Word Facts

People may be fairly familiar with the concept of a language-family, as it shows many of the relationships that languages have to each other. Nevertheless, it is not the only type of family that linguists are concerned with, such as also word-families. Much like how Spanish, French, Portuguese, Italian, and Romanian etc. are all considered Romance languages becasue they derive from Latin, many words for relating to 'nose' now, including 'snout', 'snot', 'sneeze' etc comes from the Proto-Indo-European ' snu ', making it a word family. These do not have to come from extinct sources however, and in Kalaallisut  for example, there are many words that come from 'oqaq' ('tongue') that all still relate to it somehow, such as 'oqarpoq' ('says'), 'oqaaseq' ('word'), 'oqaluppoq' ('speaks'), 'oqaasilerisoq' ('linguist'), as well as some more complicated ones, such as 'oqaati...

Imagine a language where every word had a unique sound: no compounds, no affixes, and no phonemes. Even in terms of logistics, that is hard to picture, because there are thousands of words, and each would need its own completely different sound, eventually probably relying on snorts, sniffs, and knocks. This idea is called the " duality of patterning " and as logical as it is, it is not true of all languages, as it only takes one language to break the rule. While it can be said to be true of all known spoken languages, Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language (ABSL) is a language forming within a community with large rates of deafness in Israel. It has been assessed that the language uses gestures exist independently. Most [all other] sign languages rely on combinations of other smaller gestures to convey what can be thought of as words; indeed in this way other sign languages have morphology, and can therefore be assessed on a sub-word level in the same way as spoken languages. What ...

Much like there is an order to how adjectives are used based upon what they connote—e.g. size comes before shape—there is an order to adjuncts  in certain languages as well. This is somewhat more complicated since adjectives that do not indicate case tend to be fixed to the noun, but adjuncts are not as fixed. It is why in English, one can say "yesterday, I helped the rude customer" or "I helped the rude customer yesterday" but the 'rude' cannot be moved throughout the sentence. Nevertheless, in some languages like German, and to a lesser extent English, will arrange their adjuncts by what they mean. In German, the order is: time, cause, mood, and location; these can be thought to answer the questions "When? Why? How? Where?". All of this, however, for German adjuncts or English adjectives alike can be subverted if the speaker is attempting to emphasize one element or another. This is true of many things, because the more abnormal something app...

As was mentioned in the discussion of semiotics, human language is arbitrary; there is no reason that the arrangements of sounds that make up each word should be the ones they are, even if a few of them are imitative. However, not only is it impressive that people know and repeat the precise arrangements of sounds as they do, but spoken languages also rely on building words out of smaller parts. These smaller parts can be as large as elements and affixes, or as small as phonemes and sounds generally, but this means that each word will not have its own unique sound. It is theoretically possible to have assign each word as a different sort of sound, such as a snort for 'dog', a sniff for 'cat', a squeal for 'fish' and so on, but this is not the case. This is called the duality of patterning, and it means not only can people use alphabets for their languages, but also that people can build large phonetic systems for language. Make sure to check out the ne...

In English, it is common for the subject to be the first part of a sentence, whether or not the clause is active or passive . There are ways to avoid this however, depending upon the circumstance, including beginning with an adjunct, such as  with "in English" at the beginning of this paragraph. Some languages, such as Japanese and Korean, place less emphasis on the subject than English—a subject prominent language—does, and instead have topic-prominence. In these languages, rather than always differentiating between the subject and the object, speakers can also differentiate between the topic—what is being talked about—and the comment—what is being said about the topic. In English, the subject is understood to be the topic naturally, which is why the passive voice in necessary for an inversion of the object, but topic-prominent languages don't need a passive necessarily. The effect of topic-prominence is still present in English to an extent; the invented sentence "...

Some dialects are considered ethnolects, meaning that the variety of the language is differentiated by ethnicity rather than by region. Examples of this include African-American English  (AAE),   Chicano English , Jewish English, Multicultural London English (MLE) (which is also technically regional) etc. given that the dialect is associated with a people who may not all live in one area, but who all speak the same way. In all of these examples however, there is influence from other regional languages and dialects; Chicano is heavily influenced by Californian English and Mexican Spanish, AAE is influenced by Southern American English and certain West African languages, Jewish English is influenced by Yiddish and Hebrew, and so on. This is often the case with ethnolects, which are sometimes based around migration, or alternatively they act as a sort of creole such as with MLE, but this is not necessarily true; there are certain speech patterns and lexicon often associated...

