Word Facts

Because people can add on new information to a sentence or clauses with adjuncts or subordinate clauses as well as other modifiers, theoretically anyway, a sentence in English could go on forever and there is an infinite number of possible sentences, even though there are a finite number of words. This is the case for very nearly every language, except (at least) one, Pirahã, which is quite famous for being different in a number of ways to most. In addition to having an incredibly small phoneme inventory and not having words for numbers , Pirahã also does not allow for recursion for strings of adjectives into serials like in "large blue soft old (pillow)" nor recursion for possessives like in "my mother's uncle's cat's (toy)". Due to these observations made by Daniel Everett, as well as his conclusion that embedded clauses in this language can only have one level of depth i.e. "he knows about making food" would be acceptable but "he kn

Intonation of individual words in a sentence, both in tonal language and non-tonal languages conveys syntactic information that is not present in written texts. Generally, because there are conventional ways to arrange a sentence, including information from word-order or even adjective-order cues, as well as having a knowledge of lexicon , this fact does not hinder readers. Nevertheless, certain sentences, sometimes called "garden path sentences" may appear initially ungrammatical at first but when stressed differently will make sense. One famous example is “fat people eat accumulates” which may be initially read with the phrase 'fat people' instead of thinking of them as two nouns, i.e. 'fat [that] people'. This type of confusion can come from all sorts of factors, but perhaps the most common reason is the use of substantive adjectives or the lack of hyphens in many compounds . It should be noted that this is not the same as syntactic ambiguity, because h

Looking at feminine nouns and given names, and the adjectives and pronouns that agree with them in Indo-European languages, especially in those from Europe, there is an tremendous amount ending in '-a' and '-e', while there is not such a broad trend for masculine or neuter words. The exact pronunciation of which varying slightly from language to language, but usually it is close to [a] or [ǝ]. In Spanish for instance, around 89% of feminine nouns end with '-a', and in given names the number rises to 98%. In Romance languages, this quality comes from the predecessor Latin, for which many feminine nouns and their adjectival and pronominal counterparts ended in '-a', as did many given names, a number of which were originally words anyway. Nevertheless, the trend among other language families such as Germanic or Slavic languages, while less prevalent in nouns, is still quite noticeable in given names. Some of the proper nouns would have ended in '-a'

Every person will have experienced the feeling of having a word on the tip of the tongue, so to speak, and not be able to think of something but feeling that it should normally be simple. The name for this phenomenon is, unimaginatively perhaps, "tip of the tongue" (TOT), and though the knowledge of the neurological mechanisms for this need more research and there are several distinct theories about it, the experience of TOT is understood to be fairly universal, with people often remembering certain syllables, certain—usually first—letters, or only remembering words that are similar, either semantically or phonologically. TOT has implications in psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics, but also other fields which relate to memory or (meta)cognition.

There are lots of ways to estimate the meaning of words—determining from context, looking to words that appear related, etc.—but sometimes words will only be found once for a certain author or in a certain language. This is called a hapax (legomenon), and it exists for dead languages and living ones, but for different reasons. In dead languages this happens sometimes because there is a limited, often small collection of words that survive, like for Old English with 'uhtceare' which meant ‘lying awake before dawn and worrying’, however, this can also occur in living languages, either by mistake , or when people use a word humorously, such as with ' runcible spoon '. There is no single way which these words' meanings can be determined, and even for words with established definitions, arguments among translators still occur.

There is really nothing present in languages that can be said to be universal. Many ideas, even incredibly general ones like, to paraphrase, "a language will have nouns and verbs" or "a language will have sounds" are based on logical assumptions about the way people think but are then disproven by the existence a feature of even a single language, an idea which will be discussed more in the future. Furthermore, to continue the idea from yesterday about the relationship between motion and time, it is quite common to have words, including English prepositions, conjunctions, adverbs, and some verbs that relate to both forward movement or position and the future, or oppositely backwards movement and the past. Perhaps the clearest examples of this would be the fairly common phrases "look forward to [some future event]" or "put the past behind you". This exists—in some form or another—across numerous languages, but there is one that is quite famous

