill a student of", one could not really say "what (colour) glasses is Bill a student with". This is because some adjuncts can be extraposed, which is to say that they can be moved to the front of the sentence, often leaving a preposition behind, while others cannot. Extraposition is also why people can start a sentence with an impersonal 'it' , such as 'it is no use crying over spilt milk" as opposed to "crying over sp

The words 'all' each and 'every' are often interchangeable semantically, except that 'all' is used as to describe quality , such as "all right", as well as many other nuances. Moreover, 'every' and 'each' may have generally the same meaning of uniting a group as 'all' does, but grammatically they are not often treated the same, and instead they skew more towards only singular than 'all' would skews towards the plural. One could say "all men [plural] are dogs" but that would likely become "every man [singular] is a dog", for example. It is easier to use 'all' in singular settings such as "all food [singular] is expensive" or "all foods [plural] are expensive", which does not work as often with 'every'. There are exceptions of course, such as "trains leave every 2 minutes [plural]". Even more than 'every', 'each' almost never would be used wi

English does have grammatical tense, but sometimes this is not effected from the semantics of a clause. One type of such a clause is the "before-clause" or "after-clause", which indicate action prior to or following another that would be indicated at another point in the sentence, but is not in the past-tense . In the sentence, "before/after buying [ present tense ] groceries, he went [past tense] to work", the use of the adverb signals clearly enough that the action happened at a different time than the present, but the present tense is nevertheless used. Other constructions, such as 'having bought..." use the past tense in the ordinary way, so the before-clauses are rather exceptional in English, as a sort of semantic quirk. It should be noted that just because a clause has 'before' or 'after' that does not make it a before- or after-clause, such as in "after having bought..." which does not have the nonpast verbal form

Dictionaries can have thousands, even tens of thousands of words in them, but only a fraction of those words will be used with much frequency.  Generally speaking, almost all words are rare, and in given text, it is not rare if only half of it will be made up of only 100 to 150 distinct words. For example, 80% of the Greek New Testament is comprised of merely 319 different words, while the remaining 20% is made up of 5,118. This is particularly noteworthy in English, as around 60% or more of the vocabulary can be considered Romantic in origin (particularly from Old French and Latin), while only 26% or so is Germanic. Nevertheless, it is not uncommon that sentences, especially concerning every-day, non-technical ideas, will contain all or almost all words that have Germanic origins. The reason for this has to do with the  history of English . You can now support Word Facts on Patreon for new things and to help make the content better:  https://www.patreon.com/wordfacts

Impersonal pronouns , such as 'it' in " it is raining " allow English speakers to—among other things—maintain the most common word-order in the language of subject-verb-object ( SVO ). Not only that, but also, even when rearranging the order of words in a sentence, the word-order is maintained with impersonal pronouns. The sentence "Elizabeth likes tiramisu" is in SVO order, but it could be rearranged with the object first for the purpose of adding focus to the direct object; this could be done with the passive ("tiramisu is liked by Elizabeth"), but it is also possible to start (sort of) with the object in the active voice. This would theoretically appear as "is tiramisu that Elizabeth likes", however, the pronoun 'it' is necessary to make this grammatical, so while more focus is placed on the object in the rearranged sentence "it is tiramisu that Elizabeth likes", the impersonal pronoun still is a subject in the fir

While the word 'all' acts semantically to unify things (i.e. "*all* the parts of something), the use of the word extends to one as not only a submodifier with varied senses but also as an intensifier. One can say that someone is 'all wet' to mean that every part of someone is wet, but in other cases, such as 'all better', the meaning does not necessarily refer to the literal whole of someone, but contributes to a quality. In both cases, the word is a submodifier, but the literal sense was extended to a more abstract notion of a person in the latter example. Moreover, while 'every' refers to parts of something "all parts" "every part", it does not lend itself to modifying the way 'all' does, such that someone cannot be 'every better'. Furthermore, somewhat colloquially, 'all' can be used as an intensifier, such as in "you look stressed", to "you look all stressed". You can now support

Stress and syllable-structures are linked in many ways, so while throughout the Syllables and Stress Week they have largely been considered separately, many of those ideas overlap. In English, a language heavily affected by stress, stress can be seen to affect the way individual words are pronounced , but language is more than individual words. The reason why Hawai'ian cannot have consonant clusters, for instance, is not only because those don't exist within words, but since words must end in vowels, clusters cannot appear within a sentence. With that in mind, it would seem that words like 'box' [baks] may be considered monosyllabic , but when followed by a word with no onset (most words that start with a vowel), one might assume that the [s] would become an onset, so 'box opener' would be something like 'bok sopener'. To some extent, this is true; were one to slow down a recording of speech enough, it is likely that it would be indistinguishable. Howev

