Word Facts

There are a lot of reasons why english spelling is so irregular, but one of them is that historically some words were adopted in (more or less) their original forms but not pronounced the same as in the native language. This happens still, especially with place-names. Nevertheless, English is by no means the only language to do so. While some languages such as Finnish borrows a lot of new words from English, the spelling always changes to fit the orthography, in other cases, such as Hebrew loan-words in Yiddish [1] they retain their original spelling. In fact, because of this, the letter ת (taw) in Hebrew is usually pronounced as [t] but in Yiddish its an [s] among other differences, such as אמת (true) pronounced 'emet' in Hebrew but 'emes' in Yiddish. This is also a problem for reading Yiddish, because while Yiddish always represents vowels, Hebrew does not often [2]. Word Facts' Podcast, only for Patreon patrons, came out today, so why not support Word Facts an

One thing which is often overlooked is that while there are a number of languages which are privileged in being taught more frequently than others, this is partly for practical reasons. Less than 10% of all languages have a standard written form, and far fewer have any sort of literature. This is an ongoing problem for man researchers now, but it means that sometimes, a language's literary history can be said to begin with only one person. This is true of professional linguists now, but in the past this was the work of proud writers, often poets, as is the case for Modern Italian, Modern Estonian, and Finnish. In the latter case, it was not just the case that people were originally using older form of the language as with the other examples, but that people were only writing in Swedish: a language not even related to Finnish. This changed in 1870 with the book Seitsemän Veljestä by Aleksis Kivi, who ironically has Swedish parents.

The two most commonly used irregular verbs in English are 'to be' and 'to go', but both of them have conjugational forms derived of multiple words. Many so-called 'irregular verbs' are regular within less common systems of conjugation (see the video below here ), but 'go' to 'went' follows no system. In fact, 'went' was originally the perfect form of 'wend' which is related to 'wonder' and 'wind' . It follows the same patter of 'lend-lent' and 'bend-bent', meaning that 'wend' is a regular verb, but 'go', which used to be regular too, no longer is. For a comparison with the even-stranger "be-am/are/is-was/were-been" click the link here .

There are a lot of theories about where the phrase "the bees knees" referring to something outstanding, but as with many folk etymology, there is a bit of logically weeding to be done. One theory is that it comes from Italian immigrants to America saying 'business', but this doesn't work for two reasons: the phrase has been around for far longer than Italians were coming to the US, and it originally had the meaning of 'a small thing' so 'business' would not make sense as an derivation for it. Other theories include things such as how it would be related to the collection of pollen, and other biological ideas, but these don't hold up for similar reasons. The prevailing theory is that it went from meaning something small to something great on the pattern of other phrases like "the cat's pajamas", 'flea's eyebrows', 'the canary's tusks', and "the cat's whiskers", though not all of these slang te

Anagrams are quite famous, but there are multiple varieties. Palindromes are similar but there are also so called aptagrams, which is a semantically relevant anagram [2]. A few famous examples include 'moon starers' for 'astronomer', 'notes' for 'tones', and 'dirty room' for 'dormitory'. The list of those is fairly short, but it can be expanded to cross-language anagrams, such as 'ars magna' (Latin for 'great art') as an aptagram for 'anagrams'. Debatably, the best of all of them is "twelve plus one" and "eleven plus two" which not only is relevant being within the field of mathematics, but is also accurate. To see some hypothetical Word Facts, visit  Patreon.com/wordfacts . Check out the latest Youtube video too:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqYX2heE0T0

Brown Willy is a hill in Cornwall which comes from Cornish meaning 'breast swallow'. This is neither the first thing named 'willy' to come out of Britain, as their first-ever tank was named 'Big Willy', nor is it the only place in the UK named after a breast, as that list includes other hills and even ' Manchester '. The name in Cornish for the hill in question today is 'Bronn Wennili' (effectively "hill of swallows"), however people tend to change words foreign to them into something more familiar lexically (bronn --> brown), or phonetically (wennili --> willy), both of which happen to be demonstrated here. To see some hypothetical Word Facts, visit  Patreon.com/wordfacts . Check out the latest Youtube video too:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqYX2heE0T0

