Word Facts

Looking at old map of the Americas, Spanish speaking colonists originally believed California (including Baja California) was an island, after sailing up only part of the Gulf of California. For a very long time, this was the accepted geography, and while there are certainly interesting cartographical ramifications, that is for another blog. What is relevant is that because it was considered to be an island by the Spanish, and the name 'California' was given based on a fantasy-island in the popular romance novel "Las Sergas de Esplandián'. In the island in the novel, the island was one east of Asia, and populated by black women, similar to the Amazons in this mythology way. This was not the case of course, but the name stuck. Make sure to check out the new video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTKKSf35LSE&t=10s and support Word Facts on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/wordfacts

In this third and final post in this short series about oligosynthetic languages, which you can see more about in the link . All Oligosynthetic languages classified as such are all invented languages, generally with the idea of simplicity in mind. A few examples of these include Ygyde, Sona, and Newspeak. Toki pona is a language developed with only 120 words, though now an additional 3 have been added. This language relies on a great deal of inferences, context, but also compounding such that a word like 'coffee' might appear as something equivalent to 'hot brown liquid'. This language however was created not in order to be for complicated communication, but for easy-to-learn language for business and other activities like that. Make sure to check out the new video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTKKSf35LSE&t=10s

It was discussed yesterday how the highly, even unrealistically minimalistic variety of languages known as ' oligosynthetic ' could probably not exist in natural languages, but there was a time when some thought otherwise. Languages including Nahuatl, spoken by the Aztecs and their descendants, as well as Blackfoot, also known as Siksiká, have at one time or another been claimed to be oligosynthetic in some way or another. These ideas are now discredited, and these languages, like most in the Americas, are considered to be polysynthetic . Polysynthetic language may appear from first glance to be opposite to oligosynthetic languages, given that they have extremely complex morphosyntactic systems, but actually both rely on a level of compounding which would put German or Turkish to shame. Examples of what could be considered oligosynthetic languages will be the topic for tomorrow.

Depending upon how much information can be added to words in a given language morphologically, for example with verbal suffixes that show the information about the subject such as in Spanish, a language is places on a scale; if a language is analytic then there is little morphology, and the most a language can be is polysynthetic . However, there is one group which uses even less morphology, but these only exist in made up languages. A so called oligosynthetic language is one with very few morphemes whatsoever, but it is necessary to point out that this also includes words, as well as affixes and anything else, so a language like Mandarin , with almost no affixes is still not oligosynthetic because it has many words that exist on their own. Oligosynthetic languages are therefore considered to be only theoretically possible, and would require a level of compounding which is not necessarily practical for day-to-day usage, as this might amount to even more combination than using a polysyn

While a few places, by historical coincidence, have many exonyms (i.e. what a place is called by other peoples) when the differences are very stark, as with ' Germany ', Deutschland', 'Allemagne' and 'Niemcy' all referring to the same place in different languages, there are usually historical reasons. Another example is that the Finnish name for 'Sweden' is 'Ruotsi', but rather than being from Finnish, as you might imagine would be the cause for this difference, it actually just derives from another (Old) Swedish word. 'Ruotsi' comes from 'roþs-' which related to rowing, and even in Old Norse the area was called 'Roþrslandi', which means 'land of rowers', relating to the Vikings. Moreover, this 'roþs-' is where 'Rus'—the base for 'Russia'—derives, which is consistent with the history of many early slavic states being controlled Germanic raiders. While the history of a region is usually

Although they may look similar, the cap that the pop and other cardinals wear, called a pileolus is not related to the Jewish kippah, but etymologically it is related to a zucchini (though not courgette). The other name for a pileolus is a 'zuchetto', making both it and 'zucchini' a diminutive of the Italian word 'zucca' meaning 'gourd'. The name, effectively 'little gourd', is given to the cap, but it really means comes from the meaning 'head' which is similar to the American use of 'gourd' in "he's out of his gourd" (i.e. "crazy; intoxicated". Make sure also to check out Word Facts' analysis of Arrival: https://stonewordfacts.blogspot.com/2018/06/the-linguistics-in-arrival.html

Slang has turned the noun 'goals' into an adjective. If you've missed this in the last couple of years, people have been using the word 'goals' in structures only fit for adjectives. In the photo below "her British accent is goals af", 'goals' is a predicate adjective (i.e. it follows the linking verb 'to be'. Notably, while someone can say 'her...accent is goals' or theoretically 'her accent is pretty', there is not the option to say the 'goals accent' in the same way as 'the pretty accent', at least for the time being. Moreover though, it precedes 'af' [as fuck] which is only possible for descriptors. It is also notable that while 'goals' is plural when a noun, as an adjective it has no grammatical number. This is the fourth segment on Word Facts entitled Linguistics in the Wild (LITW), and you can see the rest here .