Syllables are notoriously hard to define, despite the fact that children can be taught to parse a word into its syllables with only instinct. Indeed, it was said by Ladefoged & Johnson, “[syllables are] a unit of speech for which there is no satisfactory definition. Syllables seem to be necessary units in the mental organization and production of utterances.” Though principles like the MOP and SSP can be trusted as a way to empirically break up a word (or more accurately: a phrase) into syllables, there are some oddities. The complex word 'sixths' [sɪksθs] not only has three consecutive fricatives, and four non-syllabic consonants in succession, but far more importantly, [k] has lower sonority than [s] or [θ], so it would seem like, according to the SSP, [sɪksθs] must have to be 2 syllables. For that matter, this is the case with other words like 'box' [baks] or anything other word such as those that end with a plosive and then quite commonly [s]. However, in wo

So far in the Word Facts series, Syllable and Stress Week —the focus has mostly been on English. While English syllables are as interesting as any other perhaps, the rules for them are not universal. While English has, for instance, a limit (though not terribly strict) of how many consonants can cluster as a single onset—practically, it can have three, such as in 'spree' [spɹi]—other languages like certain Semitic or Slavic ones can have whole words composed of only consonants , including in the famous Czech tongue-twister 'strč prst skrz krk' ('stick a finger through the throat'). On the other hand, some languages such as polynesian languages like Hawai'ian can't have consonant clusters whatsoever to the point that syllables can't end in consonants because that could result in two consonants of separate syllables next to each other. Therefore, there are four types of syllables in Hawai'ian: V (vowel), VV, CV, (consonant-vowel), and CVV; this

For most words, the stress does not really affect the meaning thereof, but there are occasions where stress is not simply a natural feature of a given term, but will change, for example, a lexical class (part of speech). For instance, for some nouns with corresponding verbal forms (or vice-versa) will have different stressing, such as ‘ rebel ’ or even ‘associate’, where primary or secondary stress is shifted to the end of the word when it is a verb. This type of stress, called ‘lexical stress’ or sometimes ‘word stress’, leads to more predictable positions for stress in English, where stressing can appear at first glance more or less random, unlike in ‘ Finnish ’ where the stress is always on the first syllable. Furthermore, words do not need to change lexical class to have variant lexical stress. ‘Defence’ in American English has stress on the first syllable when used for sports /ˈdiːˌfɛns/ whereas when the stress is on the second syllable, it tends to carry connotations the law or t

Stress affects the way that certain sounds are produced fairly often, insofar as accentuation makes certain sounds more or less simple to create; whether or not one's emotional state changes one's speech is a different matter. For instance, historically, unstressed or lax vowels before an initial [h] would have led to the reduction of [h] entirely, so 'have' would have become [æv] but 'hay' would likely remain [heɪ]. This is related to why it is acceptable to say ' an historic...' or 'a historic...' . Moreover, many of the words sound the way they do today because unstressed or long vowels would often diphthongize, so an [æ] in 'has' (or 'hasn't) cold become [ɛ] as in 'bed', and then [e] to [eɪ] as in 'hey'. This is one proposed reason for how 'hasn't' could become 'ain't', or less controversially why 'have' does not rhyme with its derivative 'behave'. Make sure to check ou

It might not seem that assimilation—when one sound becomes similar to or completely elides with one that is adjacent to it—would have too much to do with syllables, but there are similarities. Rules for assimilation, in some language, are based upon sonority hierarchy , such as in Finnish in which a less sonorous phoneme can elide with a more sonorous one it precedes. For instance, [tn] could become [n]. Plenty of other languages use assimilation, including the English 'sandwich' which can be pronounced idyllically as [ˈsændˌwɪt͡ʃ], but may more likely appear as /ˈsænˌwɪt͡ʃ/ or /ˈsæmˌwɪt͡ʃ/ (with only [n] or alternatively [m]). In languages like Finnish however, because it follows the same patterns as the sonority hierarchy, this would change how many syllables are in a given word. Nevertheless, English has historically had assimilation (which is called diachronic assimilation) that changed the quality and number of syllables in words that are now consistently a certain amount