Names for groups of animals such as 'murder of crows', 'pod of whales', or 'tower of giraffes' are called 'terms of venery'; as the name suggests, they were originally when hunting (compare with ' venison '). Many of the names may sound silly to people now, and not unreasonably; there is no reason to memorize all of them, so in practical use people will opt for 'herd' or 'group' rather than saying other specific words, with a few exceptions for more common animals. It may seem that this is because we have less of a need to discuss animals nowadays, as few people need to hunt and farm than in the past, but before the 11th century, and in some ways even before the 14th century, nobody used terms of venery much anyway either. Considering that there would not have developed a hunting culture around, for instance, wombats (for whom a group is a 'wisdom') in England and France where these terms began, it should be reasonable t...

Although children are taught what parts of speech are, they likely identify them intuitively, in the same as a kid would for syllables . There are tests for them, however, that syntacticians can use to prove that a word or phrase actually is one lexical class or another. One such test is called 'coordination', in which one looks at a word or phrase, guessing the part of speech thereof, and than adds another example with "and...", so for example, to determine that 'apples' is a noun phrase in 'I ate apples', one could add another noun phrase, as in 'I ate apples and pears'. This test works, however, because English already allows speakers to not have to repeat obvious elements, or otherwise the previous example-sentence would be the very clunky 'I ate apples and I ate pears', and indeed coordination is quite common in speech anyway. Considering regular speech does show, some phrases cannot be coordinated together, such as with adjuncts...

Cornish is somewhat like the Schrödinger's cat of languages, as it can be considered dead, but also living. This is because usually it is easy enough to say that a language like Ancient Egyptian is dead because there are no native speakers, and scholars didn't even know how to interpret much of it before the discovery of the Rosetta Stone. Oppositely, English is obviously a living language, and hundreds of millions if not billions of people use it daily, many of whom can only speak English. Cornish, like many other languages, only has bilingual speakers using it, and moreover, it is not a daily part of most of those speaker's lives. None of this is rare for languages, so what separates it is that it was revived; the last native speaker died in the 18th century, and then due to efforts in revitalization for cultural purposes, a couple hundred people learned the language recently. Hebrew has shown the word that it is possible to bring back a language from its status as dead...

While the concept of antisemitism has been around at least a couple thousand years, the term 'antisemitism' has only been around for about 140. Before then, at least in Germany, the popular term was 'Jew-hatred' („Judenhass“) but to sound more scientific and more euphemistic, Wilhelm Marr coined the term in the late 1870's. Originally, he used the term „Semitismus“ as a synonym for 'Jewish spirit' („Judenthums“), but a few years later published an antisemitic pamphlet using the word we have today: „Antisemitismus“. It quickly became so popular that within the year it was used for the name of the League of Antisemites. It is for this reason—that the term was created almost as propaganda so that bigots would sound more official and the word sounded less direct—that 'antisemitism' does not also describe hatred of all Semitic groups, including Arabs, Assyrians or Amharas. This is also not the first time that Germans have used words to describe many peopl...

There are many different writing systems from all over the world, used with varying frequency, but not all of these are alphabets. The most obvious example of this may be with pictographic and logographic writing systems (symbols that represent words but aren't images thereof), which aren't alphabets because little to no attempt needs to be made to convey the way that the word sounds. This is why Cantonese and Mandarin (1) are not mutually intelligible when spoken always, but are written in much the same way. However the list goes on, for instance with abjads , such as for Arabic, Hebrew, and also Tifinagh, Syriac, and ancient Phoenician for which consonants are represented, but not necessarily vowels; Greek and by extension Latin and Cyrillic alphabets are essentially Phoenician but written left-to-right and with the addition of vowels. There are also syllabaries—where a syllable is represented but not the individual sounds—such as for Cherokee or Katakana Japanese. Final...