Anyone can be misquoted posthumously of course, but it is quite rampant regarding those of political figures and other famous people throughout history. There are many reasons for this, ranging from relatively innocent general ignorance, or it can have certain political effects. However, there is a point when it might enter the general populous, after a real quote was attributed to the wrong person, or it was entirely fabricated, when the term 'Churchillian Drift' may be applied, so named after so many false quotes were attributed to Winston Churchill. An example of Churchillian Drift is that there is little evidence to suggest that Mark Twain said "golf is a good walk spoiled", since the first known record of anyone saying it was some 38 years after he died. To see some hypothetical Word Facts, visit  Patreon.com/wordfacts . Check out the latest Youtube video too:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqYX2heE0T0

English lacks a lot of the semantic variety that pronouns in Spanish have. To start, English has neither a distinction for formal pronouns nor second person plural, both of which are present in Spanish, but there are still many more facets which neither language have. Clusivity is a feature of language in which something can either be inclusive (of interlocutors, tense etc) or exclusive. For instance, 'we' is both inclusive and exclusive, but it has the ability to include everyone—either literally each human, or just a speaker, addressee, and third person—or it can exclude the addressee, such as in "we like you" where 'we' does not include the listener. Other languages include this distinction, and will have three first-person pronouns, which may be wholly distinct pronouns, or sometimes will coincide with the informal and formal forms for the first person. To see some hypothetical Word Facts, visit  Patreon.com/wordfacts . Check out the latest Youtube video

Arguably, English has more words that any other language, though this is not to say that English speakers use more distinct words than other peoples. A common, though overstated, reason for this is that there are so many loan words, and words of foreign origin, but this only goes so far. For instance, the fact that English has an abundance of both Germanic and Romantic vocabulary might explain why there are 'big' and 'large' (which when originally adopted from French meant 'wide; long'), but this does not account for 'small' and 'little' (and questionably 'tiny') which are Germanic. To see some hypothetical Word Facts, visit Patreon.com/wordfacts . Check out the latest Youtube video too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqYX2heE0T0

All languages are from humans, but one was retrieved from a parrot. Alexander von Humboldt, known for many things including his work with electricity also spent a great deal of time in South America, as well as documenting native groups from the Amazon . There was one tribe which was said to have been eaten by Caribs (cannibals) but there was a parrot that survived. Humboldt went with someone who spoke, Maipures, a similar language to the extinct Atures and learned around 40 words from the parrot. Along with the Maipures speaker, he was able to reconstruct a small amount of the language. To see some hypothetical Word Facts, visit Patreon.com/wordfacts . Check out the latest Youtube video too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqYX2heE0T0

What separates creoles and pidgins from whole languages with heavy influence from other languages? Some languages are very pure in their grammar and vocabulary, such as Icelandic which stays incredibly true to its Germanic roots, and other languages take elements from all over, such as Haitian Creole, which uses French as the lexifier language (i.e. where it gets its vocabulary) but with a lot of influence from West African languages. However, what separates a language like Haitian Creole from a non-creole language like Yiddish, is that while Yiddish has a lot of influence from Hebrew and Slavic languages in its vocabulary, phonology, and morphonology (which includes affixes and things like that) but its core vocabulary is Germanic, and so is the grammar. This definition has historically raised a lot of questions about English . To see some hypothetical Word Facts, visit Patreon.com/wordfacts . Check out the latest Youtube video too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqYX2h

The question for today: how do you verb a noun? Well as any native English speaker should realize, that is merely a rhetorical question, but it is still an interesting and perhaps entertaining notion. Unlike in Salish , because English syntax relies almost exclusively upon word-order, placing any word, including a noun, adjective, or even preposition in the position of a verb, it will become a verb. What this leads to is a sort of test to see if something is one word or multiple. As you can see in the attached photo, "social justice warrior" (so long as you can overlook the hyphen-misuse) is used as one verb, even though it appears as three words. However, because of the social and linguistic connotations, it has now developed meaning as one word (usually a noun, though here a verb). To see some hypothetical Word Facts, visit  Patreon.com/wordfacts . Check out the latest Youtube video too:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqYX2heE0T0