This post marks the 3rd year of Word Facts', and the start of Syllable and Stress Week (SSW). Thank you for the support There are two principles that allow people to determine how a word is broken up into syllables, at least generally in English. First, there is the Sonority Sequencing Principle (SSP) which was discussed here last week, and then there is the Maximum Onset Principle (MOP). Simply put, the MOP states that, between vowels, consonants are assigned to be the onset i.e. it is the first part of a syllable along with the vowel it precedes. It is for this reason that it has been found that people will almost certainly divide tatatata... as ta•ta•ta•ta... as opposed to tat•at•at•at.... Nevertheless, there are language-specific constraints on this, which is why syllables can end in consonants, because, according to the SSP, if a phoneme's sonority (how loud it is) falls between what is immediately lower in sonority (possibly the onset: optional) and what is higher in s

People who have studied literature are probably familiar with the form of 'e'er' for 'ever', or other examples—particularly in poetry—where the fricative  (usually [v]) is dropped from the middle of a word. This can be seen repeatedly in the first four lines of An EPITAPH by Joseph Giles(*): If e'er sharp sorrow from thine eyes did flow, If e'er thy bosom felt another's woe, If e'er fair beauty's charms thy heart did prove, If e'er the offspring of thy virtuous love... By the eighteenth century, this was fairly common in poetry, though not as popular in everyday speech. What was becoming more common at that time was to drop a fricative from the contracted forms, so 'isn't' might become 'in't', which is still used by some people as an alternative form of 'ain't, but also this occurred with 'wasn't and 'hasn't' and many other words. As is always the case with the evolution of language, it

Several cultures have used letters to represent numerals. Famously, the Romans and other Europeans used Romans numerals, which assigns numbers to letters, but quite often, people would do it the other way around. Isopsephy is a Greek word denoting the practice of taking the sum of the numbers assigned to a word, but this requires that every letter in a given writing-system has a numeric value. This practice was Greek, but other cultures with other writing systems did this as well, including with the Roman alphabet, the Hebrew alephbet, and the Arabic abjad. Some people used this for prophesies, while other people would use this alphanumeric system as a code of sorts. While certainly less popular today, the notion that the number of the beast is 666 or, historically, 616 comes from this practice, but given that different people assigned different numbers to letters in both the same and different writing-systems, the same word will often yield varying results.

For many people—particularly outside of the U.K.—the vowel in the negative contraction of 'can', 'can't', is the same one, either [a] or [æ], as is used for the positive form. This should make sense, since with the exception of ' do ', none of the commonly used words with a negative contractional form change their vowels, but this was not always the case. In Middle English, many verbs that were irregular would have a phonetically distinct negative form. Then, 'can' was pronounced [kæn] like its pronounced in Standard American English today, but 'can't was pronounced as [kɑ:nt]. For this word, there is a similar situation that happens in Received Pronunciation, or other souther English dialects, but this occurred in many more words at the time. Not only was the vowel different, but one the positive form was short  while the negative form was long.

Standard American English has the sound [ɾ], called a tap or a flap, in words like 'city' [sɪɾi] which in Received Pronunciation would be with a [t] ([sɪti]) or would be a glottal stop in some other dialects in Britain [sɪʔi]. This [ɾ] sound is produced by placing one's tongue on the roof of the mouth (specifically the alveolar ridge) for less time than one would to pronounce [t] as in 'tango'. This process is also sometimes called trilling. Trilling does not exist just as an allophone of [t], but also is an allophone for [r] or [ɹ], or a whole bunch of other sounds, theoretically. Indeed, in Spanish, the 'rolled R' or 'trilled R' written orthographically with a double-R in the middle of words is the same phoneme as this. In fact, the phrase "pot of tea" in Standard American English is more or less phonetically identical to the Spanish "para ti", which would be transcribed [paɾati]. The reason that IPA [ɾ] looks more like a lower

As discussed yesterday , if a phoneme consistently morphs into a different sound in a consistent phonetic context, this means that the sound which it becomes is an 'allophone'. Another example from English that was not looked at yesterday was that the glottal stop [ʔ] and the tap [ɾ] are considered allophones of [t] because they appear as the onset for certain syllables (which will be discussed specifically during Word Facts' Syllable and Stress Week starting December 9th) such as in 'butter': [bʊɾɚ] in Standard American English and [bʊʔə] in some northern dialects of British English. There all should make sense as allophones, as they all (including the examples from yesterday ) share the same manner of articulation (row on the chart below) or place of articulation (column on the chart below). It may sound odd at first, but in kiSwahili, [d] as in 'delta' is considered an allophone of [l] as in 'lima'. This is because, before an [n], [l] become

