Word Facts

It is not uncommon to forget a word at all, but we have some interesting ways of phrasing that; if you want to learn about Tip of the Tongue, check the link . The question today is, what should the tenses be with "I forget/-got what it is/was called". For the same reason that English teachers tend to dislike the use of the past tense in essays, logically it ought to be 'forget' since the act the speaker is describing is, presumably, in the present, and moreover, if what is being forgotten is the name for a proper noun or otherwise something specific, then it still would be called it in the present too. With all that being said, it would stand that the only sensible option would be to say "I forget what it is called", but this is not always the case, in some form or another. One explanation for this is that the speaker will be thinking back to the time of remembering the name for whatever is in question and will use 'was'. Looking at the reasons fo

Words have multiple meanings, but unsurprisingly, this leads to the problem of not being able to translate things from one language to another on a one-to-one level. Sometimes, and perhaps even more often, this will be random, but nevertheless there can be the ability to gain some insights about a cultural (or at the very least linguistic) zeitgeist. For instance, the German word for 'debt' is 'Shuld, but that word is also the same for 'guilt' and less commonly though still acceptably 'fault'. Again, this could have also happened in any language, but it could be noted that Germany has a payment surplus and the nation has very little private debt compared to other European countries. See yesterday's post for more on this idea of translation relation . To see some hypothetical Word Facts, visit Patreon.com/wordfacts . Check out the latest Youtube video too: https://youtu.be/T18K38h2ZHc

Looking at other languages—particularly Romantic and Germanic ones—offers a great deal of insights about English. Take the German word  'leichter' for instance. In English it would translate as 'lighter', except that while the '-ch-' in German is pronounced with the velar fricative [1], this is not the case in English anymore; the '-gh-' however used to represent this same sound, before it was assimilated . Not only does it show related (or at least historical) similarity in pronunciation, but also, both 'leichter' and 'lighter' refer to 'light' as in lacking significant weight, and light as in 'easy', and 'leichter' is related to 'beleuchten' which refers to the sense of 'light as brightness'. This semantic similarity shows how words, even across languages and across cultures, may often share connotations due to (somewhat) universal connotations, and likely in this case also due to cultural and li

English clauses can have multiple verbs for a variety of reasons, but there will not be two finite (that is to say conjugated verbs) together. The possible confusion at first glance is that "what she does is (to) run" is acceptable in English, and clearly has two finite verbs ('does' and 'is') side by side. Moreover the tense marker 'to' is optionally omitted, so it can appear that there are even more. However, there are two different clauses here, one of which is a relative clause "what she does" and the other is a verbal phrase "...is to run", which may be more easily reconstructed all together as "to run is what she does" or even "running...". This topic was a fan-question; if you have your own queeries, do feel free to send a message or write a comment. To see some hypothetical Word Facts, visit Patreon.com/wordfacts . Check out the latest Youtube video too: https://youtu.be/T18K38h2ZHc

There are plenty of words that sound alike but by random chance happens to have a similar phonetic composition as another word with a different meaning and etymology. These such homophones including 'dear' and 'deer' are fun but are not especially insightful. What tends to be more linguistically rich is looking at words that have one origin and have since split. For example, 'example'—as with most words beginning with 'ex-'—comes from Latin 'eximere' meaning 'take out', however, while 'ex-' is often a prefix, it actually does not relate to 'ample, but does have the same root as 'sample'. This diverged from the Old French 'essample' as a noun, however in many ways, 'sample' as a noun can usually be replaced by 'example', though it might sound a little weird. To see some hypothetical Word Facts, visit Patreon.com/wordfacts . Check out the latest Youtube video too: https://youtu.be/T18K38h2ZHc

It's a quirk of English that certain relative clauses do not require the use of 'that' (or 'who(m)' if it's about a person) such as in "his is the dog [that] bit me' where is is optional. In other languages such as German, these relative pronouns are always necessary in these same structures. However, this sort of abbreviation, so to speak, doesn't end here; some relative clauses can be rephrased from "that [subject] [verb]" into the more simple "to [verb]“ such as "it is important that [you] win" or "it is important to win". To see some hypothetical Word Facts, visit Patreon.com/wordfacts . Check out the latest Youtube video too: https://youtu.be/T18K38h2ZHc

