Word Facts

When speakers of two or more languages, or speakers of two dialects, come into contact with each other enough, certain traits will eventually merge somewhat. Historically, Spanish has had a great deal of influence on English, but more modernly, Mexican Spanish spoken in and near the United States has led to vowel-changes in certain dialects of American English. In Chicano English spoken by Mexican Americans in places like the American Southwest and Chicago, as well as Californian, several shifts have occurred. The "cot–caught merger", which makes /a/ and /ɔ/ appear indistinguishable (present in the two words respectively) is complete, as well as the "salary–celery merger" which merges /æ/ and /ɛ/ before /l/, and also the /ɪ/ in 'sing' (/sɪŋ/) becomes /i/ like in 'see', which also happens in Californian English. Also, make long vowels become monophthongal, but this is a feature of Great Lakes accent as well, and has much less to do with Spanish. Thes

The pronoun 'they' has a few different uses. In addition to the standard usage as a third-person plural pronoun, there is also the somewhat 'singular they' which stands in for the arguably more cumbersome "he or she" and any other declensions thereof in constructions like "if someone is hungry, he or she should eat" or "...they should eat". This is especially disliked by prescriptivists, but it is perfectly understandable, and has been present in English for a long time. Also, some people elect to be called 'they' individually, so this usage is also more inclusive. The pronoun, however, has taken on an even more hypothetical role than just being a substitute for "he or she", and people use it in hypothetical statements, or ones relating to the future, such as in this quote taken from the Twitter account of Solomon Georgio, "you think getting friend zoned is bad, imagine your creepy male friend thinking you owe them so

Because language has to rely on multiple people understanding the same references, one of the best way to create new words and phrases is to draw from things many people know. This happens with kennings that draw from mythology, and sometimes jargon, which initially only has meaning for those with a specific occupation, makes its way into common lexicon. The phrase "knuckle down" meaning to apply oneself to a task draws from the game of marbles. In that game, which was once very popular, putting ones knuckles on the taw could help make a better shot.

English has several pronouns—'who', 'what', 'where', 'when', 'why' 'which' etc.—that all introduce the same sorts of clauses, and all begin with the same two letters when spelt. They go by some different names including "'wh-' questions", and introduce both questions, and relative clauses. Some people also classify 'how' as a 'wh-' question, because it has the same functions as all of the rest. And while 'how' does not start with the initial 'wh-' and is not pronounced with a /w/ like 'what' or 'which', 'who' is pronounced with an /h/ like 'how, even though it retains the spelling.

Affixes are a valuable and often necessary way to indicate syntax in a word, but depending upon context and convention, they aren't always obligatory. Suffixes such as '- ly ' or '-y' that can indicate that a noun or an adjective become an adjective or an adverb respectively are often dropped off from certain words, especially in certain dialects. For instance, the word 'real' is an adjective more often than it is an adverb, but in the sentence "that's real funny" it acts as a submodifier. There is no reason that any word must necessarily be one part of speech for another, so while it may not be as formal for certain occasions or certain written pieces, it is understandable to native speakers.

People use plenty of abbreviations, initialisms, and acronyms, but almost always these will take the beginning letter or letters of a word, without changing them. 'Christmas' however is often, informally written as 'x-mas' which neither sounds much like nor is spelt as the beginning of the original word. Instead, the X represents the Greek letter chi, which in lower case looks like χ. This letter actually does act as the initial, but it comes from the Greek word 'χρῑστός' ('Khristos') meaning ‘Christ’. There are indeed a lot English words for Christian terms, often coming from the Septuagint .

There is somewhat of a stereotype that opera singers are larger than average. Though generalizations like these are often unfounded, David Drexler et al. from the University of Iowa found that a certain amount of fat on the vocal cords can help a singer sound better. A mucosa on the vocal chords softens the impact when they come together, but extra amounts can improve the quality of sound. It was also found that the mucosa can add more vibrational energy to air as it is exhaled, which also allows opera singers to perform better. There are many other factors that come into this as well, and it is not at all the case that all opera singers are overweight at all, but having extra fat in general could mean there is some extra fat on the mucosa. Also, sometimes when one has scarring on the throat, surgeons can inject more fat onto the larynx for this same reason.

