Word Facts

Shakespeare certainly had an effect on the way that people use and consider English. He wrote at a time of rapid change within the language—sounds were shifting and vocabulary changed with it—with the result being Modern English, so if he wrote much earlier or later, his contribution would likely be less noticeable. Nevertheless, no matter how much he did or did not do, the number of words that he created is often stated in a way that is misleading. Shakespeare certainly coined many words, but considering the notion that he invented around 1,700 words that are still fairly common, this is not exactly in the same way as Sir Thomas More invented ' Utopia ' or how Paracelsus possibly invented ' gnome ', because Shakespeare is said to have invented words often by simply adding affixes to words where there hadn't been ones before—which only includes ones that were not found to be written before—or using some parts of speech in a way that was not typical e.g. using what...

English tends to be fairly flexible about word-order , but in terms of clauses that begin with 'that', it is often acceptable to omit it entirely. For example, in the sentence "Jane saw (that) Jim left", the word 'that' is optional. This is not to say that the grammar lends itself to only being optional, but that is the case with indirect perception, as seen before. Nevertheless, in the sentence, "Jane saw Jim leave", which is direct perception instead, the phrase cannot take 'that'. Sometimes, the reason for omitting 'that' is because it is also used as a demonstrative adjective and demonstrative pronoun, and so there are possible sentences like "that dog that that man had..." which gets rather clunky, though often 'that' can be replaced by 'the' or 'it', depending on the context. Make sure to check out the new Word Facts Video: https://youtu.be/MuEqaI7W0hA Support Word Facts on Patreon for new th...

As has been discussed before, the Old English for 'dolphin'—'mereswīn' meaning 'sea-pig' —may sound silly now, but as a compound probably makes more sense than the Greek word that entered the language via French which we use today, since it does not relate to anything else most people would know or be able to associate to the word. Compounds reduce the amount of words have to memorize and allow people to relate it to other words more easily, however, compounding is far more common in Germanic languages than it is in Romance languages. However, not only is it possible to compound in Romance languages, it was theoretically plausible that 'dolphin' could have been a compound. The word 'porpoise' comes from the Old French 'porpois' but is ultimately based on a Latin phrase 'porcus marinus' meaning ‘sea hog’. In this way, essentially the same compound arose in two different languages, but 'dolphin' nevertheless persisted.  ...

Languages usually exist along a dialect continuum which eventually forms the language family. This is to say that moving town-to-town, each dialect will be mutually intelligible with the next, but two given dialects that are used far enough apart will no longer be mutually intelligible. Looking to standardised languages, this is not so easily see; Spanish is not apparently like French which is not apparently like Italian, but looking at regional dialects of these languages, t here is not always as clear differentiation. If you are interested in exploring this further, look into Occitan for example, which is a minority language [dialect] spoken by few now, but it looks—to use non-linguistic terms—a bit like a Spanish-y French. This is also clear when looking at certain words from English, Dutch and German. Looking at 'that' and the German 'dass' for instance, there is some small similarity, but not much. However, factor in the Dutch 'dat' and the link becomes cl...

There are a few reasons why a country would have an official language. Through most of history, the idea of an official language did not exist or was irrelevant because if is hard for them to exist outside the context of a nationstate. Nevertheless, sometimes one will be used for harmony among groups living in the same nationstate, as with the first instance of an official language, Aramaic in the Persian Empire in around 500 BCE. It was to keep relations with the recently-annexed Mesopotamia peaceful, but it acted as a lingua franca (nearly 2,000 years before the French language) and was a simple solution to having to create laws in a multiethnic and multilingual empire. Other times, as with the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the official languages were used to cement authority. Here, German and Hungarian, were the only official languages, even though a dozen or so other languages were spoken including Serbian, Czech, Polish, Italian, and Yiddish, but because those groups did not have as mu...

There are certain unspoken rules, so to speak, concerning when an adjective in the comparative or superlative form will take '-er' and '-est', or 'more...' and 'most' respectively. It is why we get 'prettier' and 'prettiest' but not 'beautiful-er' or 'beautiful-est' which you can read more about in a previous post . There is somewhat of a discrepancy with the word 'fun', as 'funner' and especially 'funnest' is acceptable to some, particularly Americans, but not other, notably Brits, though despite this, generally the phonetic conventions are observed. When you see an adjective, then, with '-er' and '-est', it is probably safe to assume that there is a form without these suffixes, which is called a perfect adjective. With the words 'latter' and 'last', it might not be apparent whether they are related, and if so, what the perfect form would be, but a look into their et...