If you listen to some speaking a completely foreign language, you won’t hear pauses between words. Some languages make this easier than others to decipher, such as Estonian, which always has stress on the first syllable of a word (though the idea of what a word is has no major consensus ). This lack of division is made even more apparent when looking at words that together influence the pronunciation, for instance ‘in’ is pronounced [ɪn] usually, but before certain sounds, like [p], it becomes [ ɪm ] (2). Considering that there is no actual space between words when spoken, and that words can still influence the way other words are pronounced, there is not really any reason that contractions, or arguably words like ‘another’, should be considered one word. “ ‘Tis” and “isn’t”, or more extremely even, “won’t” are considered to be one word, but act grammatically as two. Moreover, most of the time, at least one element of the contraction is usually unchanged at all. To be clear, there is...

There are affixes that indicate grammatical function without carrying meaning themselves necessarily, such as '-tion' which makes verbs into nouns, or '-S'  which pluralized or indicated the 3rd person singular tense for verbs. There are also free words that have a similar role, such as 'will' indicating future time ( not future tense, technically ). While some of those were affixes and some are words, all of those are considered 'markers', and markers can show many different things. There are, as shown before, tense markers for instance, but just like how there are " zero-determiners " which do not exist in speech or writing but whose apparent absence still means something, the lack of a '-ed' or '-s' on a verb does not mean that it lacks tense, and indeed people know only because of the lack of an apparent marker that 'I walk' is not in the past tense. These zero-markers of course still mark things, but less intuitivel...

What sound does W make? Even the more scientific question: "what sound does [w] or [ʍ] make?" may appear rather pedantic or even silly, but it actually lends itself to phonological and orthographic insights. First off, the question is a bit of a trick; while any native speakers of English would be able to pronounce the phoneme, it is considered a doubly articulated consonant. That is to say, while other sounds are pronounced in one part of the vocal tract, such as [b] being produced by a closure of the lips, [w] is produced by  at the lips, just like [b], but is also velar, such as [k], but it is not exactly like either. Other languages have dealt with this in a few ways. For instance, 'west' in French is 'ouest'; the French doesn't use [w] the same way of course, but it does show how a clearly closely related word has been recognized to be pronounced with a closure (or at least partial closure) of the lips, which happens when the lips round to pronounce [...

A subject will be nominal (specifically, a determiner-phrase ), but that doesn't meant that every pronoun, noun etc. will be a subject. Semantics relates a great deal to the way  that people can construct sentences, in part due to things like this. The sentences "the man saw the dog" and "the dog saw the man" are both fine, and no one would argue against the validity of "the woman eats the carrot" but that cannot be reversed to become "the carrot eats the woman" in the same way. Opposite to Chomsky's famous " colorless green ideas sleep furiously " which is syntactically acceptable but semantically meaningless, the existence—but lack of acceptably—of "the carrot eats the woman" means that regardless of word-order, or declension (theoretically, English doesn't use it) there is only one possible meaningful utterance here, so the sentence can exist without needing a syntactic structure. It is therefore possible that ...

When phoneticians describe the arrangements of consonants and vowels, in a syllable , they will often just denote them with C and V respectively, so 'cat' would be CVC, and 'strengths' [stɹɛŋθs] would be CCCVCCC. This is useful for talking about the differences between English and Hawai'ian , where there are no consonant clusters, and all syllables will be CV, V, or VC, but not useful for explaining why [vdgihlp]—which is also CCCVCCC—can't be an English word. Though admittedly that was an extreme example, there are plenty of languages, famously Slavic and Caucasus languages that allow many more; Kartvelian regularly contains clusters of 6-consonant, and contains words like /ɡvbrdɣvnis/ with 8 or more, in this case CCCCCCCCVC. Nevertheless, no matter how long strings of consonants can be in a language, there will be constraints on the arrangement thereof. Even normal pairs of consonants, like [sl] at the beginning of English syllables (e.g. 'slip') ca...

Syntacticians sometimes have to make certain claims about how language must be logically, even if it doesn't appear that way necessarily, in order to maintain certain theories. This is not prescriptive as such, because these linguists are still describing how people actually talk, but simply have to come up with certain reasons of how things must be. For instance, "a subject must be a determiner phrase", i.e made up of at least a determiner (like 'the', 'a' or 'some') and a noun. Nevertheless, plenty of subjects do not have such elements, such as with given-names, or when there is zero-determiner, also called a silent determiner. In English, a silent determiner regularly appears when the subject is indefinite and plural, e.g. '[determiner] men are from Mars", as opposed "the men....", which changes the meaning. Why not just say that subjects (and many other things like this) don't need to have a determiner, and instead claim...

