Word Facts

Observations related to or based off of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis have led to some interesting conclusions, including why there would be so many Inuit words for ' snow '. Nevertheless, the hypothesis which states that the language one speaks is directly linked to the way someone thinks is sometimes used hypothetically. Sapir himself stated that “it may be suspected that the highly synthetic  and periodic structure of Eskimo would more easily bear weight of Kant's terminology than his native German”. The concept that different aspects of language ranging from vocabulary to syntax determine cognition and perception can be interpreted in such a way that anything from colors  to Kant relate to language would relate to language, and should not always be trusted.

If asked to meet someone at noon, it would be understood that that means twelve o'clock. Nevertheless, 'noon' comes from the Old English word 'nōn' denoting "the ninth hour from sunrise", though this didn't mean nine o'clock in the morning either. Instead measuring from six in the morning when the sun rose, 'noon' referred to three in the afternoon, as we would say now. The Old English word came from Latin, and is related to the ecclesiastical noun 'none' (or nones), not to be confused with the pronoun and adverb which is Germanic in origin, denoting a time of prayers and customary meal. Up through the 12th century this is all the word would have meant, but then while the customary time for these became earlier around the 14th century, the word did not. This same shift occurred in Dutch with the word 'noen'.

After three days of discussing what makes a word a word , the question arose of what makes a phrase a phrase. While a phrase and a hyphenated word are similar in that they convey a single concept through a combination of other elements, a phrase is made up of syntactically distinct elements. In the same way that a word can not be split apart while still being intelligible, a phrase must be delivered as one unit in order to convey the intended meaning. "Needle in a haystack" is an idiomatic phrase, and in the sentence "it was like finding a needle in a haystack" the phrase communicates one, metaphorical concept which furthermore could not really be split up, such as "it was like finding a needle shiny in a haystack" as that would mean something else more literal, describing the quality of the needle. Not all phrases need to be idiomatic though, such as a prepositional phrase like "in the house", though everything mentioned before still holds.

Above the number twelve, all numbers in English are a combination of different numbers raised to multiples of ten, e.g. four-hundred-thirty is four times ten raised to the power of two, plus three times ten raised to the power of one. Almost all numbers in English are said with the highest place first, and then all smaller values next. The exception to this is with the -teens : thirteen through nineteen. While those terms no longer contain the word 'ten', the ending '-teen' used to be just that, so fourteen would be, in essence, like 'four-ten'; notably however 'forty' would as well. This style of forming cardinal numbers, by putting the number in the ones place first, is increasingly rare in Modern English, but in Old English and Middle English it was quite common, or even standard to form number like this, such as the line in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales: "Wel nyne and twenty in a compaignye" ("Some nine and twenty in a company"

This is the third and final post on what makes a word a word for now,  though you should make sure to look at the posts from yesterday  and the day before. It was stated then how words are distinct from other morphemes, such as affixes, because they can be moved around somewhat freely in a clause. It is for that reason that long words in certain other languages, especially in polysynthetic ones, are not simply a collection of little words said together. In Kalaallisut (West Greenlandic) the meaning of a word is built into it in such a way that it can be its own whole clause theoretically. For example, 'tikilluarit' means 'welcome' and 'tikilluaritsi' means 'you are welcome' or 'tikilluaqquavusi' means 'you have just been welcomed'. It should be noted that some affixes are subtractive and will reduce parts of the stem or other affixes. In the case of 'tikilluaritsi', the ending that indicated second-person  cannot be moved around

This is the second part to the post yesterday about what makes a word a word. As alluded to then, an affix is not a word for the reason that it does not carry its own meaning; but additionally this is so because it is bound to the word it modifies. In spelling this is quite clear as there is no space between an affix and the stem, also called a 'free morpheme'. Nevertheless, there are words like 'will' or 'may' that modify the meaning of a word in a similar fashion to the past-tense  suffix '-ed', so it might seem that those should not be considered words, but they are. There are two reasons for this. First, English does not technically have a future-tense , so 'will' does not change the tense per se, but the mood  and is therefore not comparable to other tense-changing suffixes necessarily; second—and more importantly—it can be moved around in a clause and does not need to be put with the verb. One could say, for example, "I will pay"