Though other species do have the ability to communicate in a number of different ways, none have as sophisticated a method as human speech. This is for a number of biological reasons, including the fact that humans have such large brains, but quite importantly as well, we have a nerve in the brain that allows for much more control over the tongue as compared to other animals, and also, about 60,000 years ago, the hyoid developed which can better support the larynx, used for creating sounds. This all together allows the wide range of sounds that can be recreated that humans use, but unfortunately due to the configuration of the glottis and other parts of the throat, humans are much more likely—up to ten times more likely than other primates—to choke. Whether or not you think that is a fair trade-off, you'll still be able to voice your opinions due to a series of biological adaptations within the last few hundred-thousand years.

Though somewhat controversial, it can be said with reasonable certainty that children acquire language from studying and reproducing what they hear around them. Partly this is a matter of memorization; being able to associate a collection of sounds with an idea is how words are used, but also children will follow patterns that they feel they understand, sometimes too much as seen by adults. The sentence " I holded it " rather than "I held it" is ungrammatical but is arguably more sensible than the alternative. It would perhaps appear reasonable to assume that it is common for children to follow every pattern they observe, such as placing a verb before the subject nominal phrase makes a question, like "the man is painting" versus "is the man painting?". Nevertheless, it has been shown that children do not make errors in following this blindly, as would happen with "the man who is painting is happy" becoming something like "is the

The symbols for the currencies euro, €, ruble, ₱, won, ₩, and the yen and yuan, ¥, and many others including the no longer used Dutch florin, ƒ, are all at least partially based upon the first letter for the name of the currency, though the euro is also said to be from the Greek lunate epsilon, ϵ, as Greece is said to be the cradle of European civilization. Still, the dollar-sign, $ and the pound-sign, £—though the symbols are not arbitrary—do not appear as obvious necessarily. The £ comes from the first letter of the name for the currency as many others do, but in this case the name is from Latin, not the native language. The Latin word for 'pound', as in a weight or balance, was 'libra', related to other words from Romance languages like the French 'livre' of the same meaning, as well as the source of the abbreviation 'lb.' for pounds when referring to weight.

Though in general people rely on numerous grammatical and lexical conventions in order to understand what is being said, people are also very good at supplying information on their own that is left out. For instance, if someone were to say "I have coffee before work", it is understood that there is an implied '...starts' after 'work', or "...going to..." before 'work', or something such as that. Even though 'work' is not a time in the way that 'Tuesday' only relates to dates, people can assume from context or from habit what the intention would be. This also happens because of grammar, quite often. Sometimes, if the verb is obvious—perhaps within a relative clause when the verb was already supplied—it will simply be omitted from speech, to little or no confusion on the part of the listener. In some languages or dialects, the verb 'to be' used existentially will be left out because it is sensible given the context. Spea

The purpose of language is—at its core—to convey an idea, being an image, a command, or whatever, to someone else. That means that while people tend to follow certain conventions—abiding by general definitions for words, and using grammar that is accepted by many—not everything said has to be entirely logical. Looking at initialisms, one can see that people tend to follow grammatical conventions with the (perhaps subconscious) notion that the initialism was its own word , at least in terms of conjugations, but even more basically one could notice that certain initialisms take on a meaning of their own, despite the lack of sense that would come of saying what each letter stands individually within the given context. For instance, the phrase "OCD enough" as in "I'm still OCD enough to correct myself" conveys the idea of extreme obsessive behavior, but saying *"I am obsessive compulsive disorder enough..." does not make sense; one would say "obsessiv

Etymologists are able to do a lot of work in tracing back the roots of a word, sometimes thousands of years. Indeed, it is in certain ways more difficult to find the etymology of newer words for a few reasons. First, while some words that are invented recently will draw from other languages like Latin or Greek, at other times it can be unclear where something was drawn from. Second, because etymology relies a great deal on looking at related words, either in the same language or other ones, without much time to study them, there isn't as much information for experts to use. There are also a few problems caused by the word not having as many uses in text on account of its not existing for a long, but even with words from the 19th century like 'runcible' as in 'runcible spoon' it can be difficult to agree on one etymology. One theory is that the word, coined by Edward Lear, comes from the much earlier word 'rouncival' that denotes a variety of pea, which co