Latin is famous for its case-system , for while English uses word-order  or prepositions to indicate syntactic function, some language use affixes . Even before Romans had their five cases (or six including the vocative) that students are familiar with now, there used to be more, including a distinct locative case for indicating location, though this all is still nothing compared to Finnish 's fifteen cases. While Latin used the locative case, and English uses certain prepositions like 'to', and 'from', there are a few words where an exception is made. In both languages, the word for 'home' does not act conventionally; it is accusative in Latin and does not take a preposition in English. Nevertheless, in English, it is still considered to be locative because it describes a location where somebody is going to or coming from. People are certainly welcome to disagree; linguistics is not always about facts so much as it is about evidence-based claims that corres...

To simply say that something is in the present tense  is not necessarily especially informative. This is not only because the present tense can be used to express the past tense (including non-past before ) and future action— English does not technically have a future tense —but also, there are multiple forms that the present can take. A present tense verb can either be in the simple present of present progressive , and while the simple present tends to refer to habitual action that may or may not be ongoing at the time of the speech-act, verbs that describe an emotional or mental state of being (e.g. 'love', 'hate', 'fear') resist being put into the present progressive, that is to say, "...hate [object]" is far more common that "... (be) hating (an) [object]". It is not impossible to do this, but it will be deliberate; 'I am loving it' might emphasise that the subject used to not love whatever 'it' is, or also could simply dr...

Most African-Americans use their own dialect of English, which was greatly influenced from Southern American English , and very occasionally West African languages, incorporating unique features that developed naturally over time as well. While linguists have acknowledged this for a long time, the names used to describe the dialect have changed a great deal, not because the dialect changed, but because it has been named misleadingly. Originally, the dialect was called 'Ebonics' but this claimed that it was a language in its own right, and given the usual definition of a dialect as being mutually intelligible with other dialects of the same language, this would suggest that other English speakers would not be able to understand African-Americans, which is of course not true. The dialect has also been called 'Black English', but this could include black people from other English-speaking areas, which would not be accurate. Even the more common 'African-American Vernac...

Certain languages like English, Thai, and Persian have what is called 'stress-timing'. This is the notion that while syllables may differ in length, the perceived amount of time stressing is the same, which is in contrast to syllable-timed languages like French, Welsh, Icelandic, and Mandarin as a form of isochrony wherein syllables are perceived as the same length as each other. These categories are rough and somewhat subjective, lacking definitive empirical evidence, but are widely accepted by many linguists. What this means is that, for example, an utterance like 'bid for peace' in which there are two stressed syllables on either side of an unstressed syllable, the unstressed syllable, in this case 'for' is pronounced for longer than it would were it not between two stressed syllables. Most of the world's languages are classified as stress-timed. You can now support Word Facts on Patreon for new things and to help make the content better: https://www...

Perhaps one of the most famous psycholinguist experiment is Jean Berko's "Wug Test". The experiment was very simple, and you can see it all in the photo attached; it presented children with a picture of a made-up thing called a 'wug', and then asked "there are two of them. There are two ______". It might seem obvious that the answer is 'wugs' (unless somehow someone were to think it were one of only a few strong nouns , making it something like 'wag') but the test showed that children understand the basics of linguistic morphology. Anecdotally, it is easy enough to see children say 'holded' instead of 'held', indicating that they memorize the morphology and not words on an individual basis, but using the invented word 'wug' meant that the children could not have heard the morphological change before taking the test, and therefore would not simply be repeating some adult. The test did not look at how 'wug'...

Today will continue the theme of reconstruction of dead languages, and the rate of language-change from yesterday . First, it is important to note that while dialects are not distinct languages (usually) dialects will eventually become their own languages, and subtle differences increase. After dialects become languages, they then can have their own branches, and eventually become their own language families. Much like biological evolution, which is not noticeable unless looked at over a large period of time, random linguistic variations only develop over time by luck. However, while its true that the exact nature of the variables are random, and only spread—more or less—because of chance, some linguists have claimed that languages change at a standard rate over time. This was said after looking at the change of Latin into the modern Romance Languages among other examples. This was later criticized, however, because while those examples retain 86% of core vocabulary over every t...

Proto-Indoeuropean (PIE) was not written down, and its immediate descendants were not written down either, but much of the vocabulary and syntax can be reconstructed by looking to how modern languages—and even some dead ones—appear today. Using these tools, linguists estimate that PIE was spoken 6,000 years ago, but certainly there were people around before then who would have had to speak other languages. The thing is, even looking to other language-families people don't know what they spoke, and there seems to be a finite amount of time after which it is no longer possible to reconstruct even a proto language. For the Mayan language family it's about 4,200 years, for Austronesian its 6,000, but the longest of any is Afro-Asiatic—including Hebrew, Arabic, Ge'ez, and Aramaic—at more than 9,000 years. Still, this trend, including many more language families, indicates that there is a fairly standard rate at which languages change to the point that they are no longer intel...