The sorts of connotations that people have with words in a language will inevitably change the way that the words—or derivatives thereof, after enough time—are used. Reviewing etymology, this is quite common as societies change, such as why ' aryan ' means what it does today, in many ways opposite to what it used to. There is one relationship, however, that is fairly consistent over millennia, and it is that of space and time. Sometimes that happens for natural reasons, like the joint source of the words  'time' and 'tide' , but this happens in grammar as well. For instance, prepositions that relate to space like 'before' (e.g. "kneel before royalty") also relate to time (e.g. "she arrived before him"); sometimes both interpretations are possible without any context, e.g. "he was standing before her". This is common across languages as well, in which—almost always—the future is associated with words that mean "in front

Prescriptive grammarians may preach rules for the way in which a language ought to be used, and though this can come from good intentions, on occasion it may lead people to make more mistakes, both prescriptively and descriptively. This is called 'hypercorrection', and it takes many forms. As discussed a few months ago with ' whom ' but also with ' me ', the fear of misusing a word, or form thereof, can cause people to avoid it and use other terms, such as in this case 'who' or 'I' where prescriptivists would say it does not belong such as in *"he gave it to my friend and I". This also happens too with pluralizations like 'campus' mistakenly pluralized as *'campi'. All of those would be considered wrong by prescriptivists, but other examples, such as *"I informed her of all the things up to which I was" rather than "...I was up to" which attempts to avoid a preposition at the end of a sentence witho

There are many ways that a word might become dated, obsolete, or archaic. It is certainly possible that words will stop being popular without any particular reason, just like how "some pumpkins" used to be used as a synonym for 'impressive' (or as an exclamation) but no longer would be said ordinarily. Other times, technologies, cultures, etc. change and words like ' squiriferous ' disappear because they are no longer needed, since people don't need, in this case, squires. Nevertheless, words can survive by taking on new meanings, such as 'footage' did. Like other words for distance, including 'yard', the suffix '-age' can be added to 'foot' to mean "a length measured in feet" but this took on the meaning of "a length of film". Film is much less popular now, but 'footage' has since come to mean the video recording of something, even digitally. It also used to denote a piece-work system for paying

Word-order in English is fairly fixed because it needs to be due to a lack of much inflection that other languages like Latin have. This means that as flexible as the order was in English , classifying Latin as being subject-object-verb (SOV) has more to do with conventions than much else. Nevertheless, Latin had subjects at least which makes this sort of classification possible, but not all languages do. Ergative languages like Basque , Mayan, and even a few Indo-European languages like Gorani do not have subjects; instead what would be the subject of transitive verbs (i.e. ones that take a direct object) is called an 'agent' and behaves differently than the argument of intransitive verbs in that the arguments resemble the object of a transitive verbs. Though this is not the same as distinguishing between nominatives and accusatives, a rough English-equivalent, to alleviate confusion, might look like "she reads it" but "her dies". Classifying these langu

Syllables can be fairly complicated, but the procedure for dividing them is fairly objective. In English, a syllable has an optional onset, which is a group of one or more consonants, then a nucleus which is usually—though not necessarily—a vowel (more on that later) followed by the optional coda. For example, in 'hugs' /həgz/, /h/ is the onset, /ə/ is the nucleus, and /gz/ is the coda. There will be a post explaining how this can be determined in the near future. Some consonants however, even in English, can be considered to compose the nucleus and the coda, which together is called the 'rhyme'. The sounds [m], [n], [ɹ], and [l] all can do this, such as in the end of the word 'column' where the pronunciation can be argued to switch from /l/ to /m̩/ (marked with a small diacritic underneath) without a vowel in the middle, though also sometimes it is written with the schwa [ə] in the middle for simplicity. In other words like 'hmm', it is even clearer, be

Every year, a number of natural disasters occur, but unlike earthquakes and other phenomena, hurricanes are given names. This has been done since the mid-20th century with names that would be associated with people, but until the 1950's they were marked by the year and order in which they occurred therein. The reason for this is that unlike earthquakes that occur only in one place for which it can be named, hurricanes move quite large distances. Starting in 1953, the United States began using female names for these storms as it was simpler to remember, and reduced confusion when multiple occur at the same time, as errors when using radio-communications were common. In 1978 and 1979 respectively, both men's and women's names were used for storms in the North Pacific and then the Atlantic basin based off of the names are designated by the World Meteorological Organization. Some names are retired if the storms that are associated with them are so disastrous that it could cause