Shakespeare is often lauded for his immense vocabulary in his literature, but does this matter? In a previous post from Word Facts, it was discussed how many rappers would have equivalent or even larger lexicons than Shakespeare [1], even if they aren't thought of that was necessarily, but an important followup-question to that is: so what?. Reportedly, an average issue of The Sun—which for the sake of this post will be assumed to be considered lowbrow—contains roughly 6000 words per issue (this does not include repeated words). For reference, the both immensely longer and more academically renowned The King James Bible contains roughly 8000, though it is regarded as incredibly well-crafted and prestigious. People make this same point about US Presidents, stating how Wilson used around 1000 words in his addresses whereas those of George W. Bush could have around a mere 250, but as is hopefully clear from the first example, the number of distinct words really has no correlation wit

"I before E except after C..." is not only prescriptive and irrelevant, because English spelling is particularly arbitrary, but also usually wrong. There are in fact more exceptions to the rule than words which conform to the rule, in fact, there are 21 times as many words where "I before E except after C" is broken than those that conform. Reportedly, there are 923 words where this is the exception, including 'species' and 'weird'. Even extending the rule "...except when it says [ei] like in 'neighbour' and 'weigh' ", the rule is very much in the minority of relevant words. Indeed, this has recently stopped having been taught at schools, but for a very long time this was the norm in lower education. To see some hypothetical Word Facts, visit Patreon.com/wordfacts . Check out the latest Youtube video too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqYX2heE0T0

In Ireland, the Garda reported a criminal with a long list of speeding-tickets and parking-fines from all over the country, but each time it was under a different address. There was nothing else on his rap sheet, so this raised a lot of red flags about the need for false-identities. Prawo Jazdy was in the system for more than 50 offences, until someone pointed out that 'prawo jazdy' means driving license in Polish. This was a big embarrassment for the Irish police, but the Polish residents reportedly found this very amusing.

Those translating The King James Bible (KJV) weren't familiar with Koine Greek: the language it was written in; at the time people didn't know it existed. This may sound impossible: how do people translate from a language which is unknown? Well, it is not as if the translators for the KJV were only familiar in English (or even ecclesiastical Latin ) and translated from no background, but at the time, people believed that Koine (common) Greek, as what they were all familiar with: Classical Greek. In fact, up until more scrolls and other documentation was found, it was thought that the Greek used in the New Testament was unique, and moreover a divinely-inspired dialect. This was proved false in the 17th and 18th century by the existence of thousands of items in Koine Greek, mostly on papyrus. So while the translation is one of the most-trusted, it was beyond the grasp of the translators, and should—more than most translations of other things—be taken with more considera

People often talk of double entendres ( except the French who don't use this French phrase ). This only means that a word or phrase has two meanings but it isn't too difficult to find words with three or more meanings. For instance, the Yiddish song "Bei mir, bisti sheyn" (בײַ מיר ביסטו שײן) is easily translated into German "Bei mir bist du schön" but notoriously hard to translate into English. Though it is usually written "to me you are beautiful", "bei mir" means all of "to me", "by me" (i.e. "beside/near me"), and also "compared to me". While the final meaning-option is least likely given the context it is still a consideration. This makes the phrase "bei mir" a triple entendre. If you can you think of other triple or quadruple entendre, in any language, write it in a comment. To see some hypothetical Word Facts, visit Patreon.com/wordfacts . Check out the latest Youtube video to

There is no harm in seeing that words can have multiple and even conflicting meanings [1], though there are some words for which a misunderstanding can lead to communicational problems with deep social and cognitive effects. The word 'proof' for instance has the sense of sounding as if it means something has been confirmed as a fact. Indeed, often this is the way in which the word is used, but as is evidenced (proven?) with the statement and expression "the exception that proves the rule", if 'prove' meant "confirm as factual" then the statement would not make sense, as exceptions make rules invalid. Instead, what 'prove' means 'to test'. To say this is all it means though would be prescriptivist; due to past misunderstanding and misinterpretation, the word has gained a more objective sense of sounding infallible, and this may lead people to be critical of the uncertainty of proof. At this point however, all one can do is to be mind