There are certain pairs of phonemes (sounds) that—in very specific contexts—would probably be indistinguishable in English, such as [p] or [b] in 'spot' (or 'sbot') . Nevertheless, the phoneme [p] can represent the sound produced by 'p' in 'pot', 'spot', and 'stop', even though they are all slightly different. While [b] and [p] may not be distinguishable in a few words, there are occasions when the difference changes the meaning, such as 'bin' and 'pin'. However, none of those different words before that have a sound represented by 'p' will change or lose meaning (in English) if one is used instead of the other. These are called 'allophones', because they all act as the same sound, in that one can be substituted for the other to an odd-sounding effect but identical meaning. In other words, these allophones are not part of a language's phoneme inventory .  Another criteria for allophones, however, is

' Do ', 'does', and 'don't' are obviously related to each other, as the latter two forms are only versions of the first. Nevertheless, each one of them has a different vowel; in Standard American English, the vowel is 'do' is [u], in 'does' it is [ʊ], and in 'don't' it is [oʊ̯]. You can see these on the chart (which is modelled after where a tongue has to move to pronounce the vowel) from speechmodification.com below. These vowels are said to be unstable, and 'do' is not the only word to have this unstable vowel historically, but it is a good example of how these tend to lengthen and lower (see chart and observe that [ʊ] is produced physically lower than [u]). Some of the reason for this is that it can be easier to produce, but in some languages, vowels will change regularly depending upon which consonants potentially follow them; this concept will be explored in the future soon.

Linguistics requires a lot of scientific analysis, but since there are certain cultural elements that influence the way people speak, unless one who is studying a language understands this, linguists can misunderstand the way that people talk, due to their own biases. For example, some languages have fewer words for colors than others, which is fairly easy to describe, but sometimes comparing words for colors is not so simple. Hanunó’o, a Filipino language, has terms for ‘light’ and ‘dark’ which is understandable from an English-speaking perspective, but colors can also be described as ‘wet’ and ‘dry’, which has no equivalent in English. Without knowing this, it could seem that Hanunó’o has fewer words for colors than it actually does.

Neither sentence: "I see he" nor "I run him" can be considered acceptable, but the reason for each is different. In the first one, the problem is that 'he' is only used as a subject, even when it appears in the middle  or end of a sentence, but given that 'see' takes an object, it would require 'him' to be used. This issue does not have to relate to what each word means semantically, but how it all fits together syntactically (or not in this case). On the other hand, with "I run him", while it is possible for 'run' to take an object, such as in "I run a race", this sentence does not make sense considering the meaning of each word together. Chomsky's famous sentence—whether you agree with his conclusions—" colorless green ideas sleep furiously" is an example of how people can see that something is grammatical but nonsensical.

Sounds are not created the same way physically, and this not only—though most obviously—changes the way the sound (phoneme) sounds, but also it changes how loud it will be on average. Vowels, for instance, are the loudest while stops (such as [t] or [b] are the least sonorous. All phonemes can be placed on the sonority hierarchy which goes, from loudest to quietest: vowels, approximates (like [l] or [r]), nasals (like ([m] and [n]), fricatives (like [f]), affricates (like [d͡ʒ], or the J in 'jump') and the last category is stops. Aside from simply being an amusing fact that some sounds are generally louder than others, it is because of this hierarchy that syllables exist, because when one speaks, as the sounds decrease and then increase in volume, more or less accidentally or at least coincidentally, this creates—simply put—the rhythm of syllables. This is a rich topic, and this hardly at all scratches the surface, so expect more in the future soon.

For a long period of time, articles ('the', 'a', or 'an') were considered to be a type of adjective rather than a type of determiner. Though they do act differently in some ways, they do—at least at first glance—seem to modify nouns and though they have to go before adjectives, there is already an order to adjectives anyway. The difference is not only in the way it operates syntactically, but also differences semantically. Determiners  create a reference to the noun, rather than a modification thereto, so saying 'a dog' doesn't change the quality of the dog. Genitives  like "Mike's" is also a determiner, for the same reason, but also a noun cannot take two determiners, so there can be "the dog" or "Mike's dog" but not Mike's the dog".

