Word Facts

The English language has a great deal of exceptions in the way that words are formed and arranged, which will be true of almost any general rule people might make. It can be frustrating for sure, but this is going to be the case in every language, both in descriptive rules, which reflect on how language is used, such as "adding '-er' to a verb makes it a noun indicating the agent of said verb ", and prescriptive rules, which try to force people to speak in a certain way, such as " don't end a prepositional phrase with a preposition ". Indeed, even Latin—the language which provided the base for many prescriptive rules in English—would have just as many exceptions. The only languages that will not have exceptions to rules nor irregular forms—such as the conjugation of ' to be '—are ones that are invented, such as Esperanto, though some people who make up languages will include exceptions and irregulars in order to give the illusion of being authe

There are some homophones in English that are spelt differently, such as 'your' and 'you re', ''they're', 'their', and 'there', 'two', 'too', and 'to', or 'due', 'do, and 'dew' , as well as many more that are spelt the same but still have different origins—called 'homographs'—such as 'limbo' referring to a dance and a synonym for 'purgatory', as well as ' bear '. All of the homophones that are not homographs listed above still do contain all of the same consonants however, but this is not always the case. As spelling does have an element of arbitrariness, and because speakers pronounce individual sounds differently depending upon the sounds that precede and follow them . Some words like 'disgust' and 'discussed' are indistinguishable, as are 'prints' and 'prince'. There will be more on this tomorrow, but if you think of any yourself

As discussed yesterday, and as any native English speaker would know, there is no positive form of 'disgust', which would resemble something like ' gust '. Unlike other words like 'disk' or 'distich' for which the 'dis-' is simply coincidental, etymologically 'disgust' contains 'dis-' which indicates reversal, but in English there is nothing being obviously reversed. This is by no means the only words where this occurs—it happens fairly frequently with other words including 'distort', 'disguise', and 'dismiss'—especially as English has so many words adopted from other languages completely, or sometimes only as parts of a whole word. In the case of 'disgust', it comes from the Latin word 'gustus' meaning 'taste', and while there is no 'gust' or even 'gustus' in English, the word 'gusto' comes from the same root. Nevertheless, even when a word does start with th

English has a few words like ' butle ' which come from back-formation—the process of making words by removing what are affixes in other words— but a fairly large group of words like 'gust' from 'disgust', or 'evitable' (or 'evit, for that matter) from ' inevitable ' simply don't exist in any vernacular. Unlike 'inevitable' though, which does not have a positive form as its negating prefixes indicates, the word 'different' does exist, but not as an antonym of 'indifferent'. This is because the word comes from 'differ' in the sense that something is changing or, in other words, becoming different. In Middle English, 'different' could also mean, in a general way, 'partial', so 'indifferent' came to mean 'unchanged' or 'impartial'.

There are plenty of names for countries or regions that originate from geographical relation to other places. The words 'Austria' and 'Australia'  both etymologically derive from the Latin for 'south', and 'the orient' as well as the German for 'Austria', ' Österreich ', both etymologically derive from words meaning 'east'. Likewise, the 'Levant', denoting the area east of the Mediterranean Sea, comes from a French word that gained the sense of 'east'. Initially however, the French 'levant' meant and continues to mean 'rising' as a participle  of 'lever' (which is where English gets 'lever') meaning 'to lift'. It is from the understanding that the Sun rises in the east that 'levant' became associated with lands to the east, at least in relation to France and England. Indeed, the meaning of 'to rise' relating to the Sun is the same that lead to 'orient'

Depending upon whether you pronounce words as people do in the United States or in the United Kingdom and Commonwealth you would pronounce the word 'lieutenant' as either /luːˈtɛnənʔ/ (as if it began with 'lieu' by itself) or as /lɛfˈtɛnənʔ/  (as if it became with 'left'). The first element 'lieu' has the same Old French origin as 'lieu' when it appears on its own, as in "in lieu of", except in that case both groups would pronounce it the same way, phonologically anyway. As for the difference in the way that 'lieutenant' is pronounced, no one is quite sure the cause, but generally it is thought that the /lɛf-/ is from a variation in Old French or Middle English, as spellings indicate that there was a rare form or the word that was in Old French 'leuf'. Another, less likely explanation is that there was confusion concerning the spelling of the word with a U or a V, as for a long period—due to standards from Latin—these le

