Word Facts

In Modern German, it is common to see past participles begin with 'ge-' or 'be-' just as '-ed' would be used in English. However, because English is a Germanic language, not only do the German words also end in the very similar '-t' , but a number of English participles begin with 'be-' as well. Some strong verbs have morphed over time such that they have lost certain forms, such as 'shave', which retains 'shaven' participially, but also has 'shaved' in the past tense (rather than 'shoove', as it belongs to the same class of verbs as 'take'). This loss is present in the participial forms of other words too; although 'held' from 'hold' is already not a common form for the past tense or participial (it is the same for both), the original participle was 'beholden', as it belongs to the same class as other verbs like 'fall' (befallen). If you can think of others that sti...

There's a lot to say about strong verbs , but one thing that is comes up from time to time is the similarities and differences between them. Most strong verbs are said t be regular, in that hey follow a pattern but clearly 'ride, rode, ridden' is a different system to 'sing, sang, sung'. In fact, in English there are seven systems identified for them. Generally, these differences usually regard either the etymologies or phonology, such as the '-i-, -a-, -u-' (sometimes '-i-, -u-, -u-') mentioned before which come before a nasal consonant, such as is the case with 'sing' and 'swim'. All of the other ones (six out of seven categories) also have the participial form with '-(e)n', like 'freeze, froze, frozen' or 'shake, shook, shaken'. Often, because there is such variety of these systems, they are thought of as not having regularity, but this is not true. These will be discussed more here in coming days. ...

While it is fairly straightforward to translate English's 'green' to French's ' verde ' [1] as words to describe nouns, what is less easy is the words to describe colors. English has words like 'light' and 'dark' which refer to the relative amount of white or black in the mixture; because that is fairly technical, it is often (though not always) easily translated, but other modifiers like 'warm' and 'cool' are harder to pin down exactly. While reds and yellows are easy to identify as warm, and blues are cool, combinations thereof, such as various shades or purples may be more interpretive, debatably. Other languages, such as Hanunó'o have adjectives that translate to 'wet/fresh' and 'dry' to describe colors, that is simply not done in English. Furthermore, there are plenty of colors that are compounded for the effect modification, such as 'forest green'. Sometimes, these cultural differences make dir...

Concerning whether or not people can see colors they have no word for, one common and fairly logical idea is that it comes down to training. While certain people like W.H.R. Rivers  had ideas that related to evolutionary biology, and thought that cultures with fewer colors were less physically advanced, a less racist response could simply come down to training; people taught to look out for more different colors could just train them selves to see more than otherwise, even if everyone is physiologically the same. This is the same explanation for how people who speak Guugu Yimithirr have an innate sense of cardinal directions . There are some flaws to this idea however. Firstly, it is possibly to see something and not have a single word to describe it, either using approximations or adjectives (such as 'light'), and also plenty of people (including English speakers) use nouns in lieu of colors all the time, such 'rose', 'violet' or 'orange'.  If we includ...

Following from yesterday's post  about the somewhat arbitrary nature of confirming what hues go along with what basic color categories , it might also lead to the question of why a language would have a term for a red—or any other color—at all. This is not to say that it should be strange that languages develop words for this, but that peoples will associate certain groupings of shades and hues to the same few colors in the first place, across cultures (more or less). Of course, there are also color terms outside of the basic color categories, such as English's 'vermillion', 'scarlet', and 'magenta', but these are not the most general. Indeed, consider being in a paint store where it is possible to see squares with thousands of different colors with all sorts of names such as Benjamin Moore's "Magic Potion" (a sort of violet). However, 'Magic Potion', and moreover even the umbrella term 'violet' can both exist under the umbr...

Though language is one of the best ways we have to communicate, because people cannot convey an entire thought-process ever, there is always some ambiguity of the meaning of signs  (words). Many—thousands if not more—shades exist that could be denoted with a basic color categories [2], so for instance, a scarlet may be different from a tan red and both are different to fire-engine red, but all could still generally be called ‘red’. One could ask then: how do people know what to assign ‘red’ to?—and more importantly for our purposes—will this differ from language-to-language? To answer the first question (without getting into biology, neurology, or much childhood’s language-acquisition), the answer is that assuming, controversially , that people can all see the same way regardless of language, people only have to get used to grouping different shades from trial-and-error when learning language from infancy. The second question is more simple answered: yes. Statistically, for exampl...