English has many affixes, but it also has number that are only slightly productive like ' -th ', or not at all like ' con- ', but because the sample of words that can take those affixes is rather limited, looking at historical examples still offer a great deal of insight. For instance, the suffix ' -ling'  as in 'duckling' is diminutive, and can still be added to words like 'deerling' as an alternative to 'faun', but it goes back to Old English, and many words that took that suffix once have changed once it was affixed. 'Gosling' and 'darling' now no longer entirely resemble their respective stems, 'goose' and 'dear', however 'yearling' and 'youngling' do, and they do not have the meanings of "a young year" nor "a young young person (youth)". This is because the suffix was not originally diminutive but is believed to have come from a modification of '-ing' denotin

It is often taught that every sentence must have a subject and a verb, thanks in part to Aristotle . This is true in English, in passive constructions too , but this does not mean that this is the manner in which English speakers always or even mostly speak. A general set of examples for this that requires little context is with answering questions, such as Speaker 1: "what do you want?" Speaker 2: "pizza" which has no verb and, debatably, no subject, but is still pretty clear. It is also possible to replace phrases like "do you want to..." with "wanna..." which does not have subject, less (though still somewhat) debatably than before. These are not sentences though, but utterances, and while they may not be preferred for formal writing, they are absolutely fine in normal speech, especially because they can rely more on context, which is usually harder to gain from writing.

English has at least two different ways that the letter 'L' is pronounced. To hear the difference, say the word 'feel' and then 'leaf'. The distinction is fairly standard though blurred in words ‘feeling’. The reason for this is that it the /l/ and /ɫ/ as they are written in IPA depend largely upon where they belong in a syllable. If the 'L' is an onset, as in 'fee-ling', it will be pronounced as it is in 'leaf' with an /l/, whereas if it is said as the coda, as in 'feel-ing', it will be pronounced with the /ɫ/. This, however, can vary within a single accent or dialect.

English has odd standards for its spelling to put it simply, but for some words it makes much less sense than others. Like one of the pronunciations for another military-position, ' lieutenant ', 'colonel' may seem to be missing letters to represent the way it is spoken. It is, sort of, in part due to the same reason as many words: pronunciations change after the spelling was standardised, which is inevitable anyway. The word 'colonel' comes from a now obsolete French word, 'coronel' which later developed into the French 'colonel' but did not change this way in English, though 'coronel' also originated from words that did not have this 'r': via the Italian 'colonnello' meaning ‘column of soldiers’, ultimately from the Latin 'columna' for 'column'. Indeed, 'coronel' was also fairly usual until the mid 17th century, but that is not the spelling that dominated in the end.

Because there are standards for the spelling of English, and also because the orthography of English is not phonetic, writing in a way that captures accents and dialects is tricky. Nevertheless, people get around this problem by using what is called 'eye dialect', which is the orthographical denotation of, generally, nonstandard dialects. This can still be used to imply the pronunciation of the standard dialect, such as 'wuz' instead of 'was', or 'coz'/'cuz' instead of " 'cause", which can be quicker to write, and also would give the impression of being humourous or otherwise informal. Other times, like with this example from alphadictionary.com "Ahm agonna gichew ifn yew don't quit bothern my dawg!" which is meant to represent the way that Southern American English is spoken (though I would have written 'mah' instead of 'my'), existing conventions in the standard orthography are used to denote specific

Sometimes, explanations given to children about grammar are not exactly accurate. On the website linked to here for instance, it states that an adjective should be able answer certain questions pertaining to a noun: "What kind of noun is it? Which noun is it? How many are there?". Though sometimes these are applicable, at least for the very vague first two questions, many types of words have functions similar to that of an adjective but are not adjectives. Participles  are among these types, but the focus today will be on determiner's; while adjectives describe the quality of a noun, determiners indicate the reference a noun has, such as 'every', 'that', or 'the'. However, determiners also include numbers, and possessives like 'my' and 'her', but also words that have the possessive suffix ' -s ' [3], like in "Beth's", even though it could be said that "Beth's" and 'two' in "Beth'

English is fairly flexible when it comes to syntax. Not only is it possible to make many verbs into nouns and vice versa by simply putting it in the sort of context that a noun or verb takes, giving us the ability to say "I'm going to walk" and "I'm going on a walk", but different types of words within one lexical class, such as mass nouns  like 'milk' or 'glass' and count nouns like 'shirt' are also somewhat interchangeable, with understood variation in meaning. Though generally mass nouns do not take a pluralizing '-s' like count nouns do (e.g. 'a dog' and 'dogs'), when they do, it means "varieties of", so 'milks' would not refer to an quantity of milk but could denote kinds of milk like whole-fat, skim, chocolate etc. On the other hand, singular count nouns take articles like 'a' or 'the', but when they don't, and are used like mass nouns, it can have several different m