The abbreviation Ms. was created in the 20th century in order to solve (at least) two problems; first and foremost, it does not require people to either share or be aware of a woman's marital status, which was a double standard given that Mr. never did that anyway, and second it made hypothetical statements or unknown information possible to share without compromising truth or personal comfort. This did take a while to catch on; the title was invented in 1901 and was not adopted by many major publishers until the late 20th century at least. Today Ms. is perfectly common—and possibly encouraged—even if the referent's marital status is well-known. A modern movement similar to this is with the honorific Mx., much in the same way to how Spanish speakers are now using -X instead of the gendered -O and -A at the end of nouns, which solves the similar problems of not requiring people to be aware of gender, and making hypotheticals (or simply guessing) fairer. Moreover, it also d...

When people refer to ‘untranslatable words’ they usually mean a word that does not have a direct translation into a given language, in this case English. A crucial distinction, however, is that the ideas are translatable, even if there is not a single word that can replace it, as with the misconception that Eskimo's have more words for snow . If that were the case, one would have to learn whole languages to understand things, and moreover, if a foreign language has these so-called untranslatable words (which any will surely have), logically it would not be possible to learn a second language at all. These words are translatable. Indeed, there are whole books, card-series, and more—such as the image below—that one can find when searching for untranslatable words, but all of them come with little, translated, definitions. Otherwise, these books would just be filled with foreign words, and people would have to take it on the author’s authority that they mean anything to anyone. If y...

It has been discussed here how when [t] comes before [ɹ] as a syllable's onset , it is produced as [t͡ʃ], (consider 'tip' and 'trip' ), but this is not the only change that happens. Normally, [ɹ] is voiced, which is to say that the air passes through the vocal tract while the vocal cords vibrate. However, after [t͡ʃ] (as in the consonant in 'chai') as an onset, [ɹ] becomes devoiced , and is written as [ɹ̥]. If this is hard to imagine, or you don't sense a difference, say the word 'rain' and then 'train' while you hold your hand gently against your throat; in the first you should feel a vibration when saying [ɹ], but this should not happen with 'train'. It should be noted, however, that these two sounds are not distinguishable in English exactly, since there is no word where alternating between the two would either change the meaning nor remove meaning altogether. Therefore, these are allophones  in English.  You can now support Wo...

Esperanto is not the global language that it was designed to be as discussed yesterday , and even factoring in the many second-language and even first language speakers thereof, it is not used for things like trade,  scientific research, international or multiethnic politics etc. This could have been different though. Part of the reason that only language-enthusiasts use Esperanto and not politicians is that a few key political figures hated the idea of Esperanto in the 20th century. Esperanto was nearly the official language of the League of Nations, a precursor to the United Nations; ten out of the eleven delegates agreed to this proposal, but it was vetoed by the French delegate, who worried that Esperanto would replace French as the global lingua franca. Furthermore, Esperanto was banned by the Nazis (partly because its creator was Jewish) because it was globalist and Hitler therefore saw it as communist, which is almost ironic because the Soviets banned it as well. Franco als...

J.R.R. Tolkien did not only create the Lord of the Rings series, but he also created nearly a dozen languages for his books, all based off of natural languages like Finnish , and Old English which he studied and taught professionally, and also less famously basing Dwarvish on Hebrew and other Semitic languages. Nevertheless, he did not hold as high of an opinion on constructed languages as that evidence might suggest, saying "Esperanto and other constructed languages were "dead", far deader than ancient unused languages, because their authors never invented any Esperanto legends". His argument here is that because there is no group of people who do or have spoken the language, there is no culture tied to it; no word is more or less significant, and the only phrases and idioms would have to be artificially invented, etc. Even with Hebrew, which is the only language successfully revived on a large scale, not only was the language already tied to a culture, but the c...

There are plenty of words that are plural in form but singular in meaning, such as 'news', 'dominoes', and ' physics ', and likewise some words act in the opposite way, but the phrase "many a..." makes whatever would follow it singular. Strangely then, the meaning of the phrase is "a large number of", so semantically it will seem plural, such as in the example from Learner's Dictionary, "many a politician has promised to make changes" where both 'politician' and its corresponding verbs are singular. While this trend may exist as exceptions to the rules of pluralization for a handful of terms such as the ones listed above, it is far rarer to find it in something phrasal like this. If you know any examples of other phrases that are different semantically to what the grammar would suggest, write it in a comment below. You can now support Word Facts on Patreon for new things and to help make the content better: https://ww...