Russians blues are quite famous among cat-lovers and (some) linguists, but for a very different reason. Russian has two basic color categories  for what would both in English only be 'blue', which fascinates (some) linguists. The word 'siniy' (синий) roughly translates to the English for 'blue', but the word 'goluboy' (голубой) translates to 'light blue'. Of course, this is expressible in English, and also there will be some variation from speaker-to-speaker about what is considered which in the same way as there may be variation about how to consider any transitional color like vermillion, but some research, such as that of Jonathan Winawer, has suggested that Russian speakers are marginally faster at detecting distinctions of blues compared to English speakers. The reaction-times for seeing blues of both Russians and English-speakers evened out, however, when they were given more tasks. The experiment had a small sample-size and only looked at ...

It was discussed in the first post of Color Week that blue is usually the last color to receive a basic color category , but it is not as simple as that. This should be clarified to mean that it is introduced consistently late, because it is very common for words for browns, oranges, and grays to come later, or before, so there is some variation to that. Often, this is because until then, speakers of a language with fewer basic color categories will use nouns or some other adjectives to fill in for those such words; it is very common for words equivalent to 'water' or 'sky' to fill the gap of 'blue', or certain flowers for other colors etc. in the same way that English speakers might describe scents by their relation to other scents, becasue there are few basic terms for scents in English . Even English's 'red'—the only color for which a Proto-Indo-European root is found—is derived etymologically from words meaning 'earth' and 'clay...

This is the first post of Color Week to celebrate the 1,200th post! Thank you for your support and please share. The term "basic color category" is used to denote a word that acts as an umbrella term for a specific group of colors, such as 'red', 'yellow' and 'green', which encompass many different shades and hues. It is rare that a language would have more than about a dozen of these—English has 11 and Russian has 12 (which will be discussed during this week)—but some languages only have 2 or 3. With those languages with only a few basic color categories, the categories will almost always fall into 'light', 'dark' and then next will be 'red'. In fact, there is a noticeable trend to the order in which a language will gain each category with 'red' being the first and 'blue' usually being the last. An early explanation of this was that people could not see the color blue as thoroughly without a word for it, and pe...

Some ideas can be conveyed without a verb, and examples of this often relate to copula verbs (i.e. verbs that connect other words, such as 'to be'). African American English and Latin both regularly omit them in general, and some languages like Russian and Hungarian omit them in specific contexts (in this case it is with the third person) but there are more than the two options to either have the verb present or omit it. In Turkish, which is a highly agglutinative  language, the copula is included not as a verb in its own right but as a suffix, even though it is still meaningful . One of the ways that this is relevant is that Turkish has vowel-harmony  meaning that the vowels of a affix change depending upon the vowels of the stem, and this happens for the copula in Turkish. Also, other verbs including Turkish's negative copula can take suffixes, but the positive copula cannot, even though it carries essentially the same meaning. It is possibly the only irregular verb in Tu...

This is the fourth and final post in the short series about defective verbs . While just about any language will have defective verbs, due to random change over long periods of time, Classical Greek only has defective verbs, which is to say that no verb can be used for all nine persons (in addition to singular and plural, Greek has a dual number for pairs of objects). This is not to say that it is impossible to express certain things because certain verbs only happen to conjugate for certain persons—anything can be communicated in any language, even if the means are different. Either verbs will not have a form for certain numbers like duals or not exist in certain tenses for semantic reasons, or otherwise, one verb will be used in certain contexts, and another will be used in others to communicate the same meaning. Make sure to check out the new Word Facts Video: https://youtu.be/kT59kK71E6Q Support Word Facts on Patreon for new things and to help make the content better: ht...

To follow up on the previous two days about defective verbs , not only are words possibly defective if they conjugate to some but not all persons, but there are verbs that care defective for other reasons. Modal verbs like 'will' 'may' and 'can', lack the forms for infinitive (e.g. *'to may'), future aspect (*'I will might'), participle (*'maying'), imperative (*'would!'), and gerund (*"my maying is a skill"). This is in contrast to defective verbs like 'rain', because 'I rain' is not possible for semantic reasons, but given that the 'I would can' is not possible  but "I would be able to" is acceptable means that the issue is at least partly syntactic and not merely semantic. This is at least partly true of other non-modal verbs such as 'to be' which cannot be used in certain forms such as in this case the imperative 'be!'. If you know of any others, write a comment. Ma...