English syntax, with the exception of a few pronouns, relies on word-order to provide syntax . Most of the time this is fine for both speaker and listener, but in addition to confusion that arise from relying on prepositions carrying multiple senses , and therefore provide two different surface structures such as in "she hit the man with flowers", the fluidity of English lexical classes and participles can lead to clauses that are syntactically ambiguous. For instance, the sentence "visiting relatives can be boring" has two possible meanings, because 'visiting' could be a present participle, for which someone could substitute 'to visit', but also could act adjectivally, modifying 'relatives'. In speech the distinction is usually made with tone , but there is no guarantee of that this will happen; in writing, there is no way to get around this issue in that example except by opting for different words, even were someone to try to use punctuati

Generally, affixes do not change the sound of the words to which they are bound, though sometimes the affixes will change in order to be easier to pronounce, such as 'in-' becoming 'im-' in 'impossible'. Therefore, words that take the prefix ' dis- ' do not change, as is the case with 'dishonest' from 'honest' being pronounced with an /s/, even though normally in English orthography, 'sh' represents the sound /ʃ/ as in 'shoe'. Nevertheless, 'disheveled', which does have the historical 'dis-' prefix', has the '-sh-' pronounced as /ʃ/. This is because, not only is there not a Modern English word 'heveled', but also the word from which 'disheveled' originates was already pronounced with the /ʃ/: the Old French 'chevel' meaning 'hair'.  Initially, the sense that the word carried was 'having loose or uncovered hair', but because of what people associated with

Semantic bleaching, also known as semantic reduction or semantic loss, is the name for the loss of certain meaning of a word totally, such that it becomes unspecific or merely intensifying etc. This happens in words like ' awful ' or ' terrific ' which no longer retain at least one of their original meanings. There is no way to predict when or how this will happen, but in those two cases this process occurred because people exaggerated the initial senses of those words, and then the hyperbolic use became more generic. This happens too when people use curses emphatically , such as 'crap' or 'shit' in the invented example "I bought a new house but now I have to move all of my crap/shit". This also happens in phrases like 'have got' in 'have got (to)' or arguably 'how' in 'how are you' which do not carry much if any meaning when considered in isolation. This is not the same, however, as semantic change, as happene

Most of the time, when an affix is added to a word, the root word is pronounced the same way. Occasionally, the presence of one sound will influence another, which is why the prefix 'in-' becomes 'il-' in 'illegal' , but these changes are fairly predictable and consistent. Other times, the individual sounds of a word will not change, but may shift somewhat due to certain influences. For instance, 'comfort' is usually pronounced /kəmfɚt/ in Standard American English, but despite the spelling, most people with the same accent would pronounce 'comfortable' with the sound represented with R following the sound represented by T, /kəmftɚbəl/. There are a few reasons that this process, known as 'metathesis', occurs, including mishearing the word, but in this case the cause is likely that it is physically easier to say the word as /kəmftɚbəl/, which reduces the number of syllables, and also requires less movement by the tongue. Other metathesized

The study of modern language, when done properly, follows the same procedures as the study scientific subjects. Nevertheless, as has been discussed here before, certain conventions are somewhat political  rather than purely scientific. ' Chinese ', for example, is an incredibly broad term that can often be misleading. Though usually it refers to Mandarin when people use the term casually, depending on the situation, there are other varieties of Chinese that are quite different to it, in the same way that the Romance languages are in many ways similar, but are still distinct. Cantonese, for instance, has six tones while Mandarin has four, and both of those have their own dialects that differ even more. Generally, it is accepted that there are seven varieties of Chinese, but because most people do not call them languages, it can be difficult to describe them, along with their own separate dialects. All varieties of Chinese use not only the same writing system, but while words in

Even when the denotation of sound is standardized universally, as with the International Phonetic Association (IPA), all of the orthographical conventions are fundamentally arbitrary. While certainly more regular than English's spelling rules, there is, for example, no phonological reason that nasalized vowels in IPA are written with a tilde, such as with /õ/ as in the French 'bon' while the nasalized versions of the consonants /b/ and /d/ are written as /m/ and /n/ respectively. Therefore, it should be no surprise that anything used in the standard writing of one language would not  necessarily denote the same thing in another. In German orthography for instance, an umlaut indicates a different pronunciation of a vowel than without it, however in French orthography the umlaut, or 'accent tréma', is used to indicate that two vowels written next to each other are to be pronounced independently, like in 'naïve'. There are not any diacritical marks used in Engl