Though there is something to be said for the regularity of strong verbs  or strong nouns , which often are called irregular because they do not use '-ed' in the past tense nor pluralize with '-ed' respectively, everyone would agree that 'to be' is irregular. Not only are the present forms: "am; are; is" irregular, but also the past tense forms do not follow any apparent structure. In Standard English, in the first and third person forms 'was' and 'were' are divided by singular and plural subjects, i.e. 'I was' and 'she was' but 'we were' and 'they were'. Nevertheless, to make matters more confusing, many other nonstandard dialects (which is not the same as 'ungrammatical') reverse this, and would say either 'I were' for example, or 'they was'. Furthermore, in some parts of the UK, people are more likely to just use 'was' in positive constructions, but 'weren't'...

People interested in language are probably familiar with terms like ' Standard American English' , 'Standard (British) English', 'Australian English' etc., but while those dialects all came to diverge slightly because of geographical distance of people over time, other environments can lead to the creation of dialects as well. Some dialects are associated with ethnicity , of course, but also the Internet has led to what could be called 'meme dialects'. While most memes still use standard English, others—famously lolcat- and dog-memes—use what began as nonstandard English, which you can see below, but eventually developed to have fairly standard syntax. What separates this dialect from others mentioned before is not only does it not necessarily belong to a well-defined group, but also it has no phonology, because it is written down. You can now support Word Facts on Patreon for new things and to help make the content better: https://www.patreon.com/...

One possible way to sound more conversational in writing without necessarily switching into the second person or asking questions is to use what are called 'discourse markers'. These words include 'well', 'oh', 'ya know', 'I mean' etc. (feel free to comment others) and have many functions in a conversation. In addition to indicating the beginning or the end of a piece of dialogue, drawing attention to new information, indicating that the next idea is either reported or otherwise not necessarily facts held confidently, and making sure that someone is listening at all, speaking generally, these discourse markers allow the speaker to show the listener how to interpret the message. These all can help to make a conversation feel more personal not only because they are less formal but also because they convey more information about how the speaker considers the information in the first place. And, oh...well, ya know, you should really check out the...

Every child who's played Mad Libs® (and hopefully also those who haven't) knows what an adjective is. These descriptors aren't the only way to describe something though. Adjective clauses—not to be confused with an adjective phrase—act to describe a noun, just as an adjective would do, but do not contain an adjective. This is a type of adjunct , but unlike those that are prepositional phrases which act adverbially (e.g. 'in the house' in "we saw him in the house") adjective clauses rely upon relative pronouns like 'which' or 'who' or relative adverbs like 'where'. In languages besides English, these pronouns can agree in number and gender (but not grammatical case) with the noun they modify as well in the same way, more or less, that an adjective would have to. You can now support Word Facts on Patreon for new things and to help make the content better: https://www.patreon.com/wordfacts

In terms of spelling anyhow, 'go!' may be the shortest possible sentence in English , and while people don't always speak in full sentences, this is still only counting words. Incomplete sentences that could still convey meaning are called utterances , and these are usually shorter than sentences given that they can be grammatically incomplete, relying on understood information and context, but again these also rely on words. 'Backchannels', as they're known in psychology, or otherwise 'minimal responses' are the sorts of things that people say to indicate listening, generally, but can be more socially complicatedly and even show empathy. These can range from short phrases like 'oh no' to murmurs and grunts as in 'mmm' or 'mhm'. These rely heavily on non-verbal cues like body-language, as well as the context to whatever the other person is saying, as well as tone, volume etc. making these difficult or impossible to use in text, ...

Lots of chemicals and medical drugs end with the suffix '-ol'. Generally this follows guidelines for scientific nomenclature. The suffix refers to organic compounds that form alcohols and phenols. Arguably, this was influenced from some sort of back-formation [1] of words such as 'alcohol' [2], which has this ending (in this case though not a suffix) but is many centuries old and entered English as a non-scientific word. '-ol' is nevertheless said to be derived from the Latin word for 'oil'. However, given that so many words end in this '-ol' (sometimes found as '-ole') anything given this suffix could sound more scientific. People trust things that sound like they are scientific to be so, which is why there are often science-resembling words made up for the genre of science-fiction, but this also happens with drugs like Tylenol® or the renamed 'paracetamol' in Commonwealth countries which don't have the '-ol' in its s...