When does a noise or a pause become a word? Historically, linguists did not consider 'uh' or 'um' to be words because they were not seen to be "intentionally produced", and there is necessarily syntax for them. However, there is a great deal of evidence to suggest otherwise. First, from a logical standpoint, if these filler words were unintentional, there would not be different versions in various languages and various dialects; not only is there a dialectal difference between the more American 'um' with the British 'erm' or 'em', but there is the Chinese 'nage' and 'zhege', or the Japanese 'eto' and 'ano' to name a few. And furthermore, referring back to a post on Word Facts the other day , there are places where these fillers are more likely to appear, meaning that there is some argument for their having a syntactic role as well. Considering that 100 years ago, 'the' and 'a(n)' wer

There are a lot of ways to use the passive voice  in order to deflect blame. For instance, "mistakes were made" does not reveal who made said mistakes. However, a few verbs allow for this hidden agency to be carried across without the passive, per se. 'Broke' for instance in "my pencil broke"  is active in the way that it is formed, but it's passive semantically, because pencils cannot break themselves. This is another example of the passival , which is a generally overlooked and fairly rare middle voice in English. Also, it might be interesting to note that while 'broke' and some other verbs can be active, passive, and passival, intransitive verbs cannot even be passive; no one could say "he has been died" nor "she has been slept" because those verbs do not take objects ever, and in this situation, the subject is also the object . Check out the video that came out today!

Do people think in terms of individual words, or clauses as they speak? The answer is that, while of course people think of the actual words, people largely think in terms of clauses. That is why most pauses will happen between clauses, but not between, say, an adjective and a noun. However, while so called 'major-delays' (around a second) may happen between clauses without sounding abnormal, if a speaker used one between words it would sound extremely choppy, and often speakers will paraphrase or go as far as to ramble in order to remain fluent until the end of a clause. So called 'minor-clauses' still do exist between words if the speaker is searching for the word, but again, this will rarely be more than .6 seconds. There will be more about this in the next few days. Stay tuned tomorrow for the next Word Facts videos. To see some hypothetical Word Facts, visit Patreon.com/wordfacts . Check out the Youtube too: https://youtu.be/Kgg5P7IIzvk

English does not distinguish phonetically between long and short vowels, but plenty of other languages such as Hebrew do . There is still some level of mystery about how long vowels develop, though for that matter, there is no one reason that short vowels should be presumed to be a constant nor a default. One theory as to why Hebrew developed long vowels is that in many words with glottal stops, the glottal stop was lost which left either two of the same vowel next to each other (which is essentially what a long vowel is) or otherwise the first vowel was assimilated into the second (vocalic elision), and this would result in the latter vowel lengthening. For instance, the word שעונים /ʃeʔo'nim/ loses the glottal stop and becomes [ʃoː'nim] (the ː represents a long vowel). This would not explain vowel length for every language, and especially not the middle length in languages like Mixe .

There is a reason why negative affixes [1] are going to be prefixes in English is the same reason why derivational affixes such as '-al', '-ness' and '-ate' will be suffixes. English has what is called the "English right-hand rule" which states that usually, the right-most element is the head of the word, and will determine the syntax and or meaning. This is true of most adjectives, compounds where the first element acts almost like an adjective, and affixes. With the latter, negating prefixes such as 'in-', 'un-' and 'non-' all can be attached to adjectives (among other things) and the word will still remain an adjective (or whatever else) whereas the aforementioned suffixes will all make a word of one part of speech become a word of another lexical class. This is the case with most affixes in other Germanic languages as well, though there are a few notable exceptions within each, and is one of many significant reasons why En

Compared to the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, or South Africa, the UK has many more dialects. The reason for this is because English has been spoken there for longer, but that has to be interpreted in two different ways. The first is the more obvious: there was more time for the dialects to diverge as any tend to do naturally, and have more or less influences from other languages like Danish, Norman French, and a few Celtic languages . However, the second, and less obvious reason, is that what we think of as English now comes from a variety of different dialect groups, and while they merged to a great extent, it was not complete. Why so many dialects in England often goes all the way back to Old English, and the Northumbrian, Mercian, Kentish, and West Saxon dialect groups that developed into regional dialects of modern UK English. Many of the syntactic features that differentiate the various Northern, Midlands, and Southern dialects today date all the way back to Old English or

Even though case is reflected on nouns, and sometimes adjectives and determiners, verbs assign case. In all languages—except for one very famous example which will come up here some time this week—verbs can either be transitive (i.e. there can be a direct object) or intransitive (there is no direct object), even if it is a similar meaning. For instance, 'kill' is a transitive verb, and one can say "he killed her" but 'die' is an intransitive verb and no one can say "he died her". In ergative-absolutive languages, these are especially important because they change the case of the "subject" as well. All of these cases are determined by the verbs, and this is still considered to be the case in situations where the verb is omitted.