Except by linguists, the questions of 'why is a word a word?' or 'what even is a word?' may be seldom asked. The answer to this is debated occasionally, but in a general sense the word 'word' is used to describe any discrete "meaningful element" (i.e. it conveys meaning unlike an affix which only affects syntax) but this is vague. It may seem easier to determine to understand what a word is because it is separated by spaces when printed, but this is misleading. The term 'passive-aggressive' is a compound of two words, but is only one; while it usually spelt with a hyphen , though not always, this is not the reason it is not two words: it's because when modified into being a noun, only the latter half is morphed. If this were not the case, it would become 'passivity-agression' or 'passiveness-aggression'. There is much more to this topic, and that will be explored tomorrow.

English has a myriad of words that denote to sex itself—either for actual description or sometimes for swearing  and other purposes—but there is another group of words that only relate to sex, and these two groups are often not so dissimilar. With words like ' sodomy ' or ' orgy ' that denote sexual acts, for example, the original meaning of these terms etymologically did not relate to sex at all, but eventually took on the meaning because of—in this case—the Catholic Church. Other words as well also often first connoted something bad or immoral in a general way, but then were later applied to things relating to sex because of popular opinions. Likewise, with the word 'randy', which does not denote sex itself but does relate to it tangentially is thought to have come from a word meaning 'to rant' but eventually gained its modern connotation from another association to someone who would 'rand' as it were. Moreover, in Scots, the word 'randy

Modern tanks were first used during WWI by the British. When they were employed the goal was to surprise the Germans and break through the front line, but they didn't want the Central Powers to know what they were. For that reason, some people have claimed that if the Americans invented the tanks first that they could have been called 'barrels', but not because of gun-barrels or anything like that. Instead, this is due to the fact that 'tank' in 1915 and 1916 was the code-word used to denote the war-machine, as it was hoped that the British might fool the Germans into thinking that they were simply vehicles for transporting water at first. At the time, the term 'tank' and 'barrel' were synonymous, much like today, but 'barrel' was more common in the United States to describe what would be called a 'tank' in Britain.

If your mind is dirty enough, there are plenty of words that look like they should be related to a swear  or something sexual, but this isn't always the case. To answer a fan-question, 'pusillanimous' meaning "lacking courage" doesn't have an apparent connection to the word 'pussy', even though that too can also be an insult for someone timid. The former term is from Latin via Greek meaning 'small mind', related to ' animus ', whereas the latter term is Germanic, among other reasons. That does not mean however that there aren't other modern words that have some sort of etymological connection. 'Pussy', which is used in many senses including 'cat' and 'vagina' comes from an Old English word 'pusa' meaning 'bag', related to the Old Norse for ' pocket ' though not the English word 'purse'. The word is also related to the Low German for 'vulva', though early uses in English

Those writing in English use very few hyphens even if it could make things a great deal clearer. Even though they may not be included in writing, there is a difference in speech where they could be present. For example, a native speaker of English would use a different intonation for "I'm in a car" versus "I'm in a car-park", though the change is subtle. Hyphens, just like any other type of punctuation, aren't technically pronounced, so the only reason to use them instead of combining the words together, as happens for German words, is convention, though there some exceptions like 'busstop'. The effect of hyphenated pairs becomes more appararent in German as well, and there's no better example than with the word 'eierstock'. That term meaning 'ovaries' but is masculine in gender, because while 'ei' is neuter, it is only the last element that dictates the syntax. While English doesn't have grammatical gender, but fo

In the U.S., it's common for young children to get lice-checks in school periodically, or when one student gets head-lice. Those same kids, however, would not get cootie-checks, partly because children already know that half the population have them anyway, so the thought is: "why bother?" but also—and more importantly—because they are a fictional germ. The term 'cootie' however can be used in more serious circumstances to mean 'body-lice', though people tend to opt for that term rather than 'cooties'. The word itself derives from the Malay 'kutu' which was the name for a parasitic insect, and was adopted into English during the first world war.