Many people lament that languages are dying out at a rate that has been estimated to be as many as one every two weeks, but is more likely to be around once every two to three months. Regardless of the exact numbers, it is true that most people speak only a small percentage of the world's languages, and dialects and accents are becoming less distinct largely because of an increasingly global economy, as well as technologies that allow people to connect with others far away, and necessitate a lingua franca. Not all hope should be lost, however, for while many languages are losing speakers, and dialects are disappearing, new ones are emerging. It is easy to discern when a language has become extinct because no people, or only one person can speak it, but it is much harder to determine when a new one is formed. Much about various standards are political, such as how to classify the difference between Norwegian and Swedish , but also natural changes to dialects that will eventually b

The prefix 'un-' that negates certain words like 'unmanageable' or 'unlockable' does not change based on the word to which it affixes. The prefix 'in-' on the other hand appears in all sorts of ways before some sounds, such as 'il-' in 'illegal' or 'im-' in 'impossible' when it is used to negate the meanings thereof. In fact, this also happens when the prefix is used to indicate 'in' or 'into', as this phenomenon is due to phonology. As it happens, when written, it will almost always appear as 'il-' before the letter L, 'im-' before a B, M, or P, and as 'ir-' before the letter R, as in 'irrespecitve'. Indeed, the sound changes in speech too of course, but not only does this occur when 'in-' appears as a prefix, but also when it is used as its own word. It is much less work for the /n/ sound to be produced like a /m/ before certain aforementioned sounds like /p/, and b

Anyone who had to learn how to read in English probably has been frustrated by the inconsistencies, and while there is no reason that they had to exist in the first place, we can still look over orthographical oddities and explain why. The prefix 'en-', as explored yesterday , can indicate several meanings including "in something", but so can the prefix 'in-'. Indeed, while these variations usually only necessitate some memorization of what words use which letter, sometimes it can alter the meaning of a word. In the case of 'insure' and 'ensure', there is some overlap in the two meanings; while, 'insure' tends to have the sense of financial compensation for certain problems like health-concerns or property-damage, both words, often followed by the word 'against', mean "protect against or prevent a possible problem". In that case, it is often interchangeable, especially in American writing. As it happens, most often th

Yesterday, there was an eclipse that was visible in the continental United States, leaving out those from every other country. Fittingly perhaps, the word comes from the Greek 'ekleipsis' and ultimately 'ekleipein' meaning ‘fail to appear', but more literally 'leave out' ('ek' means 'out' and 'leipein means 'to leave'). English also gets words related to this, 'ellipsis' and 'ellipse'. Both of these ultimately come from 'elleipein' meaning 'leave out', except here the K /k/ is not present. In this case, the Greek prefix was 'en-' usually meant 'in' not 'ek-'. This might lead you to believe that the meaning would have been 'leave in', but the prefix 'en-' or sometimes 'in-' depending on from where it is borrowed can be used to indicate several things, including that something is "made to be", such as with the word 'endear', but also th

There are lots of reasons why a word will disappear, but most commonly it is the case that a language will lose a word if there is a new, more popular word that replaces it, or if there is no need to use it. Every language will have examples of the latter, such as 'squiriferous' which meant "having the qualities of a squire" in English a few centuries ago, but due to a lack of squires nowadays, it is not used. The word 'shambles' is still used, mostly in the phrase "in shambles" or "in a shambles" to mean things are disorderly, but it had first meant 'butcher's' or 'meat-market'; I'm sure if you can imagine a medieval meat-market you can understand the logical jump to the modern sense. Nonetheless, the original meaning of the word was replaced eventually by the more popular 'butcher's' and only survives in place-names, such as Shambles, in York, one of the most famous streets in Britain.

There are plenty of reasons why multiple words can sound similar. First, the words could all come from a shared root, and be related in what they mean, either now or what they historically meant, as well have similarities in how they appear audibly. Second, the words could have been pronounced differently, or had different connotations in the past but then later gain similarities that had not originally been present. Third, every association could be completely coincidental; for example the word for 'dog' in the Australian language Mbabaram is 'dog' /dag/, but this is just luck. With that in mind, it may appear due to differences in standard spelling and a lack of relation in meaning that ' team ' and 'teem' in English are not related and are simply arbitrarily pronounced the same, but this is not the case. Neither they, nor another related word 'tow' have the same root in Old English, but all of them relate to pulling or pushing something hist