The most similar language to English is generally said to be Frisian, specifically West Frisian. Still, if an English speaker heard West Frisian  for the first time, he or she not likely understand what was being said, because even though they share the Ingvaeonic root (see photo below*) there are still many centuries of foreign influence  and geographic isolation that made the two languages distinct. Because they are both so famous, and because they are spoken quite near to each other, one might assume that the most similar language to Modern German would be Dutch , and while the two are certainly quite similar to the point that there is some level of mutual intelligibility  (though not 100% or anywhere close to that) Yiddish is actually closer related. Though German and Yiddish occasionally differ in some vocabulary, accent, and word-order, they are remarkably similar, in part because the two only diverged relatively recently, and were spoken in a similar region. * http://yiddish.b

To many people, ‘dinner’ is the last meal of the day, which can also be called 'supper' or in some places 'tea', while to many other people in certain places, 'dinner' is the mid-day meal, as opposed to something else like ' lunch '. Though 'dinner' as the final meal of the day may be more common globally, neither that nor the alternative labelling of what would otherwise be 'lunch' was not without reason. The word 'dinner' comes from the Old French, 'disner' meaning 'to dine' and when it was adopted into English, it often would denote the largest meal of the day, not when it was timed. Moreover, it is believed that 'disner' comes from 'desjëuner' meaning ' to reverse ' and 'fasting', or somewhat more idiomatically: ‘to break fast’. In this way, a word that originally that either descended from or at least is related to breakfast now means 'supper' or 'lunch'.

There are lots of ways to describe types of words, and all of them have different applications. Words are broken up into well-known categories like ‘nouns’, ‘verbs’ ‘adjectives’ etc based upon the way they function in a clause. Beyond that, types of words in various lexical classes are also broken into categories like ‘mass nouns’ and ‘count nouns’ which have different sorts of meanings when they get pluralized or have determiners, such as ‘milk’ and ‘cookie’ respectively, bu t classifications for words are not always—albeit they usually are—syntactic. Telic verbs, for example, relate to actions or goals that have a defined end, such as “build” whereas atelic verbs do not. This does relate to syntax, as certain phrases can only be added to certain verbs, such as “he ran in an hour” which sounds bad, while “he built (something) in an hour” is fine, but this is also somewhat of a semantic issue.

There are a lot of ways to report speech, but not all of them are treated the same way, both socially and grammatically. A traditional way to do this is “[person] said/ordered/mentioned/stated/posited (that)...” which reports, obviously, what was communicated verbally. There are plenty of verbs other than “said” such as the ones before, but these all use the same syntactic structures, and while they all communicate the same thing more or less, certainly some of them would sou nd clunky outside of written work. Other phrases such as “[person] was like” sounds less formal generally—one wouldn’t find it in a newspaper or academic journal—and (at least for the second half of that statement) there is good reason. “[person] was like” allows the person reporting the communication to include non-verbal cues, and it is certainly possible to simple utter the phrase and make a face, or gasp etc, which wouldn’t serve written work much, but does allow for people to include much more information abo

There are many different accents and dialects of English spoken all over the world , but since this is the same language, the differences will only be slight. Even if people do not know the linguistic academic terminology, people are generally able to pick out the ways variation appears, such as how the same sound can appear two distinct ways in the same context, e.g. rhotic or non-rhotic R  in a New York and London accent respectively. When people are aware of this difference, it is called a 'salient variable'. Not all variables can be called salient for every person, which could be a small part of the reason why some people are bad at putting on other accents. These variables can also be emphasised or diminished in order to adapt to situations, and appear either more or less to belong to a certain group.

Having an understandable sentiment linguistically is more than simply the grammar of a sentence when considered in isolation. The term Cooperative Principle describes the idea that people will speak in a way that is suitable to the context of the conversation, both linguistically and otherwise. The four Gricean maxims, simply put, identify rules by which people know how to talk to each other. First, there is the maxim of relevance: the notion that people will give relevant information. A somewhat exaggerated example how this is broken could be: Speaker 1: "how's the weather?" Speaker 2: "I like cats" Next, there is the maxim of quality, which states that people cooperating in a conversation would tell what they believe is truthful. To lie would violate this maxim. For the following two maxims, there is some overlap. The maxim of quantity posits that people try to be as brief as they can, and the maxim of manner states that people will try to be as clear as th