There are many words which have evolved over time to mean something completely opposite, and while in contronyms  like 'peruse'—which meant to read thoroughly and now means to skim—are not very important, some are. One such word is ' aryan ', discussed here before, but one with less baggage though still relevant is 'liberal'. The original sense of the word is still preserved in 'libertarian', and espoused the notion that all people are free to have their own ideas and opinions in spite of external conditions, which merely influence the individual. Indeed, many derivatives of the Latin 'liber' relate to individualism, however today the idea of 'a liberal' tends to evoke ideas of someone socially leftist, who would believe that there are systems in place which necessarily influence action and thought, whereas libertarians and others on the right are no longer called 'liberals', but use liberal ideas in the traditional sense.

There are many old theories about sites in Africa having built by European travellers rather than natives which are Eurocentric and racist, so the idea that a Hungarian man by the name of László Almásy discovered a lost Hungarian tribe in Africa would seem to fit into this type, but actually it is thought to be true. The Magyarab tribe, the name of which is strikingly similar to Magyar is estimated to be descended from 16th century Hungarians who travelled to southern Egypt and Sudan when the Ottoman Empire controlled those lands, and some stayed, intermarrying with the Nubians. Genetic information, as well as many loan words, suggest that these people were in fact from central Europe, though today they speak Arabic. The name comes from 'Magyar' (Hungarian) and -Ab which is Nubian for 'tribe'. 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 content better: https://ww

There is a great deal of genetic evidence to suggest that Native Americans are related to East Asians, but there is also some controversial evidence linking certain groups linguistically. The Zuni language spoken in the Pueblo area is a linguistic isolate, like Basque , and it is not considered related to any other American language, and even though most American ones are polysynthetic (leading to extremely long words) opposite to the analytic nature of most East Asian languages [2], there are some notable linguistic similarities between Zuni and Japanese. The linguistic data on its own was not enough to convince many people, but there were later genetic studies that claimed to support such a link. However, much of the explanation for this relates to the debunked theory of the Altaic language family [3]. Check out the new Word Theory, out today: https://www.patreon.com/posts/19437219

Words have been added to dictionaries erroneously before, called ' ghost-words ', but sometimes fake words are included to be able to later prove if there has been copyright-infringement. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) describes 'esquivalience' as "the willful avoidance of one's official responsibilities", which is certainly a useful word, but it completely made up. Given that ultimately what dictionaries do is to describe the same words that every other one describes too, it can be tricky to catch when some company has stolen any entries, but both Dictionary.com and Google have had entries for 'esquivalience', indicating that they took, at least to some extent, from the OED, having fallen into their trap. 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 content better: https://www.patreon.com/wordfacts .

In English, the term "labor of love" is common enough to not sound abnormal, but this really is an odd phrase. However, the reason this is used is because it was taken straight out of a translation of the New Testament. If you don't believe that, look at the other lines in the same sentence: "work of faith" and "steadfastness of hope""; it sounds off. This phrase, however, would be normal in Koine Greek , which is the original language. This is because there is a level of vagueness in genitives  which relate to sources rather than actual possession, similar to the interchangeability between "bread made *from* flour" and "bread made *of* flour". In Koine Greek this is fine, and even in German wherein 'von' means both 'of and 'from' this is normal sounding enough, but often translations of the Bible will sound unnecessarily clunky for reasons like this, though perhaps even 'steadfastness from hope' wou

Pronouns, both personal (e.g. 'he' and 'you') and relative (e.g. 'that') are one of the last places where grammatical case may be found in English. Sometimes the distinction is simply subject-possessive-object such as 'I-mine-me' or 'who-whose-whom', but there is more to this. The fairly obscure and usually only literary or found in certain expressions 'hence; thence; whence' (meaning 'from where') and 'hither; thither; whither' (meaning 'to where'), which follows the same patter as 'here; there; where', are the best and possibly only cases where there is locative   displayed morphologically in English. Most of the time, speakers rely on prepositions like 'to' or 'from', and this is the case with the relative pronouns to in that most of the time people say 'to there' rather than 'thither', but it is still very occasionally used. Make sure to check out the new Word Facts Vide