People are very good at figuring out what implied information should be. Simply put, this is how people can understand pronouns and other things like that. It also means that people can leave off the end of sentences, e.g Speaker 1: "Can you meet your deadline?" Speaker 2: "I will try" [and finish meet the deadline] When this happens often enough to the same clauses, then the rest can easily exist on its own. Expressions like "put 2 and 2 together to make 4" are regularly abbreviated to "put 2 and 2 together". All of this is done in an effort to save time, and to sound less clunky when stating something which is probably obvious. Not to be confused however, other expressions feature bits of words or phrases that already carry connotations, such as 'bright' in "not the brightest crayon in the box" or 'sharp' in "not the sharpest tool in the shed". This also happened with ' cute '. Check ou...

Usually when people think of compounds in English, people thing of words composed of two nominal elements ('noun-noun'), or occasionally two verbal elements in the same fashion, but sometimes it is different. For instance, the nominal form of 'slow' is ' sloth ', but the term for the pot that stews things over many hours is not a 'sloth-cooker' but a 'slow-cooker'; indeed, a 'sloth-cooker' would mean something very different entirely: culinarily savoury, but ethically unsavoury. What makes 'slow' here different than an ordinary adjective is that it does not describe the 'cooker' so much as it becomes a new one. As extra proof, consider that 'slow' can't be removed while retaining the core meaning, but it can be modified in ways that would otherwise be impossible semantically, as in 'fast slow-cooker', and also the stressing of the word is different than it would be with 'slow cooker'. This is a...

Part of the reason that translation can be so difficult is that translating something word-for-word does not work. Not only does this attempt fail for idiomatic phrases, which is the most obvious example, but also, since one word can have multiple connotations in one language but not another, sometimes executive decisions about cultural importance or semantics have to be made. In Machiavelli's "The Prince" for instance, the word 'virtù' describes the quality that a good leader should have, but can be translated easily a few dozen ways, including as 'virtue', 'strength' and 'power', but also 'cunning' etc. The reason that there is not a one-to-one correspondence across languages is partly cultural, but at its core it is because all language is arbitrary; there is no more sense in calling pig-meat 'pork', than there is to say 'schweinefleisch', which is why they both mean the same thing in different languages. This obs...

Every dialect will have its own rules and its own exceptions thereto, so even in a dialect that is considered "standard" so to speak, it does not mean that it necessarily the most consistent. For instance, in Standard American English and British English, and others, reflexive pronouns are usually formed by the genitive [possessive] form of the personal pronoun + 'self'. For instance 'you' --> 'your' --> 'yourself', as well as 'I' --> 'my' --> 'myself. This is because it was originally two words, but the determiner phrase eventually came to be thought of as a single term. There are two exceptions to this: the 3rd person singular masculine ('himself') and the 3rd person plural ('themselves'). However, in African American English (AAE) , the pattern of using the genitive form + 'self' is maintained. This is most obviously seen in 'hisself', which is a standard variant of 'himself...

Creaky voice, vocal fry, sometimes called laryngealisation, pulse phonation, or glottal fry may sound horse and scratchy to some when it is extremely pronounced, but it is totally normal to use, and jut about everyone does. There is a video from Johns Hopkins University showing how this sounds looks physiologically, but warning: it shows someone's throat, and is fairly graphic. Some people criticize it for sounding lazy, detached, or for being bad for people's voices, etc. but to understand this animosity one has to keep in mind that it is "increasingly common among young American females" [1], and furthermore, not only do people associate it with young, educated, city-dwelling women, but that is makes people (women) sound "less competent, less educated, less trustworthy, less attractive, and less hirable" [1]. The confusion that vocal fry is associated with educated women but gives the impression of being less-educated, well noted by linguists, shows the w...