One way to determine when something is a verb-phrase is that it can be substituted for "do so (too)". For instance, both "walks the dog" and "walk the dog on Tuesdays" in "Yosef walks the dog on Tuesdays" are verb-phrases, which we known because one could say "...and Beth does so too (/ on Tuesday)". It is not that this test does not work for all verb-phrases exactly, but there is the problem that this works too much. In the sentence "Beth is selling her house, but Yosef could never do so", "do so" does not mean "selling her house", (or "his house", as this is not specified either) but simply "sell [his/her] house". The meaning could be essentially the same, or not, but this is not only a matter of semantics , but also one of syntax. Also, people understand that certain meaning is not carried forward with 'do so', such as "Yosef pet the cat, but he never would have done so

Humor relies a great deal on misconceptions based upon ambiguity. Syntactic ambiguity  has been discussed here before, when a word can be more than one part of speech, but there is also structural ambiguity, such as in the sentence "I saw the girl with glasses" (i.e. it is not clear who has glasses). Also, there is lexical ambiguity, when a word has two possible meanings such the answer to "in what state will this water be flowing?" could be 'liquid' or, say, 'Kentucky'. Then finally there is referential ambiguity, such as the old joke "where was the Declaration of Independence signed?": "at the bottom". There is of course a great deal of similarity sometimes with these.

People are surprisingly good at understanding bad grammar, and perhaps equally good at determining when good grammar sounds bad. This is not to say that people will to innately follow prescriptive rules, but that, on the contrary, people can often make out a reasonable meanings that are not provided in the language, for instance if the sentence is worded in a confusing way, such as with double-negatives. Although these do not have to rely on 'not', no', and '-n't ', these are prevalent, as in sentences like "this is not to say that I don't think that it isn't [adjective]" which would have a negative meaning when parsed, but in conversation could easily be interpreted as positive, because it combines two commonly used double-negatives: "I don't think that it isn't" and "this is not to say that I don't think (that...)". For an example of this confusion in the real world click here . Often, as with 'me' af

Differences in people's dialects will not only manifest themselves as accents but there will also be some amount of separate lexicon. For instance, while in America and Canada, 'pudding' only denotes a sweet, custard-like dessert , in Britain (and other Commonwealth countries) 'pudding' is synonymous with 'dessert'. Neither could be considered to be wrong, so to speak, but you may wonder which of those is traditional. The answer is: neither. The term in Middle English denoted a sausage , as is still the case when the word is qualified, such as 'black pudding'. As a side-note, haggis is technically a pudding as well.

Onomatopoeias—words that mimic non-human sounds like ' shriek '—should all logically sound more or less the same, since people are ostensibly all hearing the same noises, but this is not exactly the case. Sometimes the variation is reasonable, such as how cats for English speakers say 'meow' whereas in Malay the word is 'ngjau', which is not the same, but both start with a nasal sound and end in a similar vowel-sound, while other times it may be rather different, as with the Bengali 'hamba' for the noise a cow makes, or the Russian 'gav gav' for dogs. If you know of any others, do include them in the comments. The only sort of explanation, besides any variation caused by different breeds (which would not account for differences in onomatopoeias of inanimate things, like the German version of Rice Krispies' "snap, crackle, and pop" being "Knisper! Knasper! Knusper") is that crucially cows do not say 'hamba', but n

No one knows what the original language sounded like, or even if there ever were such a language. Really, the furthest back that people can estimate ancient languages is a few thousand years, depending upon the language family. Still, it is thought for various, mainly biological and anthropolicical reasons that language began as far back as 100,00 BCE. This is largely to do with adaptations in the brain and larynxes of early humans. It is debated whether language developed before this, but there is really no way to know, and this also raises the question of what constitutes a language. Studying other animals can lend some insights however; some believe that language wasn't created from nowhere but developed as a replacement for other forms of communication including grooming, or some form of involuntary sounds like laughter or cries, which can be supported by studying monkeys.

Syntactic ambiguity [1] is a problem that speakers, and especially writers of English must deal with fairly regularly. This happens when one word can act as two parts of speech, and there is no way to determine which decidedly, given its linguistic context. This happens with present participles that can appear like adjectives, e.g. " visiting relatives can be boring " but this also happens, perhaps unsurprisingly, with past participles. In this case, the confusion would usually surround whether something is a passive verb or an adjective, such as in "plans can get complicated". However, it doesn't really matter. Here, there is less of a distinction needed than was the case with present participles, because the words function like adjectives not in spite of the passive nature of the participles but indeed because of it, largely.