Unlike French, which has the Académie Française to regular French, Hebrew did actually need a committee to figure out how certain terms would be used. This is because it was merely a literary language for over 1,600 years, and in that time, societies had developed new ideas and new objects which needed to be added to the language. The creator of Modern Hebrew, Ben-Yehuda [1], order the establishment of the Committee of the Hebrew Language with the specific goal of modernizing where necessary, but he insisted that the gaps be filled, both grammatically and lexically, following Semitic systems, often taking from Aramaic or usually Arabic in order to maintain a predominantly Semitic character. As a point of information, this is not the same reason why certain words changed from Biblical to Modern Hebrew, such as 'anochi' to 'ani' meaning the pronoun 'I'. Make sure also to check out Word Facts' analysis of Arrival: https://stonewordfacts.blogspot.com/2018/06/t

Parapraxis is another term for a Freudian slip, i.e. making a linguistic error which is subconsciously motivated (humorously: "when you say one thing and mean your mother"). There is a large debate going on between linguists and psychologists on this subject; in a classical psychoanalytic reading (though there are plenty of new theories) the erroneous replacement word is drawn in this assumedly systematic way from words which are related—in general—semantically, with much more emphasis placed upon the meaning of the slip that other factors such as how it sounds. A more strictly linguistic approach to this problem—forgetting for a moment the different takes within the neurolinguistic and psycholinguistic fields—would consider more factors, such as how a word sounds, and more to the point, how it is stressed. Think about how you may have experienced a word on the tip of your tongue (ToT), believing it started with one sound, and actually it began with a different sound, but

The headline "Sessions ‘Hate, Hate, Hates’ Kushner’s Prison Reform Plan, Pardon Push" makes use of what's called emphatic reduplication  regarding the word 'hate'. Moreover, because English has very little inflectional morphology, such as the '-s' ending on 3rd person verbs, in the childly question "Do you like him, or do you like like him", it is unclear whether the verb is being doubly conjugated, or indeed has no conjugation, as happens in small clauses . This headline, which uses the verb in the 3rd person, answers this question. Indeed, it shows not only is the verb only conjugated once, but that unlike in phrases like 'fancy-schmancy', with the verb, the original stays at the end, and not the beginning. This is the third part in a new segment called Linguistics in the Wild (LITW), and you can see the other 2 here: https://stonewordfacts.blogspot.com/search?q=LITW

Certain terms, such as 'language family' can often be vague; it is often unclear when it refers to groups of languages as specific as West Germanic of which there are around six, and others like Indo-European, which includes scores of languages. Another proposed large family of language-families was the now-discredited Altaic languages, including Turkic, Tungusic, and Mongolic families, as well as the disputed Koreanic, Japonic, and Ainu languages, thus covering most of central and northeastern Asia. The former three families are inarguably more similar to each other than to the others, but even so, people have claimed that the similarities are only due to geographic relation and cultural contact, rather than having common origins, citing the fact that earlier forms of all the languages are quite dissimilar. Even though the theory has virtually no support from linguists today, the theory is still often cited in writings about languages such as Turkish or Mongolian by non-ling

In English, there are no determiners which agree with proper nouns overtly; unlike nouns such as 'table', no words such as 'the' are necessary with names, so "Mike saw Ike" is fine, but one would need to include a determiner in "Mike saw the table". This is discussed in one of the Word Facts Video . However, in some languages such as Greek, this is necessary, such as in the transliterated: Irthe o Pavlos kai o Giannis sto wherein 'o' in front of "o Pavlos" and "o Giannis" literally means "the Pavlos [Paul]" and "the Giannis [John]". Other features like this have historically made certain translations clunkier and less colloquial than necessary, though for some contexts such as religion, this may be desired.

Children have an astounding ability to learn languages. Not only are they better at discerning between sounds in a way those over the age of around 5 can, their neuroplasticity allows them to learn—theoretically—as many languages as they are exposed to. This period of around 4 to 6 years is known as the Critical Period, and though it affects most areas of learning, it has been found that as one ages, languages are not stored in the brain in the same way, and that one's first languages will often be linked to emotions, whereas the languages one learns later, especially well into adulthood, tend to rely on following systems and logic. Of course, this is somewhat of a generalization, but you can certainly expect that should one curse in pain , that will likely be in her first language. Make sure also to check out Word Facts' analysis of Arrival: https://stonewordfacts.blogspot.com/2018/06/the-linguistics-in-arrival.html

As was discussed during Gender Week , the assigning of gender to nouns usually is just an extension of the words for what determiners and adjectives agree with the words for 'man', 'woman', and possibly other objects, but these often get even more specific. For instance, many languages have specific pronouns and gendered declensions for water and other aquatic things, or commonly food. Pirahã has, essentially, 3 pronouns which translate into English as 'it'; one for animate non-human non-aquatic things, one for animate non-human aquatic things, and one for inanimate things. While grammatical gender tends to be framed in terms of nouns, (and adjectives and determiners), or in verbs Afro-Asiatic languages, the main focus in non-linguist English speakers is pronouns, but looking at other languages, there is an incredible amount of variability.