In general, English allows for flexibility when it comes to the part of speech of a given word. The word 'paint' for example can be a noun, a verb, or an adjective such as in "they paint a scene with red paint, but it left an unpleasant paint smell". Additionally, an ad for the company Hulu read "come TV with us", using a well-established noun as a verb in a way that is still understandable to a native English speaker. Nevertheless, some words do not have such flexibility. In addition to other parts of speech such as determiners or conjunctions that cannot be used as other lexical classes, not even all kinds of adverbs can be used in the same ways as each other. There are several types of adverbs that linguists identify, but submodifiers—the group that refers to adverbs that modify only adjectives and adverbs such as 'very' or 'quite'—can not only not be used as other parts of speech, but cannot even substitute for any given adverb. It should

This post is more of a hypothesis than a fact, so please do not rely on this as your only evidence if you wish to explore the topic. If you find you would like more theories like this on Word Facts in the future, leave a comment. As discussed on the Word Facts post about ablauts , strong verbs are almost always conjugated with the present tense featuring a high vowel like /ɪ/ in 'spring' or /eə/ in 'wear' that becomes a mid or low vowel like /æ/ in 'sprang', /ə/ in 'sprung', or /oə/ in 'wore' in the past tense. For more on types of vowels, see the image below, from  speechmodification.com . This is one of the many conventions that people will follow naturally, even in words that are newly created, but it does pose a few problems. 'Shoot' for example is a strong verb that follows that same pattern, going from a high vowel /u/ to a low vowel /a/ in its past tense for 'shot'. In compounded words where a strong noun, strong verb, o

There are lots of cities in the Americas with the word 'city' in the name, like Oklahoma City, the capital of Oklahoma, or Mexico City (Ciudad de Mexico), the capital of Mexico. In other parts of the word this is not so common, or at least not outright. Some European cities, particularly in places that speak Germanic languages with the exception of Strasbourg have the ending ' -burg ' which no longer means 'city', but historically meant 'fort' or what might have constituted 'city' at the time. Likewise, the names of cities in Eastern European countries often appear with the ending '-grad', though the spelling is sometimes slightly different. The capital of Serbia is 'Belgrade' coming from Slavic for 'white city'. There are a number of other Eastern European places whose name meant 'white city' including 'Belgorod' in Russia and 'Biograd na Moru' in Croatia. It should be noted that Croatian and S

Anyone who reads Word Facts often will have heard plenty by now about strong verbs . There are relatively few of these, and they tend to follow the pattern of '-i-, -a-, -u-' , but historically there was a great deal more variation, as one can still see with words like 'dive, dove', and 'tear, tore'. Moreover, nearly all of these are Germanic, coming from Old English for the most part, but there are a few words which were historically weak verbs and then became strong verbs. Among them are 'dig, dug' and 'fling, flung'; they happen to be Germanic in origin coincidentally, and the modern strong past tense form is somewhat invented. With those words, as well as others like 'wear, wore', even though they developed different forms than they had originally, they still followed the same patterns of words that they resemble in sound to some extent. Nevertheless, while it is true that English has gained some new strong verbs, more often they are

 The concept of the Indo-European language family—the idea that most languages of Europe and India, as well as Persian, all descended from a single language—was a notion proposed in the late 18th century which helped to create the field of linguistics as it is known today. That language, and the idea that there was a single people who connected almost all Europeans, and certain Asians, genealogically soon gained political and social importance when it was used to support a sense of European identity. Many names were initially proposed for this, but the "Aryan language family" became quite popular. Even though the word 'Aryan' is originally Sanskrit and therefore not necessarily European, some linguists at the time believed that this was how the speakers of Proto-Indo-European referred to themselves. There's little substantial evidence for that, as the only people who used this term belonged to the Indo-Iranian branch of Indo-European, though some people claimed th

There are many words that people consider to be irregular for different reasons including how it is conjugated or pluralized, but whether or not that term is fitting for all of them, the so called irregulars can make speech tricky at times. 'Tooth' is held by many to be irregular because it changes internally , even though it pluralized to have an /i/ sound with 'teeth'; arguably this is not irregular and just less common, as the same process happens with other words like 'goose, geese', 'foot, feet', and 'mouse, mice', even if they have come to differ slightly over the years. Nevertheless, it may make things confusing when these words come at the end of compounds, such as 'sweet-tooth'. In general, the conventional way to tackle this problem is to pluralize (or however else modify) a word in the way it would be when on its own, such that 'sweet-tooth' becomes 'sweet-teeth', but it would not be impossible to hear 'swee