A Classical European education would typically include Latin and Greek along with one's native language, or any other modern languages available in school. This meant partly that for a few centuries once linguistics became established as an academic field, while there was a large collection of data on languages of Africa, the Americas, etc. and later Oceania, comparative linguistics was largely narrow. With a few exceptions, most likely Hungarian, this somewhat accidental cultural norm was one of the factors that led the prevalence of Indo-European as a focus of study in linguistics for those in Europe and often elsewhere. This issue was not only cultural nor racial, but also political. In 1799, Hungarian was related to Finnish (correctly), but other languages belonging to the Finno-Ugric family [2] could not be studied, as they were spoken within Russia. Some languages were unfairly included or excluded from the label ( which went by many names over the years) by modern stand

The Welsh city Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch is known for having the longest name of any city in Europe (though not the world) at 58 letters, but this is not the only reason that Welsh [1] names for cities should be notable. Celtic languages used to be the dominant language family of the British Isles, and indeed most of Europe, and there are still trances of this. The city ‘Dover’ in southern England comes from ‘Dwfr’ or ‘Dŵr’ meaning 'water', even though English has been the dominant language there for a considerable amount of time. As well, somewhat redundantly, since 'afon' means 'river', the River Avon would simply mean 'river river' when considering its Celtic origin.

In the same way that the arrangement of streets for old cities are arguably less logical than those of new ones because people had the ability to plan new cities more, newer words for units of measurement tend to be more structured as well, but this is not to say that older systems like the Imperial System never had any reasoning. Words like 'meter', or 'gram' come from words that mean 'measure' and 'small weight' in Greek and Latin respectively, and how prefixes in the metric system come from words that denote powers of ten in Greek and Latin, because the metric system was designed to be easy for conversions, and people creating it had the ability to plan and standardize more easily than for the Imperial System. In that system, words would either relate to measurements for practical things like lengths of fields, or would relate to fractions. Both 'inch' and 'ounce' come from the Latin 'uncia' meaning 'twelfth' (ounces

There are many ways in which the present tense is used as has already been explained on Word Facts, but it is worth revisiting the differences between present continuous and simple present. Grammatically they very clearly distinct: the present continuous takes a form of 'to be' and then a participial with '-ing', such as 'He is driving' whereas the simple present conjugates the verb itself, such as "he drives". Both, however, can indicate that a the action is coinciding with the time of the speech-act, and can also indicate that the action is occurring habitually, so while one form maybe tends to mean that the action and speech-act will be simultaneous, there is no certainty. In African American English however, the ' habitual be ' only means that the action is ongoing, i.e. "he be working" or "she be in college" implies merely that the subject is employed or attending school, even if that subject (contextually) were on

Some people believe that the language one speaks natively determines—or at least heavily influences—the way that he or she thinks. This has been discussed here on multiple occasions from 'Eskimo's' (so to speak) having more words for snow than in English , to Sapir's idea that the 'Eskimo' would have an easier time understanding Kant than a German-speaker and how these, and other non-Eskimo relating ideas, tend to be illogical or even racist. On the other hand then, if a language does not relate to cognition, it might not seem like it would matter should a language die off; this is not to say that all languages are the same  (which some people believe), but just that nothing would be lost really if people move onto other languages. Nevertheless, there are a variety of reasons why preserving a language is important. Linguistically, much of what is known about languages—particularly historical languages and linguistics—is done not by textual records necessarily b

Ostensibly, the clauses "he gave me the gift" and "he gave the gift to me" have have the same meaning, as each word has the same syntactic function in both, i.e. 'he' is the subject', 'gave' is the only verb, 'me' is the direct object, and 'the gift' is the indirect object. This rearrangement is true of sentences with 'give' as the main verb that have a direct object and indirect object, as well as other such verbs such as 'brought', 'ask', and more. The difference between the two original sentences however is control, which is to say the how the interpreted subject—which is in control—relates to the elements of the predicate. Generally, elements closer to the subject after the verb are said to be in higher control, so while is would be acceptable to say "he gave to me the book" is sounds a bit clunkier and perhaps archaic, but because more focus, so to speak, is put onto 'me' in that cons

It would not be considered grammatical and could easily be taken as offensive if someone where to use the pronoun 'it' in lieu of either 'he' or 'she', but this is not entirely to do with the impersonality of 'it' per se, and more to do with English conventions. People accept when babies or animals are referred to as ' it ', and also can use 'that' instead of ' who ' with certain sentence-structures, but none of that matters as much as the fact that in other languages like German or even Old English, plenty of words that relate to people, particularly women in those cases, are in the neutral gender, and can take the pronoun that would translate into 'it'. In the original German for Rapunzel from the Grimm's Fairy Tales for example, it reads „Rapunzel ward das schöste Kinde unter der Sonne. Als es zwölf Jahre alt war, schloß es die Zauberin in einen Turm...“ meaning "Rapunzel became the most beautiful child (neu