There are a number of English words that have endings like ' -et ' which historically were diminutive suffixes  from other languages, but English does not use these sorts of suffixes anymore, and instead just use adjectives for the most part. Modern English also does not really use augmentative suffixes, which, opposite to diminutives, indicate an increased size of something, even though other languages like Italian have plenty. Instead, English has a few augmentative prefixes, such as 'over-' as in 'overlord', 'mega-' as in 'megachurch', or 'arch-' as in 'archenemy' which can carry the sense of 'physically large' but also just intensify whatever they are bound to. These prefixes, also including 'super-' and ' grand -', are fairly common in certain words, like those mentioned before, but they can be added fairly freely to new ones; if you know any contemporary examples, write a comment. Indeed, so long as s

Only nouns have grammatical gender, insofar as adjectives, articles, and pronouns are either modified or selected in order to agree with the nouns they modify. Not all genders have to be distinct from each other in every word however; in German, masculine and neuter forms for possessive pronouns are often identical, and there are only two Dutch articles: one for neuter, 'het', and a common form for masculine and feminine words, 'de'. So long as there is a fairly consistent manner in which words are distinguished in such as way, however, grammatical gender can be said to exist. If people stopped using different forms for adjectives, articles, and pronouns to modify nouns with which they agree, there would be no gender, because, though the gender is determined by the noun, it is indicated by those other aforementioned lexical classes. It is partly for this reason that certain languages will include articles where there would not be one in English, which has no grammatical

It is easy to look at languages like Latin or Old English—now no longer used—that were heavily inflected  and each had three genders, and assume that because modern descendants thereof have either lost all or most of those attributes, languages have a tendency to lose gender, or other morphological (or morphophonological) features. Indeed, looking at the way that Indo-European languages have evolved over time, that trend is fairly consistent. Most linguist assume, however, that Proto-Indo-European was both gendered and heavily inflected, so realistically the most likely way it could have evolved was to lose some of that. This did not happen all at one time though, and the loss of gender in English took several centuries, starting in the north of England around the tenth century. At the time of the Norman invasions, many English speaking communities still had gender, which would often be influenced by the Norman French, such as the gender of 'se mona' ('the moon') which

While there are some potential benefits of grammatical gender in terms of the speed of recognition of words, gender can make it harder to learn a language, even if one is somewhat familiar with it. Grammatical gender requires extra memorization, in addition to the vocabulary and other features that someone needs to know when learning another language. Even in languages that are closely related, there is no guarantee that cognates  will share the same gender. For instance, in Italian and Portuguese, the word for 'milk', 'il latte and 'o leite' respectively is masculine, but in Spanish 'la leche' is feminine. At best this is only something else to remember, but could also be a source of confusion for interlocutors. Furthermore, while some languages like kiSwahili base their system of noun classes on sound alone, in other languages like French or Spanish where gender is mostly arbitrary, the usual gender of the word can appear to change because its sound. For

If, as has been said in the last few days here, that gender is fairly arbitrary and also has the potential to complicate things, there may not seem to be any use for it. That is not to say every aspect of every grammar has to be reasonable—there is not a reason why some languages rely on word-order to indicate syntax while others use inflection—but at least in that case there needs to be some way to show how the words relate to each other, whereas there does not need to be gender: three quarters of the world's languages do not have it at all. Still, at least one of the possible benefits to grammatical gender is recognition of words. In the paper, Young Children Learning Spanish Make Rapid Use of Grammatical Gender in Spoken Word Recognition [1] written by Casey Lew-Williams and Anne Fernald, it was discussed that children learning Spanish were better able to identify referents when they were given the morphosyntactic cue, and native-speaking adults showed similar results as well.