Defective verbs [1], which can't be fully conjugated, sometimes are that way by chance, but other times it is for semantic reasons. For instance, it has been discussed here many times how verbs like 'rain' or 'snow' (or just about any others that relate to the weather) are stated impersonally . Indeed, it is not possible to say 'I rained earlier' or 'I snowed earlier', becasue those actions simply are not physically possible. Therefore, verbs like that are considered defective because there is no first person or second person  form for the verb. Interestingly, it is far more acceptable to apply human-qualities to inanimate things than the other way around; personification allows many verbs to not be defective or anything similar, though usually there are not verbs that relate to human action that are defective in the first place. Make sure to check out the new Word Facts Video: https://youtu.be/kT59kK71E6Q Support Word Facts on Patreon for new thi...

Verbs are incredibly versatile, but this is not to say that they are beyond limitations. Some verbs, called "defective verbs" cannot be completely conjugated in some way or another. Because English is not a heavily inflected language, these defective verbs are rarer than in other heavily inflected languages such as Greek or Latin. Defective verbs in Latin sometimes are considered defective if there has not been a discovered instance of its usage outside of a few ways, such as the verb 'ait' or 'aiunt' meaning 'he/they speak', which is said to only be used in the third person, but theoretically could have been found in other persons. In English, there are a few verbs like this, such as 'beware', which exists almost exclusively in the imperative (e.g. 'beware of the monster") or as an infinitive (e.g. "you ought to beware of the monster") but almost never as a finite verb, and especially not with conjugational endings, such as ...

As has been mentioned here before, the verb 'to be' is irregular , but this is in part because its conjugational forms come from 3 or 4 different origins. Indeed, many of the words that gave rise to the forms of 'to be' today were irregular in its own right. 'Am' and 'is' come from an older Indo-European (IE) root that is shared with the the corresponding versions of Latin for 'to be', i.e. 'sum' and 'est'. Not all of the words that gave rise to the current conjugational forms meant 'to be' always, such as the root of 'was' and 'were' which came from an IE root meaning ‘remain’. The forms 'be' and 'been' also come from an IE root, but it is less obvious at first glance; they are related to the Latin 'fui' meaning 'become' and Greek 'phuein' meaning 'bring forth'. This sort of relationship between [b] and [p], and also [f] , are quite common across languages in...

Pirahã is not considered endangered necessarily—to be precise, it is merely considered vulnerable—even with only a few hundred speakers (approximately 250 and 390). Lombard, on the other hand has 3,500,000 speakers and is considered "definitely endangered". To reconcile this, it must be noted that 'endangered' is more complicated than the number of speakers. There are several factors than go into this categorisation, including how much the language is taught to children in school, how much the language is used officially, and how much the language is used in the home, along with how much other languages are spoken along side it in those same places. Also, for a language not spoken in urban areas, or at least for a language not used much for business, if members of the community urbanize there is a good chance that the rate of language-use will decrease. Insular communities therefore are less likely to see as high a risk of extinction as another language spoken by a...

With strong verbs (i.e. verbs that conjugate internally) the vowels change from a high or mid vowel like [i] or [e] to a lower vowel like [a] (either mid or low), or occasionally the vowels move from front to back for present and past tense respectively. The height or lowness is determined by where the tongue is in the mouth (see the diagram below). This can be seen with 'sing' in the present tense becoming 'sang' in the perfect tense. Moreover, this can be seen with truly irregular verbs ( unlike 'sing', 'sang', 'sung' which is regular ) such as 'to be'. With the 3rd person singular it appears as 'is' in the present tense with a high vowel, and 'was' in the imperfect tense with the back vowel /ʊ/. However, 'are' is present tense and has a low vowel, but the past tense form ' were ' has a mid vowel, which is higher. Does that mean the rule is imperfect (not referring to the grammar here)?—not really, bec...

As has been discussed here, while there is a past tense and a future aspect in English, both of them overlap somewhat with the present tense, syntactically. This is true of non-past before  in which a subordinate clause with 'before' at the start will take the present tense, even though it is semantically in the past (even more so than the independent clause, indeed). This is also the exact same situation with 'after' possibly, but there are other words for which the present tense is used to indicate semantic future. The phrase "as soon as" like in "as soon as I finish game, we will go out" indicates that the action of completing the work is sometime in the future, but is grammatically present. Notably, both here and with non-past before, the reason that it is present tense is because it must act in a sequence with another future aspect or past tense verb respectively. If you have other examples, please comment. Check out the new video: https://www...