Turkish and Finnish agglutination were brought up in the latest the latest Word facts video , but no example was given. In the video it showed how Germanic languages allows for compounding of terms within a single lexical class (e.g having strings of nouns acting together as one word) and polysynthetic languages can attach affixes to indicate meaning that connotes ideas that would belong to multiple lexical classes, but synthetic languages are somewhere in the middle. Turkish, for instance, can pack a lot of information into one word very similarly to polysynthetic languages. As you can see in the chart below, shows that affixes, particularly suffixes (and then infixes) can be added to one word in order to indicate meaning which in English would have to involve prepositions (which is also true of less agglutinative languages like Latin), verbs, and adjectives. There are still more limitations to this than in, say, Greenlandic (Kalaallisut), but are still more produc

To see effect of time and culture on language, loot how one root develops in two languages; this is best exhibited with English's 'black' and French's 'blanc' (white)  coming from the same origin . Less directly than that, though still notably, the Germanic 'klammjan' lead to the Modern German 'verklemmen' meaning 'to jam/press', the Yiddish 'farklempt' (ווערקלעמפּט) meaning 'grieving' (although in Jewish English it only means 'emotional'), and the English 'clam'. All of these go back to a root that meant 'block', but were taken different ways. The original meaning was probably closest kept in German, but in English it was applied to an animal with a tightly shut shell. The meaning in Yiddish, however, emphasizes the emotional side to this word, and it is by no means the only one; other terms in English such as 'choked up', or indeed 'clam up' convey the sense of having a sort of emo

A contronym (also contranym) is a word that has two opposite definitions, and there are two main reasons how these come to be. Sometimes this is due etymology; the word 'cleave' means to split apart—leading to the knife, 'cleaver' and also 'cleavage' (via geology)—but also it means 'to stick together'. They both have different participles 'cleaved and 'clove' respectively, and come from different words in Old English: 'clēofan' and 'cleofian' respectively. In the case of 'inflammable' and ' unlockable ', this comes down to morphology; 'inflamable' can mean "not able to be flammable' or "able to be inflamed" and depends upon which affix would be added first. If you know other contronyms, write it in the comments. To see some hypothetical Word Facts, visit Patreon.com/wordfacts . Check out the latest Youtube video too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqYX2heE0T0

Whats the difference between: "The man, who I met earlier, is funny... The man—who I met earlier—is funny... The man (who I met earlier) is funny" ? In effect: nothing really. All of these have examples of a nonrestrictive clause, meaning that it is modifying clause nonessential to the rest. The difference is that commas are used to separate many types of clauses, including generally main clauses from subordinate clauses. However, m-dashes also are used for this, though more specifically for parenthetical clauses when the information can be thought to interrupt the rest of the speech, and moreover, parentheses are used for—obviously—parenthetical clauses. Since the sentence cannot be rearranged to be "the man is funny who I met earlier" because that sounds odd, so the parentheses aren't as jarringly parenthetical as they could be, but there is some overlap in usages. There will, however, be editorial preferences when writing. Check out

It is hard to judge the two most similar pairs of sounds in English. Looking at the place of articulation for sounds, it could appear that [p]/[b] is a lot closer to [t]/[d] than [k]/[g], with the former two being pronounced at the front of the mouth (lips and teeth respectively) and the latter produced towards the back, but there is a higher frequency of  eggcorns  produced from confusions over the sounds [t] and [k] than with [p]. This can be evidenced with ' buck naked ' being misheard as 'butt naked'. Make sure to watch the video out tomorrow: What's a word? on the Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNofHfYEoM2l7fu2340gsDQ

Spelling is not a motivator for major linguistic change, but does contribute to some phonetic variation. This is clearly evidenced by the fact that English spelling no longer matches up with pronunciation, but neither do are English speakers known for bending over backwards, so to speak, in order to accommodate for the pronunciation of foreign words. For instance, the Catalan word 'paella' is pronounced /pajejə/ in US English (and Spanish and Catalan), whereas in the UK it is produced as [pajelə]; this however does not make speakers in the UK 'wrong', that is unless they try to use it in Spanish or Catalan that way, because words change when they enter another language. This of course also happens both ways, with English loan words changing to accommodate for other languages' phonetic rules or normalities, such as how 'merry christmas' changes in Hawaiian , or how the country 'Kiribati' (pronounced /kiribas/) comes from the name 'Gilberts'.