Affixes all attach themselves to individual words, but some have the ability to be affixed to more than others. The term for this is 'productivity'. For instance, the suffixes '-ness', '-ity', and ' -th ' can all be added to adjectives in order to make nouns (with some variation in meaning), however, '-ness' can be added to far more adjectives than '-th' can'; indeed, sometimes, '-ness' even can replace '-th' , though this is not possible the other way around. Therefore, it is said that '-ness' is more productive than '-th'. Also, certain affixes may have meaning for some words, but will not add additional meaning to others. 'In-', with some words, for example 'invoke', cannot be removed from the root, whereas with 'inbreed' it can be, so it is said that 'in-' is productive in certain circumstances, because it only produces new meanings that are separate from that of its

Is there a reason that 'bookcase' 'bookmark', 'bookshelf', and 'bookstore' are all written as one word, but other terms like 'book publisher' or 'book writer' are spelt standardly as two words, marked with a space?—not really. It might not seem important whether there is a space or not—after all, all spelling-conventions are arbitrary—and people do not speak with breaks between words anyway, so the separation of words would not change pronunciation. Nevertheless, these standards change the way that people think about language; orthography affects the way that people interpret a so-called standard variety of a language, so even though syntactically speaking 'book writer' is a compound word (and could be spelt as 'bookwriter' or 'book-writer' instead), it is perceived as two, while other ones, even occupational words relating to books, are written without a space standardly, like 'bookseller'. For more on

Back-formation has been brought up several times on this blog, but while that follows logical processes that people are accustomed to seeing in words with legitimate, productive suffixes, other words are sometimes broken down into different elements incorrectly without following any linguistic patterns necessarily. 'Rebracketing' for example, is a process in the field of historical linguistics, which concerns itself with the study of how languages evolve, in which a word that derived from a single origin is segmented into a set of different elements. One famous example is that of 'hamburger' which is sometimes falsely taken to be from 'ham' and 'burger' as a sort of compound. It could be that without thinking too much about the actual meats involved in the food the word is seen to follow the pattern of other types of burgers, like "turkey-burger" or "veggie-burger", but those two are also retronyms  designed to clarify that something

One thing to be aware of when looking at patterns in various aspects of language is that even if two things look to be related, that does not mean that there is a valid correlation to be made. For instance, the words 'kernel' and 'satchel' both are historically diminutives with the '-el' ending. Nevertheless, due in part to the fact that English is somewhat of a hodgepodge of other languages, it happens that these two words come from completely different origins. Unlike other suffixes like ' -en ' [1] or ' -et ' that act as diminutive suffixes for multiple words that derive from the same language, the '-el' in 'kernel' comes from the Old English diminutive 'corn', 'cyrnel' while for 'satchel', the ending isn't really a suffix at all but instead comes from the Latin 'sacellus' from 'saccus' meaning 'bag', via the Old French 'sachel'. Interestingly enough, the verb 's

One of the fun aspects of etymology is that while they often can be presented as a matter of fact for certain words, there is still room for deliberation. The word 'nugget', for instance, has an unclear origin. Though it is believed that the word came about in the mid-19th century either way, one theory states that the word came from a misinterpretation of the word 'ingot', which is is fairly reasonable on account of both words' association to gold. Another, perhaps more accepted theory is that it comes from a dialectal variation of the word 'nug' meaning "lump" from Southwestern American English. It is then possible that 'nugget' could follow the pattern of ' jacket ' and ' pocket ' and others with the diminutive '-et' suffix.

Though most of the affixes used in English have been used for centuries, new ones still can appear in speech. It is fairly rare that this happens in comparison to the number of new nouns or verbs created every year, but -fucking- is nevertheless relatively new as an infix . This happens in words like 'abso-fucking-lutely' or 'unbe-fucking-lievable' (or 'un-fucking-believable') for the purpose of emphasis on the original word. The infixes as well are not simply inserted randomly; the '-fucking-' will appear before the stressed syllable of a word; with certain cases, such as with 'unbelievable', the words can be stressed differently from individual to individual though. Words with the stress in the first syllable therefore cannot take this infix, such as 'wonderful' or 'beautiful'.