There are many forms of the verb ' to be' , but there are just about as many uses too, including the equatorial 'be',  the 'be' for locative predications, the habitual 'be' to name a few, but none of those relate to psychology as much as the dynamic (and its opposite: stative) 'be'. Of the latter two, both of them relate to predicate adjectives , but in different ways. The dynamic 'be' is used for adjectives that can—semantically—be thought of as impermanent qualities, such as 'humorous', 'sarcastic', or 'angry', whereas stative adjectives describe (you guessed it) the state of something, such as 'tall', 'stone' or, debatably, 'intelligent'. In both cases, the sentence can be phrased as "subject is (adjective)" as in 'the comedian is funny' or 'the statue is stone', like any other predicate adjective. The difference however, is that while one can say "he is bei

Think of an alphabet other than the Latin script, and what comes to mind: Cyrillic? Greek? Hebrew (Assyrian)? Arabic? Ge'ez? Brahmi? Devanāgāri? Pallava? Khmer? the list goes on and on, but one thing that these and many others have in common is that they are all ultimately descended from the ancient, Phoenician writing-system. There are literally dozens of writing systems that have some roots with the Phoenician alphabet (it's called that but technically it's an abjad ), with a few notable exceptions being Chinese, Korean, and anything from the Americas, including Cree , which was nevertheless was invented by someone who had the Latin script. This means that as foreign-looking as something written in Hindi or Khmer looks to someone writing in English, the alphabets all go back to the same place. Sometimes this is obvious, such as what became ה in Hebrew ( Assyrian ) became h in Latin, but other times it may look like more of a stretch. Carrying on from yesterday, there will

While theoretically any alphabet can be used to represent any language, given that there is some arbitrarity to all of them, some are more fitting for certain languages than others. For instance, the Assyrian alphabet used to write Hebrew (and Yiddish) primarily is an abjad  meaning that vowels are not written in, at least necessarily. However, this does not mean than English words cannot be written in with this system, such as איי לייק ביג באטס אנד איי חנות לי graffitied on a wall in Israel reading a transliterated—not translated—"I like big butts and I cannot lie". However, the reason that an abjad is especially fitting for Hebrew is that while it has 9 vowels (five short; four long) any unstressed short vowel becomes the centralized schwa /ə/. This is in contrast to Yiddish  where—like in the very similar German—vocalization is more important, and this is reflected in the writing which uses Assyrian letters, but more fully uses the vowels: א,י,ע, and ו. To see some hypo

While generally words of French origin in English are seen as more formal , usually, there are a few exceptions to this. Many times, there are examples of a division between Northern and Southern English lexicon wherein the former will contain more Old English or Scandinavian-derived words, and the latter will contain more from Norman French, due to the history of invasions in Britain's history, but occasionally this is reversed by chance. For instance, 'poke' can be used to mean 'sack' in the North, which comes from French and is related to ' pocket ', as well as 'rammel' ('garbage') for example. Notably, 'scallions', called 'spring onions' in the South, is considered merely dialectal in the UK but is standard and dominant in North America, because 'spring onions', while considered part of Standard British English, is quite new as a term. It should be clarified also that the Northern variations with French origin ar

People do not just freeze at ungrammaticality, and try instead will try to make sense of things. This is how talking to someone newly learning a language may say something like "I likes it" or a baby may say " I holded it " and this is not impossible to understand, though it is obviously ungrammatical. A prime example of this is most of the entries in the book "English as She is Spoke", the title alone of which shows just this very idea. The famous line "...he speak the frenche as the Frenchmen himselves. The Spanishesmen believe him Spanishing, and the Englishes, Englishmen." In the obvious places where there are linguistic issues, generally what would need to be supplemented to make it sound normal would be words that are phonetically similar (somewhat), and usually syntactically similar to what is already there. In this way, language is less a formula and more a set of clues for interpreting signs . To see some hypothetical Word Facts, visit