In the outside world, two wrongs don't make a right, and likewise in the world of English grammar, two negatives do not necessarily equate to a positive concept. For starters, using the word 'not' before a negating suffix like 'un-' such as with "I am not unhappy" does not necessarily communicate the same meaning as would "I am happy" without any word negating another, because both the speaker and the listener, assumedly, understand that there are more than two, in this case, emotions. Moreover, even if a sentence contains two instances of the word 'not', they only relate to each other if they appear in the same clause and in the right circumstances. Therefore, in the sentence "I'm not saying that I do not (don't) like you", the result is largely the same as with "not unhappy" in that the understood meaning would be somewhere in the middle between, in this case 'like' and 'do not like'. Addition

This is the third and final (for now) post on reduplication; click the links day 1  and day 2  for the previous ones. As discussed yesterday, English does not use reduplication to indicate verbal modification in the way that other languages like Latin or Gothic. Nevertheless, English does have ablauts: a common feature in Germanic strong verbs  and strong nouns. These appear in related forms that are not irregular, like 'swim, swam, swum',  'drink, drank, drunk', and 'spring, sprang, sprung' for which the form of the vowel is changed in the same way from word to word. To be clear, ablauts are not themselves reduplicates, but there is a strong association between the two, and in words like the Greek' dérkomai, dédorka' ('δέρκομαι, δέδορκα') meaning 'I see' and 'I saw', both ablaut and reduplication is present. Additionally, English words like 'chit-chat' or 'ding-dong' employ so called 'ablaut reduplication'

This is the second post on reduplication, but if you missed the one yesterday, click the link . Reduplication is not only used for emphasis as discussed before, but also it is used to indicate grammatical changes, in other languages. Many languages, such as those in the Malayo-Polonesian family, use reduplication as a way to pluralize words, so, for example the Indonesian 'orang', from which English gets 'orangutan' means 'person', but the plural 'people' would be 'orang-orang'. Plenty of other languages allow for this as well, including Dakota in which adjectives also can be reduplicated depending on if they modify a singular or plural noun, but reduplication can also occur with verbs in order to indicate different forms, ranging from tense to number and more. While this is not possible in Modern English, some verbs in Indo-European languages changed tense by reduplicating segments of a word (though not the whole word), so Gothic's present t

There are many ways in which reduplication—which can refer to any kind of doubling in speech—is employed to different effects. Sometimes, due to the multifaceted nature of word-definitions, words are reduplicated in order to contrast other meanings. One example of this is with the word 'like' which can denote lots of types of joy and pleasure, so when referring to romantic interest in another person, one (especially a child perhaps) may differentiate between "do you like him?" and "do you like-like him?", the latter of which is to say 'have romantic feelings'. This type of reduplication is called "contrastive focus reduplication", but reduplication can also produce the opposite effect. So called 'Shm-reduplication' (or Schm-reduplication) such as "rules shmules" is used to mock and dismiss an idea. These examples highlight the way in which reduplication in English directs the focus of a listener to a word in order to commu

There is a lot of information that is conveyed linguistically beyond just words and beyond pragmatics . English does not have tone in the way that Chinese does in order to indicate lexical information, but there still are way in which accent, intonation, and things of that sort are used to communicate different meaning. In the somewhat famous sentence "I never said she stole the money", every word can be accented differently to produce a different meaning out of the sentence. This information is also useful when differentiating between two words that are spelt the same, such as 'rebel' (noun) and 'rebel' (verb).

After discussing yesterday how English has lost phonemes from its phoneme inventory , one might wonder what would happen if too many sounds are lost over time. It is possible to differentiate two words' meanings from context—or in some languages, also grammatical gender—such as 'there', 'their' and 'they're', and in German 'das Tor' and 'der Tor' (neuter and masculine respectively) mean 'door' in neuter but 'fool' in masculine. Nevertheless, this would not be too easily sustained if too many sounds were lost over the years; in languages with smaller phoneme inventories, the words tend to become longer rather than becoming homophones, such as in Hawai'ian. It should be noted that there is little need for concern that there will be only a handful of sounds used in English in the future; while some sounds merge or indeed even are dropped, new ones develop. In Old English the consonant sound /ð/ as in 'the' was not

The reason there is more than one way to spell the same sound e.g. 'pane' and 'pain' is not only because people writing English hundreds of years were inconsistent —though that did happen—but also because English used to have a greater phoneme inventory in some regards, that is to say, there were more sounds used. Of course, all languages will over time lose some sounds and gain new ones along the way, such as GH (phonetically /x/) in words like 'night' which would have been pronounced like the German CH now, which is no longer present in English. With vowels however, those that are lost weren't all dropped in the same way that /x/ was, but instead they tended to merge with other sounds. In just about all accents for English 'pain' will be pronounced /peɪn/ with the /eɪ/ sound representing a diphthong (one sound produced by two vowels), which is the same for 'pane'. The sound /e/ used to appear on its own in English though, as it would have