Characterising a language as having a certain word-order is more of a generalisation in many ways than it is a standard or rule. In English, even though there is some flexibility such as in "what say you", being in object-verb-subject (OVS), people use impersonal pronouns like 'it' in "it is raining" that don't mean anything but fill in for a subject first which English-sepakers will prefer to have in most constructions; one could not say *"the sky is raining" but it equally as strange to hear "is raining" with no subject at all. In other languages however, not only is word-order not consistently fixed in the way it is in English, such as in inflected languages like Latin, but some languages allow for omission of certain elements such that there is not always, say, a subject included. In these cases, including a few examples in certain dialects of English, usually it is said that whatever is omitted is implied , but strictly spea

As stated before, when speakers of two languages come into contact for long enough, some parts of one language will likely influence the other . Sometimes this can be obvious, such as how much of English's vocabulary comes from romance languages due to the Norman conquest of England and other events , but there is still often plenty of room for debate. Estonian , for instance, has been heavily influenced by (Low) German and Russian due to about 700 years of contact with Germans starting in the 13th century with the Teutonic order before Estonia became part of the Russian Empire and later Soviet Union. Since Estonian is a Uralic language, not an Indo-European language, one might assume that the influence from those aforementioned languages would be quite apparent, but this is not always the case. Certain verb markings to indicate tense, aspect etc. in Estonian are mostly similar to other Finno-Ugric languages, but other times it may differ slightly, in which case it is not always

In English statments, the verb will almost always come after the subject, though this is not true of questions nor imperatives. Because English is not declined i.e. the form of the noun does not change depending upon how it functions syntactically, it does not especially matter whether the subject were to be considered an object or an agent of the verb by the speaker; nothing changes phonetically to the individual nouns in sentences like "the man saw the dog" and "the dog was seen by the man", so generally it doesn't matter. Nevertheless, even though the agent was "the man" in both sentences, in the one written in the passive voice, "the dog was seen by the man", 'the dog' is considered the subject, and indeed "by the man" can be omitted. If this seems like an arbitrary classification however, consider that in other languages, such as Latin, in which nouns are declined, even when the subject is not the agent, in passive cons

It is nearly impossible to consider something a grammatical rule, for a single language or multiple, even if one were to speak incredibly generally. For instance, to indicate agreement with personal pronouns and antecedents, English relies on word order, and in some cases—though by no means always—gender, number, and case. It is for this reason that in the sentences taken from Nature, Nurture and Universal Grammar, it is clear to a native speaker of English that in “John said that he thinks he should wash himself” the 'himself' refers to John, whereas in “John said that he thinks Bill should wash himself”, the 'himself' refers to Bill. In English, the pronoun is necessary, though in other languages that role can be filled when the pronoun would be indicated by the verb. In those languages where the pronoun can be omitted, the absent pronoun is called the 'variable pronominal' or 'null pronominal', depending upon how easily it can be omitted given context

In English, there are far more strong verbs  than there are strong nouns , all of which change to indicate tense, so it can be easy to assume that this is the only reason that strong verbs are used grammatically. Nevertheless, in addition to ablaut reduplication  and reduplication for the purpose of emphasis , sometimes—though not so much in English—strong forms can feel fairly arbitrary and change for phonological reason. For instance, the German infinitive form for the word meaning 'to catch', 'fangen' becomes 'du fängen' in the second person  singular informal. This process of modifying a German '-a-' into a '-ä-' is fairly common, as is '-e-' to '-i-' and '-u-' to '-ü-, even though they may remain in the same tense in the case of verbs. This post was inspired by a fan-question; queries and comments are always welcomed.

Though often affixes are used to indicate certain meanings fairly regularly, for a few different reasons, certain ones can often have multiple meanings. Sometimes, as with the prefix ' a- ', an affix can become a homograph ; in this case, it came from different origins and only appears the same coincidentally. Other times, as with the prefix ' re- ' it is only due to chance that an affix can take on more than one meaning over time. Here, the prefix can function as an intensifier in words like 'remember' historically, but also can show distance in words like 'remote', or even indicate repetition in words like 'replay', though it should be noted that the latter group includes many newly-formed verbs. Still, it is because of this that 'remove' does not mean 'move again', but indicates movement to somewhere distance. As a side note 'emote' and 'remote' both relate to motion etymologically, but the former is more metaph