Word Facts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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