There are a number of words in English that denote the meat of an animal separate to the word for the animal itself, including 'pork' and 'beef' as opposed to 'pig' and 'cow' respectively. This is because the names for the food came from Old French whereas the names for the animals are Germanic. To a native English speaker this might seem typical, but compared to most other languages this is quite rare; most of the time, the word for a food and the word for an animal are the same. This happens in English with 'chicken' and kinds of fish however, so the idea should be understandable. In those cases where the two words are the same, the meaning may be discerned not only from context but from grammar, which all native speakers will know subconsciously. In the sentence, "I like chicken", food doesn't even need to be mentioned at all, but because it has no article and is singular people would know this 'chicken' is for food. Th

In general, a word's derivatives make it very easy for a speaker to apply one sort of concept throughout different parts of speech, also called 'lexical classes'. Some words, though theoretically all words, can be used in different contexts in English to change the part of speech to which it belongs without affixes or anything else e.g. 'water' in 'I drink water' and 'I water the plants is acting as a noun and verb respectively. Much of the time, either for clarity or tradition, speakers will modify a word to convey the same sort of concept but within lexical classes, such as with 'analysis', a noun, 'analyze', a verb, and 'analytical', an adjective. In a few instances, the derivatives have changed meanings however, so while 'hypothesis' and 'hypothesize' both relate to the explanation of something based on minimal evidence usually in regard to research, 'hypothetical' and 'hypothetically' are used

Word order in any language tends to be presented just as a three-letter code denoting where the grammatical subject, object, and main verb are placed. This makes sense for English, classified as SVO, as, for the most part, the position of a word in a sentence determines its function almost entirely. In other languages like Latin, the grammatical meaning is identified by endings on words, so there could theoretically be any order to the sentence, but it is nevertheless classified as SOV. It is not a rule, in any way that word may be regarded, that a sentence in a given language must be in a particular word order, so this based off of convention. For that reason, a sentence like "that I know well" is in OSV , one of the least common standard word orders for any language and may possibly be rarer than "I know that well" but is still understandable and used in regular speech largely thanks to the pronoun 'I' which is only used for the subject. Non-standard wo

The post yesterday was concerned with the different sorts of plurals that people use in English, but there are still a number of plurals that people don't use (at least not often). There are plenty of originally Italian terms ending in '-i' that have made their way into English, such as 'spaghetti', 'graffiti', 'paparazzi', and 'cannoli' which people almost always use as singulars. It doesn't help that some of those may be thought of as a collective in the same way that people talk about hair in the singular, though certainly 'cannoli' does not belong to that group. Other words that are more common as plurals like 'lice' are sometimes also confused as singulars (instead of in this case 'louse'), so it isn't only with loan-words either. You could say that ordering one cannoli is a faux pas, but be careful, as doing that a second time would result in plural 'faux pas' being pronounced the same, and not t

As far as pluralization goes, English makes the process far easier than some other languages. Since there is no gender, the plural of a word only needs to have one form, and unlike in German where words are commonly pluralized with '-en', '-er', '-e', or by some internal-modification, even without any need for more differentiation, English tends to use just '-s' . There are a few regular exceptions to this. First, there are words that are pluralized by modifying the ending in a more complicated way that with merely a suffix, for example those ending in '-um' or '-on' that are pluralized by dropping that ending and adding an '-a' such as with 'flagellum' to 'flagella' or 'criterion' to 'criteria'. These, however, are all borrowed from from other languages and aren't very common; moreover, it could probably be understandable if someone said 'flagellums'. There are also a few historical met

English is a Germanic language but takes a lot of the vocabulary from Romance languages due to its somewhat complicated history . This lexicon is not only appears in whole words but many times from affixes as well. There are plenty of words that historically had Latinate prefixes that are now not removable , but plenty still operate as prefixes. Either as a prefix, like with the word 'decry' but also just as part of the word, such as with 'descend' and 'decline', 'de-' appears in a lot of different terms but does not have the same function for each. In these and other words with 'de-', either as a historical prefix or as a current prefix, it does not always indicate the same thing; there are some examples that relate in some way to going down and others meaning 'removal of'. In Latin this difference would have been very clear, as there was a prefix 'des-' which usually appears in English as 'dis-' as in 'disrespect