As mentioned yesterday , grammatical gender does not have to relate to men and woman, or at least if it does, people do not have to be the sole focus or foundation for gender. For instance, like kiSwalhili, Ganda has many noun classes—ten classes in this case—that are simply numbered as such. The noun classes are based upon sound—not meaning—but some people still assign names to the semantic groups, including 'long objects', 'large objects and liquids', 'small objects' and 'pejoratives', as well as 'people', 'animals', though all of these groupings are pretty general and full of exceptions. Many languages divide words by 'animate' and 'inanimate' either instead of or along with 'masculine' and 'feminine', or in other cases such as with Chechen there will be a 'masculine' and 'feminine' that appears alongside classes that are simply considered miscellaneous. Moreover, Czech, Polish, and some

About a quarter of the world's languages have grammatical gender, but while some of the ones with which people familiar, including mostly Indo-European languages, may only break up nouns into the categories of masculine feminine, and sometimes neuter, this is not how grammatical gender appears in all languages. Some languages have more than 3 genders, but when this happens the terminology switches from 'genders' to 'noun classes' and so there is no longer an association with ideas of maleness and femaleness that there might have been before, even though there is always some arbitrariness . In kiSwahili for example, there are 18 noun classes. In the same way that Latin nouns are divided into genders by the way that the suffixes sound, and change to indicate syntax or pluralization, the noun classes of kiSwahili are divided by prefixes, but these are numbered rather than named. Still, some noun classes can be called " semantic  groups", because they tend to

In languages that have grammatical gender , a noun can be masculine or feminine (or neuter if there is a third gender), but this does not mean that it can be classified as 'male' or 'female' in the way that some people may make it seem. In general, words that relate to biology, such as terms for 'man', 'woman', 'penis', 'vagina' etc. correspond to the grammatical gender of masculine or feminine, but there are some issues with generalization. There is no guarantee that this convention will always be followed, so while the German 'Frau' ('woman') is feminine, the word 'Weib' ('wife' or 'female') is neuter, and likewise ' Eierstock ' ('ovary') is masculine. This may appear strange but the reason for this is fairly logical: the terms 'masculine' and 'feminine' were only created to describe trends that were already in use. While there are certainly some patterns in terms o

Tomorrow's post at 5:30pm EST will be the 1000th Word Facts! There is not any language that is necessarily easier or harder to learn for infants when they are first developing language-skills, though some linguists may claim polysynthetic languages like Greenlandic (Kalaallisut) are easier for children to understand. Nevertheless, once one learns a language, the difficulty of learning another depends upon how similar it is to one's first , or other languages with which that person is familiar. Finnish would be quite difficult to learn for an English speaker because the grammar and vocabulary is completely different, but it would be very hard for a speaker of Estonian. Some languages, however, are not related to any other at all, thereby making them generally hard to learn as a second language for anyone. Basque may be the most famous example of one, spoken in Spain and to a lesser extent in France, is regarded by most linguists to not be related to any other language. Th

Generally, an affix like '-ness' or '-ing' can be attached to any word so long as it is the suitable part of speech, though in English there is a great deal of fluidity between nouns, verbs, and adjectives anyway. With this in mind, one can observe the way that people will—subconsciously or otherwise—consider utterances as certain parts of speech. The initialism 'LOL' ('laugh out loud') for example first started in text-messaging but has since made its way into the lexicon of many people. One would say "I laughed out loud" when using the past-tense by conjugating the verb 'laugh'. However, when using the word 'lol', in order to indicate that it is in the past-tense, one would not say "I L-ed OL" but instead would say or write "I LOLed" which is sometimes found as "LOL'd" thereby treating the whole initialism, or acronym depending upon the speaker, as if it were its own verb. Since English is

The majority of English nouns are pluralized with the letter ' -(e)s ', but this is pronounced three different ways: /s/ as with 'cats', /z/ as with 'dogs', or /ɪz/ (or /əz/ depending on one's accent) as with 'beaches'. This is not random but is based off of the sound that comes before it. In general, if a consonant precedes it and is unvoiced like /p/, /t/, or /k/ the suffix will be /s/ but if it is preceded by a voiced consonant like /b/, /d/, or /g/, or a vowel it will become /z/. There is a chart below showing voiced and unvoiced consonants, you can also feel the difference if you make the unvoiced /p/ sound and then /b/ that uses more air . There are certain sounds that act as an exception to that rule, including /s/, /z/, /tʃ/ (‘like church’), /ʃ/ (like ‘rush’), /ʒ/ (like in luge), and /dʒ/ (like in 'hedge'), because when the pluralizing suffix '-(e)s' follows those it becomes /ɪz/. The chart is from http://gawron.sdsu.edu/int