There are plenty of words for which there is no agreed etymology, but there are still a number of ways in which looking over those words can be insightful or at the very least interesting. The word 'jaw' comes from the Middle English 'jowe, joue' meaning more or less what it does now, but aside from that there is some debate. It is thought that the word comes either from Old French 'joue' meaning 'cheek', which could originate from Gaulish, but there are some issues with this explanation. It could also be Germanic, and related to 'chew' and 'jowl'. Either way, 'jaw' (or really 'jowe') replaced the Old English 'ceace, ceafl'. That C in Old English, by the way, would have been pronounced like the CH in 'chew', which in Old English was 'cēowan'. In related words in Dutch and German, however, a /k/ is used, such as in 'kauwen' and 'kauen' respectively, as one who didn't know Old Engl

There are a lot of words that each communicate different concepts, but this does not cover all of the ways that people understand the meaning of a sentence, even just in English. Most of the time, meaning is understood through semantics, which can be thought of as the sum of all the meanings of words individually. In the sentence "it is lovely to pet cats and dogs" one only needs to know what each word denotes (assuming comprehension of how the order of words indicates syntax) in order to understand what it all comes together to mean. In the other sentence "it is raining cats and dogs", the semantic value of each word does not communicate what this sentence would almost certainly connote (unless it were the apocalypse or something), which is that it is raining very heavily, as that sentence relies on pragmatics, i.e. understanding that the context of the words in a sentences creates a new, not necessarily related concept.

Much of the time, the only thing necessary to make an adjective into an adverb is to add the suffix '-ly' , but as the phrase "working hard or hardly working?" illustrates, 'hardly' does not retain the meaning of 'hard' when it becomes an adverb at all. The word 'hardly' used to only mean 'with force' or 'with effort' but that changed in the 16th century when the word gained the senses of 'barely', 'not at all', and as a way to soften a negative, such as "I can't hardly tell what this word means". Now, it would be incredibly rare and possibly confusing to hear 'hardly' mean what it had originally. To communicate that sense that the adverb used to have, the word 'hard' functions as an adjective, as in "the way he slammed the door was hard", but can also be used as an adverb such as "he slammed the door hard".

There are lots of different kinds of pronouns, including personal pronouns like 'I' or 'she', demonstrative pronouns like 'that' or 'this', and interrogative pronouns like 'who', though the list doesn't end there. In a very broad sense, a pronoun is any word that can stand in for another word or phrase, but while some personal pronouns make this very simple by standing in for one or several names, deictic pronouns like 'here', 'that thing', or 'next Friday' depend on context entirely, but still do stand in for an idea. It should be noted that pronouns can belong to more than one category, such as, 'you', which is a personal pronoun, but also a deictic pronoun.

While there are examples of people using language as a tool to try to explain culture or cognitive abilities extremely and unfairly such as Sapir's ideas about the ' Eskimos ', when used more generally, linguistics and etymology can offer good insight into the way people think or thought. The word 'time' comes from Old English 'tīma' and is related to a number of other words in different languages, but for a while, 'tīma' related to the tide. Eventually it took on only its temporal meaning, but not only did the word that became 'time' have the relation to tides, but the Old English 'tīd' that led to the Modern English 'tide' had the sense of 'time' or 'period'. In fact, this relation that it has to the sea now only goes back to late Middle English. With all this, it is safe to conclude that the relationship between the sea and the passage of time was very strong to English speakers, to the point that it did not

Runic letters, also called FUTHORK, FUTHARK, and FUÞORC, etc (ᚠᚢÞᚨᚱᚲ), are characterized by the straight lines that make up the symbols, in the same way that cuneiform is noted for its triangular marks. This is due to the fact that they were generally carved into stone, beech , and other materials making curved lines harder to create, though it should be noted that the alphabet varied greatly over the many centuries it was used, and by the location in which people were writing. With a few exceptions in some alphabets, such as Icelandic's retention of Þ, Ð, and Æ, these letters are no longer used. Even so, the symbol and name for Bluetooth technology, comes from king Harald Bluetooth whose initials, H.B. were written ᚼᛒ in runic letters, but for the logo, the characters were combined into one. He was famous for uniting parts of Denmark and Norway; now the idea is that Bluetooth unites people technologically.