It can be tricky to get people to talk right away, especially within formal settings. Indeed, the idea of "small talk" describes a common sense that such speech is not especially relevant or important, but may be felt as necessary anyway. However, people in an ordinary conversation have as much or as little time as they want, at least in theory, but meanwhile researchers may need to collect data in a setting that is fairly formal and perhaps intimidating (to the participant), so the concern is that the speech will not be as authentic as it ought to be to do proper scientific analysis. Regarded as the father of sociolinguistics, William Labov came up with a solution to this, with the notion that “danger of death” (as a question) elicits a thorough response. The question would be something such as "have you ever been in a situation in which you were in serious danger of being killed?". Clearly, this is a very bold question, and evidently not only was it effective enou...

Something that everyone who speaks English (and German, and many many other languages) knows subconsciously is that the verb only needs to be marked for tense and number etc. once. Usually this is once per clause, such as 'he has seen' or '...had seen' rather than '...has sees'. This is also true when one verb, such as 'need', takes another, such as in 'he needs her to explain' which has 'to explain' in the infinitive form. When there is another clause, then the verb will also be conjugated, such as what follows 'what' in "he needs her to explain what she needs". The reason however, that one cannot say that there will be one verb marked for conjugation for every clause precisely is that so called 'small clauses' contain unmodified verbs. If you were to say "I find these inconsistencies to be confusing", the phrase "these inconsistencies to be confusing" is a small clause, because of the type o...

Verbs in English are either active or passive , but occasionally there is a third option, because people are surprisingly good at making sense of gaps between grammar and meaning that don't always match apparently. What is sometimes know as the passival  is a form of the middle voice which is passive in meaning but active in form, such as the awkward sounding 'the food is eating' (i.e. 'being eaten'), but also appear more colloquially, such as in "this book reads well". This is different than "this child reads well" because of course children have eyes and brains with which to read, while books do not. What makes this voice a middle voice is that the action is done by the recipient of said action—which is totally fine as either active or passive e.g. 'he shaved himself' an theoretically 'he was shaved by himself' respectively—but sentences in this form of the middle voice, such as also "the window breaks", is not somethi...

The line “let’s Marvin Gaye and get it on” from the song 'Marvin Gaye' uses the name of said artist as a verb, which is fairly obvious, but more specifically the lyrics use it as one word . It can easily be thought of as two words given that it uses both two parts of someone’s given name, which can often be thought of as two elements, but the grammar shows otherwise. In the term ‘store-owner’ as opposed to ‘storage’, while both are single words coming somehow from ‘store’, the ‘-age’ of ‘storage’ (here not referring to the noun ‘age’) cannot function as its own word, whereas both ‘store’ an ‘owner’ can function independently of each other. Here, Marvin Gaye is also not a compound, but to be clear, that is not to say that ‘Marvin’ or ‘Gaye’ cannot exist on their own as verbs theoretically even, but because this example is using his name quite inventively, only it has semantic meaning that could allow for the syntax to do what it does. Support Word Facts on Patreon for new ...

There are a number of adjectives that can be used to describe how something looks, or feels. Of course, it is sometimes easier to observe what else something is like e.g. "this brick feels like a rock", but using words like colors or others like 'pale' for vision and other words like 'hard', 'soft' rough' etc. there are plenty of ways to describe the way something appears or feels using these more abstract adjectives. This is also true of tastes and sounds, for example with 'sweet' and 'savoury' or 'loud' and 'quiet'. Certainly there is also some crossover because of how people can assume that one sense would not contradict another, so something can look smooth because it is assumed to feel smooth. None of this information should be surprising to an English speaker, but when it comes to scents there is a certain lack of adjectives. Bad smells are comparatively easy to describe with words like 'stinky' and ...

Following yesterday's post about Shakespeare , another possible misconception about the vocabulary he used was in the number of distinct words he used in total. The number is 24,000-28,000, though the exact number is tough to gauge especially with ordinary compounding [2], but also that he would quote things from foreign languages verbatim sometimes. This has been suggested to mean that he knew around 100,000 words, which is certainly quite impressive. Nevertheless, this also has to take into account the vast amount of words that he used in the first place; between sonnets, full plays and everything else that he wrote, there is no doubt that he was prolific, but when compared to other works by the total number of words used therein, according to Matt Daniels' statistics, the first 35,000 words of Moby Dick has more distinct words than all of Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Othello, Macbeth, As You Like It, Winter's Tale, and Troilus and Cressida. Moreover, that same study com...