Yesterday  it was discussed here how the words for 'dolphin' and 'caterpillar' in Old English translate to 'sea-pig' and 'leaf-worm' respectively. In Modern English, their names may sound more elegant, or perhaps at least less semantically blunt, but it is not as though words like that, now replaced with terms derived from Romance languages, don't have ay meanings. The word 'caterpillar', for instance, is from Old French, and the predominant theory on its etymology states that it comes from the word 'chatepelose'. That may still sound more exotic to you than 'leaf-worm' (lēafwyrm in the original Old English), but it translates to 'hairy cat'. The connection to cats is present in other languages as well, such as 'Teufelskatz' in Switzerdeutsch meaning ‘devil's cat’ or in Lombard where the word for 'caterpillar' is the same as the word for cat. You can support Word Facts on Patreon for more content: h...

Many of the words that exist in English now come from Old French . Famously, this is why there is a difference between words for meats as the animals sometimes i.e. 'pork' is not 'pig' in the way that 'chicken' is both an animal and a food, since the animals' names are Germanic but the richer Normans gave their words for the foods they could afford more often. Still, this does not explain why words like 'caterpillar' are Romantic in origin, and replaced the Old English, in this case 'lēafwyrm' or 'cawelwyrm' though. Indeed, many modern loan words exist because there is not an equivalent, such as 'sushi', a word which was borrowed because the food was borrowed as well, but many words do not need replacement. To put a complicated and controversial issue simply, anything can be expressed in any language, so long as the referents are understood. With this in mind then, there might not seem to be a reason to ever borrow words, n...

Nasal consonants were discussed yesterday with regard to how they still require movement of the oral tract. What was not discussed was that the fact that every nasal consonant in English is voiced, which is to say that the glottis is involved. To understand the difference physically on yourself, put your finger on your throat gently while producing [s] (which is not voiced) and then switch to [z]—the voiced equivalent—and notice the additional vibration. This same voicing (vibration of the glottis) is present in [m], [n], and [ŋ], and this is true of most nasal consonants in most languages. A few, including Icelandic, Burmese, Jalapa Mazatec, and Welsh have unvoiced nasal consonants. Astonishingly Iaai has 6 such consonants: /m̥ m̥ʷ n̪̊ ɳ̊ ɲ̊ ŋ̊/. This fun video from Glossika Phonics has an audio of what [m̥] sounds like, with a visual aid as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CcSsEbwyBFk You can support Word Facts on Patreon for more content: https://www.patreon.com/word...

Most consonants (and vowels, to be clear) in English are produced by moving air through the mouth; these are called oral consonants and include phonemes like [b], [d] and [g]. To prove it to yourself, you can hold your hand close you tour lips and say something with those consonants like 'bog-dog' and feel the air moves out of your mouth, and not your nose. The phonemes [m], [n] and [ŋ] (like in 'siNG') are the only nasal consonants in English (do the same test with 'non-mom' if you'd like)—out of a total of 16 known nasal consonants—meaning that air exits through the nose after the velum is lowered. However, just because these are nasal consonants doesn't mean that the mouth isn't involved. For instance, if you prepare your mouth as if you were about to produce [b] and then [d], even without producing any audible sound, you would still have to move your tongue and open your lips, and likewise you would move your mouth from getting ready to make an [...

English has plenty of examples of assimilation: when a sound consistently changes due to the phonemic context, i.e. the sounds around (particularly after) it. This can be seen with [n], which becomes [m] before sounds like [p] (e.g. ' impossible ' is the negating 'in-' prefix + 'possible), or [t] becoming [t͡ʃ] before [ɹ] (e.g. the sound modified from 'tail to 'trail'). In Kalaallisut (a.k.a. West Greenlandic) this is even more extreme. At first glance it may seem that there are between 5 and 11 vowels, but because of assimilation there are only 3 vocalic phonemes: [a], [i], and [u]. Funnily, the alphabet for Kalaallisut contains 5 vowels—A, E, I, O, and U—but E and O only appear before [R] and [q]. All of the other vowels are allophones  of [i], [a] or [u], even though they would be considered separate phonemes in other languages such as English. To see the range of each of these Greenlandic vowels, look at this graph below (citation after the links). ...

New Years' Eve, yesterday, was a day of partying for many, and maybe involved helium balloons. If you have happened to inhale helium—and likely even if you haven't—you may think that it makes the pitch of one's voice higher, but this isn't exactly true. The pitch of one's voice itself is not greatly affected by air-quality, so long as there is air at all. If that were the case, not only would this make it hard to comprehend two people with a relatively high and relatively low voice respectively in the same room, for instance, but also keep in mind that people can control the frequency of the movement of their vocal cords in order to alter the pitch of their voices, as is typical especially when singing. Your ears do not deceive you too much though, as what helium does do is to make the air travel faster, and the frequency of the airwaves passing through the larynx does change. This is also why records that are sped up can make whatever is being played back have a h...