There is a myth both discussed and debunked in the 2016 film Arrival that the word 'kangaroo' is derived from a foreigner asking a native Australian what the animals are called, to which the aborigine replied 'kangaroo' meaning "I don't understand". This is just a made up story, but it does remind us that linguistic communication will always be limited in its ability to allow people to truly understand each other. Moreover, this sort of thing did really happen in Australia; the Wendoree swamp which is now the name for a nearby town and lake derives from William Yuille asking a native Australian woman for the name of the swamp, to which she replied ‘wendaaree’ meaning ‘go away'. Check out the new video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kT59kK71E6Q&feature=youtu.be

Following a post the other day about a change in morphology in certain languages , it should be noted that much of the cause of that change is due to interlinguistic influence. For instance, it was said here that people sometimes use pronouns in Modern Spanish rather than whatever verb-ending would carry that same information as happens in English where conjugation is minimal, but in the examples of Spanish, this occurs more often in U.S. Spanish, especially in the Spanish of immigrants to the U.S.. On the other hand, Tocharian—a now-extinct Indo-European language from  modern northwest China—has eleven cases, but some have suggested that as many as half of these derived from or were influenced by neighboring Uralic cases. Considering that modern Finnish—a Uralic language—has fifteen cases , it is not hard to imagine a language of that family leading to increased declensional endings in another language. Check out the video that came out today at that link.

There are many different parts of speech, also called lexical class; some are open meaning that people can create words that belong to that class fairly easily, such as nouns, verbs, and adjectives, but closed lexical classes rarely change over time at all. Things like conjunctions, prepositions, pronouns, and articles haven't really changed in the last 800 years in English, some going back even twice as long. However, every so often something will change. The reason for this is that unlike nouns which are needed to represent lots of different things, conjunctions and other closed lexical classes already contain enough words to cover semantic needs. However, every so often one will fill a new role and catch on, such as the conjunction 'slash'. This only came about with the rise of typing, and was further reinforced through texting. Earlier—and still today—people word express certain dualities such as having the same person be a friend as well as a coworker with 'and...

Anyone who has studied an inflected language as a native-speaker of an uninflected language may have the question "do people always use cases right?". After all, there are plenty of examples showing that often, the rules of word-order as a method for supplying syntactic information are subverted, as with starting a clause with an object or sometimes just plain broken, as with "...than me" as opposed to "...than I" . The answer to the question is that languages with a lot of morphology tend to lose those agglutinative tendencies over time, as was the situation with Ancient Latin's seven cases becoming five in Classical Latin and then as it morphed into Vulgar Latin (and became the modern Romance Languages), the cases were lost wholesale. Even some speaker of Modern Spanish often use pronouns instead of conjugational endings, as is the case in English. Does this mean that eventually there will be no inflection?—no. Logically, a heavily inflected langu...

Following yesterday's post about the effects of globalization on language, it should be noted that this is not a new problem only. While it is true that globalization is increasing in just about every sphere, any time that two or more groups come into contact with one another there will be the same problems. For instance, for a long time, Malay has been a lingua franca in Indonesia and Polynesia, especially around Borneo, even though there are as many as thousands of languages spoken in that area. There was an increased need in the 15th century to have a lingua franca as the region was becoming Islamicized, and many writings from the time indicate a high rate of second-language Malay-learning as evidenced by frequent usage of loan words from Arabic and Sanskrit, but also many more local languages. For instance, a letter from the early 16th century written to the king of Portuguese by Sultan Abu Hayat shows signs of Ternate-influence, but regardless that neither Portuguese nor Te...

It used to be the case that languages and dialects could easily be tied to people-groups, but with the rise of globalization, people are abandoning their older languages for more profitable languages and creoles. As has been discussed here before, most of the world's languages are spoken by the minority of people; an estimated 10% of people speak 95% of all languages, with everyone else speaking the same handful . Historically, colonization and other national and regional foreign-occupations lead to the displacement or replacement of different languages, the affect of which is still present in the Americas and Australia especially, but this has happened everywhere. There are a number of reasons for this, but mostly it is that people abandon their "local languages" in order to gain access to economic opportunities. While those are sinister or unfortunate, those sorts of issues are indeed more preventable than another large cause, which is globalization does not lead people...

Is it 'snuck' or 'sneaked'? Linguists don't tend to like prescriptivism, so to say "it ought to be sneaked" is not seen as especially productive per se, but it does lead to some larger linguistic insights. Indeed, traditionally the word was 'sneaked', but what the existence of 'snuck' demonstrates is that there is a natural inclination (sometimes) to conjugate verbs as strong . Most of the time, these strong verbs like 'swim, swam, swum', tend to be holdovers from much older verbal systems, dating back to Old English. Indeed, most strong forms for strong nouns and verbs in English and other languages like German are on the decline, but a few newer forms are emerging, such as 'snuck' for 'sneaked' becoming even more popular, and less significantly, the rise of 'swang' rather than 'swinged', which still has some work to do. Watch the new Word Facts Video: https://youtu.be/2YWfhZLMhrQ ...