A few examples of eggcorns (i.e. errors in phonetic-/spelling-reproduction that still make some sense) vary from the original phrase because of voicing. For instance, "nip it in the butt" rather than "...bud" or “old-timer’s disease” instead of "Alzheimer's disease" hinge upon [t]/[d]; the only difference between those two sounds is that the vocal chords vibrate for [d], but everything else is the same. Looking over many lists of eggcorns available online, there is a noticeable trend of eggcorns which only deviate from the original word or phrase by one sound, making them what linguists call a minimal pair. Other common sounds that are the source for these mishearings is [n]/[m], such as with 'medium strip' instead of 'median strip'. To see some hypothetical Word Facts, visit Patreon.com/wordfacts . Check out the Youtube too: https://youtu.be/Kgg5P7IIzvk

Just about every feature of spoken languages is present in sign-languages, with the obvious exception of vocalization. Sign-languages have morphology (with one wild exception), and there is still syntax, as one would probably assume. However, less intuitive but nevertheless true is that sign-languages also have accents. For instance, sometimes the words that are used in a certain region that has a standardized version (such as American Sign-Language) will not follow the conventional guidelines. At other times, such as with New York signing, it tends to be done faster than that in the Midwest or the South of the United States. Moreover, there are even stylistic differences, such as with US Southerners who are more likely to touch their chests and jaws as they sign. All of these together make up some of the different ways accents reveal themselves in sign languages: here, it was only American Sign Language, but the ideas can be applied broadly.  

In heavily inflected languages like Kalaalisut (a.k.a West Greenlandic ), names change in form where necessary for case. For instance, the capital of Greenland, Nuuk in English, is also 'Nuuk' in the ergative case, but in the locative  (i.e. locations like "in Nuuk") becomes 'Nuumi'. This is also true of names for people etc.. With English however, there is a general aversion to modifying proper nouns. Partly this is because case is limited in English, but even where there is case such as the genitive -'s following an [s] or [z] in a coda, the word doesn't change, such as "chris's (dog)". The other reason is that it is conceptually odd; the other common inflectional morphology in English is with the plural, but it is uncommon for there ever to be a plural proper noun. For more on this, see the video about proper nouns out today. https://youtu.be/Kgg5P7IIzvk

Sentences like "the boy done good" may sound not only non-standard but incorrect, but actually in some dialects of English it is acceptable and systematic. Moreover, the same sentence in Standard American English, "the boy did good" would also use the same verb with a follow up "...didn’t he?" when in fact these verbs serve two different purposes. In this sentence 'done' is a lexical verb (a.k.a. 'main verb' or 'full verb') while 'did is an auxiliary verb. Much like how a plural 'you' is considered standard, even though 'y'all' or 'yous' etc. would probably be easier to differentiate and understand, 'done' as a lexical verb is helpful for (in this case) disambiguation. This sort of idea was also explored with the use of ' hisself '. Make sure to check out the newest Word Facts Video: https://youtu.be/Ay9PNWwcQwo Support Word Facts on Patreon for new things and to help make the conten

People tend to know when use 'more' and 'most' for the comparative and superlative, and when to use '-er' and '-est' , because it relies upon phonetics, but there is some discrepancy. While no native speaker would say ' beautifuler ', 'lovelier' and 'more lovely', for example, are both acceptable ways of speaking, even though 'lovelier' is more conventional both historically and linguistically. When a full phrase is used such as 'most happy' or 'more funny', it is referred to as the periphrastic. The periphrastic refers to anything that, to put it simply, is stated in a phrase when it could be one word. This also happens with verbs, such as 'let's talk' versus 'let's have a talk', or 'he pushed the door' versus 'he gave the door a push', which can be stylistically useful, but does not have any defined linguistic benefits necessarily. These commonly involve '

It is not uncommon that older, popular names will have regional variations when given to children over a large area. For instance, the Germanic 'Johan' and ' John ' also appears as the Romantic 'Jean', 'Juan', and 'Gianni', the Celtic 'Sean' and 'Iwan', and the Slavic 'Ivan' and even 'Honza', which all ultimately derive from the Hebrew 'Yohanan', relating to the name of G*d. While the phonetic differences among these do have some randomness, they can illuminate the similarities among certain phonemes. With the name 'Elisabeth', which in Scottish is 'Elspeth' or 'Elspet', the difference switching from [b] to [p], or at least 'b' to 'p', it shows how in certain environments—such as following an [s]—the two are more or less identical. Furthermore, [θ] (written as 'th') exists in relatively few languages including English, so it should not be surprising that a Sco