Out of the more or less 7,000 languages spoken world-wide, all but a handful of popular ones are spoken by only around 10 percent of people. This means that there are a great deal of languages which only have a few speakers. Ayapa Zoque (Ayapaneco), also referred to as Tabasco Zoque, or by its native name, Nuumte Oote, is an endangered language spoken in Mexico by around 15 speakers, all of whom are elderly. Once however, there was once a rumour that there were merely two speakers, who no longer were talking to each other. While this was later found to be false, it does highlight the notion that a language does not die when the last speaker thereof dies, but indeed can be considered dead if all speakers but one die, because in that case there is no longer anyone to talk to in that given language.

English speakers may be fairly familiar with the idea of long vowels , as in the difference between the [a] in 'car' 'father', but these vowels depend largely on the sounds they precede, and whether or not that the consonant is voiced; it would not sound normal to use short or long vowels in alternated places, but it would probably would be understandable to switch the two, and the issue usually concerns whether the vowel is lax or tense instead. In some languages however, the length of vowels affect the meaning of words a great deal more. Anyone who has seen Finnish writing would know that it has a lot more vowels than English writing—it is possibly the only European language to normally have more vowels than consonants in a given text—but partly this is due to the fact that a repeated vowel signifies long vowels. Furthermore, in Finnish as well as many other languages, consonants can be long as well, so for example 'kuka' means 'who', but the word &

People teaching the way that sounds are produced, usually to children but also to second-language speakers ought to be careful not to over-pronounce sounds, so to speak, and make every part of a word or syllable stressed, or vocalize too long, etc. Perhaps the clearest example of this is the word 'a' (and 'an'), which is—outside of exceptional contexts such as emphasis for semantic reasons—pronounced [ə] as in 'duh' but may said to pronounced [ei] which is the name for the letter in the alphabet, but is not the same as how people actually say it in a sentence, and is indeed even a diphthong. The article can be pronounced as [ei], as mentioned before, in certain contexts, such as clarification of the fact that there is only one of something like "I have [only] a shoe", but this is not the typical use. Below is a link to a video from Electric Company which is supposed to teach children about putting sounds together to make a word, but exaggerates the wa

The usual rule told to those when learning English is that 'a' is used for that state with a consonantal sound, and 'an' is used for words when the article precedes a vowel. There are at least two ways this can be confusing to some. Because English orthography is not phonetic nor even phonological, the letter 'u' can represent the [ju] in 'mute' at the beginnings of words, such as 'university'. Therefore, even though 'u' is a said to be a vowel, it represents two sounds in ce rtain words, the former of which is a consonant, and would therefore take 'a' not 'an'. The other possible issue is that of which article to use before [h]: is something "a historic day" or "an historic day"? The first option is generally preferred, and much of the reason that people would use 'an' in this case is that historically the 'h' was not pronounced in the 18th and 19th centuries, as is still the case in so

In English, an affix can be said to be more or less productive, but whether it can attach to fewer than 50 nouns as in the case of ' -th'  or thousands, as in the case of ' -ness' , the affix will not change its form. Occasionally whole words change over time, such as what would have been something like 'youngth' becoming 'youth', but this is not systematic in any way. Meanwhile, in some Uralic  and Turkic languages, vowels have to harmonize with the word to which the affix is bound. For instance, a multiplicative ending, similar to '-(i)ce' in 'once' or ' thrice ' in Hungarian is '-szor' for certain vowels (back vowels) like in 'hatszor' but will appear as '-szer' and '-ször' when harmonizing with front vowels or front rounded vowel respectively.

English has plenty of words for the different people in a family such as 'brother', 'sister', 'mother', 'father', 'grandparent', 'aunt', 'cousin' etc. This is fairly typical for other languages; words for things that are important and fairly basic will have simple one-to-one translations to most other languages usually, while other things may require a full sentence, like words for snow in Inuit  or indeed the Inuit word 'iktsuarpok' which denotes an excited anticipation waiting for something and repeatedly checking its arrival (e.g. when excitedly waiting for friend or an event and constantly checking the time). Nevertheless, some languages have more or very occasionally fewer words for family-members than English does. It is thought that Proto-Indo-European had more words for family-members , such as a single term for "son's wife" which English needs to construct with multiple words, and plenty of languages