Unfortunately, there are a lot of racial slurs used in English and pretty much every other language, though according the the anti-discrimination paradigm  this won't change until people's views change, or until the particular word changes meaning. We see this with the word 'honky' and its predecessor 'Hunky' which referred to white people, specifically from Central or Eastern Europe. Now the word is much less common than it used to be, as opinions have shifted, but it still appears in word 'honky-tonk' which is at most a distant relation in terms of its current meaning. Similar to how the opinion of Slavs  by Western Europeans was pretty bad as indicated by the name (learn more by clicking the link), 'Hunky' came from an alteration of the word 'Hungarian'. The word 'Hungarian' isn't even what the Hungarians call themselves either; the word for Hungary in Hungarian is 'Magyar'. Like many names for European countries in

The sociolinguist Max Weinreich popularized the phrase, "a language is a dialect with an army and navy" and people have been quoting it ever since. Other than that, there is not much of any consensus about what makes a dialect and what makes a language; maybe there will be one day, but it can take a long time to definitively pin down ideas that seem quite simple, much like how the form for a syllable, in any scientific way, was only defined in the 1980's. In general, dialects of a language tend to be considered anything with mostly similar grammar and vocabulary, that may have different pronunciations, syntax, and some different lexicon while being intelligible to those who know another dialect, but that can itself be hard to determine. There are, for example, some dialects of English, like those spoken in Scotland or the Appalachians that evolved somewhat differently and might be unintelligible to someone who knows English from New York, but these are considered dialects

Almost every demonym or other adjective used to denote a people involve either a suffix like '-ish' and '-ian', or are strong nouns like 'Greek' from 'Greece'. There are some few exceptions, such as 'Muslim' that comes from the word 'Islam'. In English there are fewer prefixes that are used in general compared to suffixes, and far fewer than there are in some other languages like Hungarian . Arabic, and other semitic languages like Hebrew on the other hand don't have root words in the way that Indo-European ones to which affixes are added but use templates into which usually vowels are added to provide grammatical meaning. Nevertheless, in general M is a common way to make something into a demonym, so 'Islam' would become 'Mislam' (Muslim). In kiSwahili, a Bantu language with a great deal of Arabic influence, and 'Marekani' ('America') becomes 'Mmarekani' (American) as well.

Most suffixes, like '-ness' and most other derivational suffixes  for example, can be found at the end of words without any similarity in meaning, even though they are syntactically similar. Combining forms  on the other hand do have an impact on the meaning of the word, such as 'Austro-'  as a prefix or '-crat'  as a suffix. With that in mind, it might be confusing to look as the '-drome' in 'aerodrome' ('airdrome') or 'palindrome', for while the meanings are not apparently related, removing the ending of those words would leave 'aero-' and 'palin' which are not words on their own, as would be the case were it a suffix. You might assume also that the ending is completely coincidental, as does sometimes happen, but this is not what the element is considered to be. '-drome' is said to be a combining form simply for the reason that it adds semantic meaning; it denotes the idea of running or of courses like th

While normally the word lift means to pick up or raise in a general way, informally the word means 'to steal'. Although the exact word that became slang was fairly arbitrary, and might as well have been 'raise', the connotation lifting something up, and lifting something off of, say, a shelf in a store is fairly reasonable. Somewhat similarly, the word 'heist' evolved only recently in the mid 19th century from 'hoist'. 'Heist' does not have the double-meaning that 'lift' does, but that was only a matter of luck. Not only was 'heist' an alteration of 'hoist', but 'hoist' was originally an alteration of the verb 'hoise'. In that way, while 'hoist' now is a verb and a noun, in the famous line "hoist by his own petard" it is a participle , and could have been 'hoised'.

There are many native languages spoken in the Americas —somewhere around a thousand—though most have a fairly low amount of speakers, and only four are deemed non-endangered depending upon the source. The vast majority of people predominantly use a European language like English, Spanish, Portuguese , or French, along with a plethora of creoles from those languages. Some European language that might be associated less with the Americas than those others mentioned above might be Russian and Danish. Russian is spoken by a small number of people in Alaska who tend to be descendants of those whom originally colonized the region; the dialect uses a lot of archaic Russian vocabulary, so people call it Old Russian, and has various influences from the native Aleut or Yupik . Perhaps fittingly, most of the speakers of Old Russian now are elderly, and there aren't many of them. Danish on the other hand is spoken widely in Greenland, which is still a Danish colony. Nevertheless, the total po