English has a great deal of borrowed words; not only is nearly 60% of this language's vocabulary of Romantic origin (even if many of those words are restricted for specific fields like law and science), but also because unlike French and other languages, there is no one official body of linguistic regulation. Of course, other languages have plenty of adopted words as well, including lots from English given its global presence. The word 'boychik' (meaning 'young man') stands out among these however because not only is it a loan word in English from Yiddish but also it comes from a loan word in Yiddish from English. The word entered Yiddish from the English word 'boy' and the Slavic suffix '-chik' which is diminutive . Later, 'boychik' entered English as a slang term in Jewish English . Make sure to check out the new Word Facts Video: https://youtu.be/MuEqaI7W0hA Support Word Facts on Patreon for new things and to help make the cont

It was mentioned during Color Week  how before English had the word ‘orange’ to describe the fruit, there was no word for the color either. This is only half true, so what would have been clearer would have been to say that before this, there was not a unique word for ‘orange’. Up until the word was borrowed ultimately from a Dravidian language via Sanskrit and Old French, people got by by saying the equivalent of ‘yellow-red’: ‘geoluhred’ in Old English. Indeed, ‘orange was only first recorded in the 16 th century (or 13 th century as a reference to the fruit), but clearly people were not partially colorblind until that point. It is a good example of how people will learn to get by regardless of limitation to communicate the same ideas. Make sure to check out the newest Word Facts Video:  https://youtu.be/Ay9PNWwcQwo Support Word Facts on Patreon for new things and to help make the content better:  https://www.patreon.com/wordfacts .

It is hard to give a year for when any language began. With French for instance, there are certainly periods when there was rapid change between Latin, Vulgar Latin, then Old French and so on, but any linguist would be hard-pressed to give an exact year, let alone a month or even a day. The one exception to this for any natural language is Modern Hebrew, which began on October 13th, 1881, when Eliezer Ben-Yehuda and his friends decided to only speak to each other in Hebrew. up until then, there were over 1,500 years of linguistic inactivity, except in rituals and other special circumstances, in the same as Latin might be thought of today. Ben-Yehuda created the Committee of the Hebrew language, and wrote the first modern dictionary for the language, and often he is credited as the source for revitalization. He realized the importance of a national language  for the purposes of solidarity and nationalism (in this case Zionism). This was as a replacement for Yiddish , which was—at the ti

Language is fraught with ambiguity. Philosophically this is because nothing can ever be fully communicated only verbally, but this is also because there are some words that can be different parts of speech, or words that are only one part of speech, but that have different definitions that can be included in the same contexts. Linguists call this syntactic ambiguity  and lexical (or semantic) ambiguity  respectively, but most lay folk call it double entendre. For instance, the question, "how did you find that music?" only features 'find' as a verb (though it can also be a noun) but asks two different questions: "how did you discover..." and "what are your feelings toward...". The linguistic pivot, so to speak, comes from lexicon, so for reference, this double entendre is said to be lexically ambiguous. This is also true in "I got to sleep late" which pivots on 'got' where it can mean "I could sleep in" or "it was la

Standardiszed languages are conceptual , to be sure, but they are not pulled out of thin air. Often it will be fairly logical how the standardized version comes from various capitals of a nation, such as that for culture, politics, or economy; for example British English comes from Britain's capital (if not for all of those things, then at least for the latter two). With German, the standard version comes not from Berlin, but from Vienna (historically, southern Germany and Austria), because the Habsburgs from Austria used it for commerce. There is a similar situation for Italian, which standarized only very late in the game; before then, every region had its own dialect (at times essentially a language) but a blend of the Florentine (Tuscan) variety became official because of the area's economic significance, certainly, but also because writers like Dante, and many linguists wrote in and recorded this variety, when Italy looked to standardize the language, it was easier to us

APRIL FOOLS   APRIL FOOLS APRIL FOOLS Don't worry, Word Facts will continue indefinitely. There is an order of adjectives, but also an order of adjuncts. To be clear, anything that is not syntactically necessary for the meaning of a sentences is an adjunct, so adjectives are technically adjuncts too. However, while prepositional phrases can be moved around a bit more easily than adjectives relatively, there are still comparable differences. For instance, adjuncts for physical descriptions have a less close relationship than ones that describe other qualities, so one can say "the student |of linguistics| |with three children|", but not "the student |with three children| |of linguistics|".