The question "how many languages are there?" is hard to answer not only because of the possible lack of differentiation of dialects , but also because language is not only natural anymore. Not only are there a few invented languages that people use in varying contexts including Esperanto or even Klingon, but far more significantly: computers have their own languages, so to speak. This takes multiple forms; not only are there various coding-languages with different vocabulary and syntax—more simple than human-language—which are not merely ways to transcribe a limited set of commands from another language, and are indeed can be used generatively, but also other parts of a computer will require different codes—such as for a CPU—that the rest of the systems do not understand. This is a complicated subject, so if you have any questions or comments of what you'd like explored here in the future, feel free to write a comment. Watch the new Word Facts Video and s upport ...

Following the post on taboo , the reason that words are felt so powerfully is because lexicon can evoke extralinguistic responses. Ultimately all sounds are arbitrarily assigned to signs , and even when words are imitative, there is no reason that those words are and others are not. However, lexical groups (such as that of swear words) can trigger physical responses , not because of the phonetic qualities or even the meaning of the word, but because of the social significance of the word. In cultures that practice taboo, words that were the names of those who have died have become like swears only because of extralinguistic factors. For this reason, the practice of making words taboo is found to occur independently all over the world, from Africa to the Pacific to the Americas. Indeed, the cueing of death is so commonly painful—in varying senses of that word—that it is rare to not find euphemistic options such as in English 'passed on', 'no longer with us' because like ...

Taboo is a concept used in many cultures, but the traditional sense is often misunderstood due to its interpretation in English, where it can simply refer to something forbidden. The term was introduced into English by Captain Cook after he encountered the Tonga people who practiced Taboo, as is fairly common of Pacific Islanders, and also certain indigenous Americans. The practice involves not using a word that carries certain spiritual significance, including names of those whom have died. Since these cultures used names based off of words that appear in normal contexts as well, this could mean that any word used as a name for a now-deceased person could not be used. This would sometimes even extend to words that relate to the original, either semantically or phonetically, depending upon the people-group. Of course, people need to use these signs, so this practice results in certain words changing rapidly from one word to another. Among other things, this speeds up the rate at which ...

Plenty of languages don't have definite or indefinite articles, but as with everything, there are ways to get around this information. Sometimes this happens that the older form of languages that now have these articles, such as English and French which came from the article-lacking Old English (OE) and Latin gain these through deictic pronouns  (e.g. 'that' and 'this'). Other languages just use context as well; it is fairly easy to know in the context of a conversation whether a noun is definite (e.g. 'the book') or indefinite (e.g. 'a book') or not defined (e.g. 'books'). Moreover, this is clearer in Latin, OE, and other more inflected languages like Russian that use cases, though of course languages like German have both cases and these articles. Kalaallisut has no definite articles but they have ways to get around that with cases as well, on the part of the agent. For example, in an active construction that uses a transitive verb, the erg...

Verbs are marked for subjects; in English, even passive constructions are not marked by agent, but by subject, e.g. "you are commanded by her", not "you is...". Some languages, however, distinguish between the subject and the agent—as is the case in English's passive—in the active voice as well. This, called the ergative  is true of many languages, but it raises an important question: Should the verbs be marked for subject or agent? For Kalaallisut a.k.a West Greenlandic—which uses the ergative case rather than nominative—this is a trick question, because both are marked, and moreover, when there is possession, both are marked on the noun as well. Because verbs are marked for the subject and object, in addition to everything else that is conveyed with conjugation (person, number, tense, mood, voice), a single verb can contain all of the information that in English would require a whole clause. A pleasant example is with "I love you", which requires t...

Nouns and verbs are always going to be in the 1st, 2nd, or 3rd person, right? Not necessarily. Even without conjugations, every language will have these three grammatical numbers—one for the speaker, one for the listener, and one for everyone else—so even conceptually it may seem impossible to have a fourth person, but actually some languages do. Kalaallisut , for instance, has a fourth person, which has two similar uses; it is used as the subject for subordinate verbs in the third person, and as a noun's possessor when they both reference the same 3rd person subject. That may sound fairly convoluted, but it can also sort of be considered as 'he' or 'his' when they reference the subject being 3rd person, and 'he' or 'his' when they reference someone or something besides the subject as being 4th person. For instance, "Aligoĸ illua takuaa" means "Aligoĸ saw (the) house", but specifically "Aligoĸ saw the other person's hous...