There are many aspects to language, particularly in vocabulary that are fairly consistent from language to language. Even if an idea that can be expressed with a single word in one language has to be composed of two or more, theoretically it should be the case that anyone can say anything no matter what. In the case of the Australian language Guugu Yimithirr, as just one example, not everything is so simple. Its claim to fame, so to speak, is that there is no term for 'left' or 'right', and instead the people use the cardinal points North, South, East, and West. Children have to learn the concepts of left and right at a young age anyway, but just as how an English-speaking adult could identify where left is regardless of location, the speakers of Guugu Yimithirr could identify North even when spun around or in a windowless room. In memory as well people can recount cardinal direction in the same way an English speaker could remember relative position. Either way, it jus

There is something of a myth surrounding the claim that Eskimos , more commonly now called Inuit-Yupik  peoples have so many words for different kinds of snow. Depending upon where you may look, this number can range from 50 words to a couple hundred, but this misconception that began with Franz Boas is incorrect for two reasons. First, there is not a single language that the peoples from the arctic speak, with the Inuit-Yupik languages referring to three language-families, each with different languages that make them up, so to make the claim about the vocabulary as if it were consistent for all of the many languages in this group would be a huge generalization. Second, it does not take into account the structure of these languages and the way words are formed therein. In Inuit-Yupik languages, incredibly long words are made by placing many affixes all around a single root word such that theoretically a word can be a whole clause by itself. Due to the highly synthetic nature of th

Guerilla tactics have been used in wars for thousands of years, but the word that we use in English is fairly modern. Historically the name for guerillas has varied from place to place, and from perspective, i.e. one side might say 'freedom-fighter' and the other say 'rebel'. 'Guerilla' itself comes directly from the Spanish word that became fairly well known during the Peninsula War against Napoleon in which the Iberians lost but citizens continued fighting with small, informal assaults. The word recognizes that scale as well, as it is the diminutive  of the Spanish 'guerra' meaning 'war'. There are quite a number of related words, either within one language or between two that differ only on the G or W, like with 'wage' and 'gage'.

Language is a fine tool as a way to study some aspects of culture, but when people rely on language too much to do so it leads to problems. An example of this is with a study done in 1901 by Dr. W.H.R Rivers who was an anthropologist, neurologist, and ethnologist, but when he wrote the paper Primitive Color Vision in which he studies a group living on islands in the Torres Strait, he analyzed language. In this article on a people whom have only three words for colors—what would translate to ' black ', 'white', and 'red'—he wrote, “the ground of the development of their color language corresponds with the order in which they would be placed on the ground of their general intellectual and cultural development” essentially claiming that these people were less intellectually evolved than others; some people have also made similar claims on the basis of word-order . This is certainly a racist point of view, but works now as a lesson that researchers today should not

There are a great number of alphabets from all over the world, all with different names. Some names for writing systems, perhaps most, come from the name of the language for which they were intended to be used, such as Arabic or Georgian. Also, 'Cyrillic' is used for many languages, generally Slavic  ones, names after St. Cyril who invented it based off of the Greek alphabet to better fit Slavonic; part of the reason for that was that most of the initial uses were ecclesiastical, so the East Orthodox church would have wanted to be closer to the Greek Orthodox church rather than the Catholic church. Cuneiform got its name, deriving from the Latin, 'cuneus' meaning 'wedge' not from the language not the creator, but because of the wedge-shaped marks that make up the individual characters. People writing in this system pressed a tool into clay, with different orientation s and combinations.

Now that it's June, Christmas is probably not at all on anyone's mind, though perhaps pears are. Either way, much like many other old jingles and nursery rhymes, The Twelve Days of Christmas has undergone a number of changes and has a significant amount of variation from version to version. An example comes from one of the more famous lines: "a partridge  in a pear tree" which has also been found as "some part of a juniper tree" and "the sprig of a juniper tree" by a misunderstanding of the words. That is not to say, however, that "partridge in a pear tree" is any better. This phrase comes from a similar French jingle in which the words 'perdriole' or 'perdrix', depending on the version, feature. Both of those words mean 'partridge', but it is commonly held that some mishearing of the word 'perdrix' lead to the phrase 'pear tree' which only appears in the English version of the song, even though the