Yesterday it was discussed how Salish does not distinguish between nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs . Salish does have the actual lexical classes—although nothing is impossible—there are not the same contextual limitations like in every other known language. What this means is not that the language relies on guessing, but for instance there is no distinction between transitive and intransitive verbs, every element of those four categories can take verbal suffixes, nominal suffixes etc., and no contexts in which one word from those categories cannot be placed, for examples. This is not true of all dialects of Salish though, as for instance there is evidence to suggest that Klallam Straits Salish distinguishes between verbs and adjectives in the predicate, but this still acts as enough of an argument against Chomsky's notion that all languages have nouns and verbs.

The word 'back' is an adjective, verb, and noun; this sort of productivity is not possible in all languages, but even English has limitations. The uses of 'back' depend upon linguistic context, and that can be given in merely one other word; to make it a noun, add a determiner (e.g. 'the back'), for a verb, add a determiner phrase (e.g. 'I back [the company]), and for an adjective: a noun (e.g. 'back pain'). However, this means, this means that there are contexts in which back cannot exist. For instance, back cannot follow a preposition like "in back" (though "out back" is a phrase on its own), nor can 'back' be a noun and follow determiner phrase, although this is true throughout all of English and should not be terribly special. One could argue that this is only because word-order is so foundational to English grammar, but languages with more inflection tend to have less of this kind of productivity anyway. There is

English doesn't have a 4th person for verbs , and indeed most languages don't. However, it is with the 4th person that Greenlandic (Kalaallisut) distinguished between when a third person object of a third person subject (e.g. 'him' in "he loves him") is referential or not. Instead, English uses 'himself' and 'him' to show when one is referential and the other is not. Therefore, any direct object pronoun of a third person subject will refer to another person; in “Brian loves him”, ‘him’ can only refers to someone else, always. Where this gets tricky in English but wouldn't necessarily in Greenlandic is when there are multiple clauses, e.g. "Brian said that she loves him" where 'him' could refer to anyone except for the 'she' in question, because even though 'himself' exists, it cannot appear here *"Brian said that she loves himself". These are rules which any English speaker knows without being awa

Looking at other, related languages' evolutions can offer great insight into their history; indeed, this is why so little is known about Basque, which has no known relatives . However, there is a lot to see with the history of Germanic languages. For instance the prefix 'ver-' in German 'vergessen' ('forget') or Dutch 'verliezen' ('lose'), the English 'for-' as in 'forgive' or indeed 'forget' and even the Yiddish 'ver-'/far-' depending upon how it is written in the Latin script, or '- ווער' when it is written in Assyrian letters , as in 'farklemt' (both emotionally 'depressed' and physically 'pressed') all come from the same origin. The root for all of these had the effect of adding intensive force, semantically speaking, in the same way that 're-' does in ' remember '. Nevertheless, in all four languages 'ver-'/'far-'/for-' gained a negati

In Appalachian English, people do not say 'climbed' and 'had climbed' but will opt instead for 'clamb' and 'clumb'. This word belongs in strong verb class 3, which you can learn about more in the most recent Word Facts video . However, this fact is not just something fun to say at parties, but also helps to understand an etymology which more people are probably familiar with today: clamber. The word 'clamber' is thought to ultimately derive from 'climb', but the reason that the word in question is not 'climber' is that it comes from 'clamb'. "Why did it come from a participle?" you might ask: no one knows; linguistic innovation is not always logical, whether that is in minority dialects or standard forms .

The auxiliary verbs 'have' and 'do' ( which is extremely rare outside of a few languages, having been borrowed from Cornish ) have similar functions on the surface, but are extremely different. The difference between "I did [verb]" and "I had [verb]" is that while both 'do' and 'have' are often used to indicate past action instead of (or in addition to) conjugating the main verb, they show different grammatical aspects. Simply put, 'do' is for when the action is continuous or perhaps habitual "I did run" which is the imperfect aspect whereas 'have' only refers to that which has (had) an end, "I had run", which is the perfect aspect. This all becomes trickier considering the present tense  "I have run" is the present tense but takes place in the past, and "I do run" is clunky; most people opt for simply 'I run' and only use 'do' for the negative form, or for emphas