Although there are ways to predict the stress on a syllable from phonology, a lot of that process also comes from the conventions of the language itself. In a 3-syllable hypothetical word that existed in Finnish, French, and Hebrew, it is extremely likely that the stress would be on the first, second, and third syllable respectively, because this is how those languages place stress in a polysyllabic word most of the time. In fact, this is less predictable in English, but because it is often the case that the words from Old English are stressed on the first syllable today, whereas those deriving from Old French or Latin will be stressed on the second syllable. The reasons why a language will have this stress-pattern is not exactly clear.

There are a lot of affixes in English which are able to attach them selves to a lot of words, but some are less productive . For instance, the suffix '-ous' can affix itself to words like 'danger' or 'courage', but this is not always where it will be present. In this situation, it is a suffix, but many if not most of the word where it is found cannot be parsed because those words were adopted wholesale from French (mostly Old French), and Latin, such as 'horrendous', 'enormous', or 'tremendous'. Make sure also to check out Word Facts' video which came out today about the film Arrival: https://stonewordfacts.blogspot.com/2018/06/the-linguistics-in-arrival.html

There is a rumour " 'rhythm' is the longest English word without a vowel" and disregarding the 'y', it does show the way that English-spellers view vowels. 'Rhythm' is two syllables not one, so assuming the 'y' represents the sound [ɪ], there would seem to still need to be another vowel somewhere in pronunciation to make the middle of the second vowel . This comes down to what is called ' syllabic consonants ', and this can be thought of like the [ə] in words like 'the' or 'gum' (sort of). However, in words like 'rhythm' and 'column' the vowel is even shorter and less prominent, such that it it thought of as only being a byproduct of moving from one consonant to the next while still breathing out. So, while the number of syllables doesn't change, there is some truth in saying there are fewer-than-expected vowels, though certainly not zero.

There are many languages which derive the majority of the grammar from one language, and possibly the vocabulary from it too, but have many influences from other languages, but are not quite as mixed as creoles. These are fusion languages, and these include Germanic languages of English and Yiddish, among many others, the former containing many words and affixes from French Latin and Greek, and the latter having influences from Hebrew, Aramaic, Polish, Russian. Other languages like Icelandic and Hebrew have relatively little influence from outside sources. Check out some hypothetical Word Facts, visit Patreon.com/wordfacts . and to see the latest Youtube video: https://youtu.be/tY6_zs7-k5I

While it has been discussed on this blog before than no concept is truly untranslatable , there are certain phrases which will not have the same sort of significance in one language as it will in another. Words in this group include 'apartheid', which directly translates to 'separation' (lit. 'apartness')  or 'shoa' which is Hebrew for 'catastrophe' but is a common synonym alongside 'holocaust' found in English. There are more lighthearted ones too such as names for holidays, like 'Ramadan', which here comes from a word meaning 'be hot' but obviously has a lot more meaning than 'be hot' conveys in English. This is all the case because those terms have value in a way that does not carry over, and so even though the translation for those words is not possible in order to capture the full gravity, they can always be adopted.

Participles are one of the most versatile lexical classes in English, and can contribute to or act as nouns, verbs, adverbs, adjectives, and prepositions. Words like 'running' in 'running is fun' for this reason are even sometimes called verbal nouns because grammatically it acts like a noun, but could be replaced with 'to run'. Moreover, because of their adjunct-like qualities, they can act as adjectives such as in 'the running man' and combine with nouns to form compounds like 'groundbreaking' or in the case of KFC "finger-lickin'". Some, as mentioned before, can act like prepositions; this happens when the relative pronoun is omitted from a relative clause, such as "the box containing (i.e 'with') the supplies" as an alternative to "...which is containing" or "which contains" To see some hypothetical Word Facts, visit Patreon.com/wordfacts . Check out the latest Youtube video: https://

There are two reason that while more than twice as many people speak Russian natively than French (254M to 118M), and likewise there are more than double the number of Chinese speakers—when including all dialects —to native English ones (1.4B to 547M) as of 2015, both English and French are considered more international than Russian and Chinese respectively. Of course there is nuance to this, Arabic, Russian, Hindi-Urdu and Chinese and to a lesser extend Spanish are lingua franca over large regions but not so global as English. This is changing as certain economies grow, but the fact that English and French are still official languages somewhere on 6 continents makes it more global, and will more often be the common denominator, so to speak. Moreover, although Chinese dialects may be a more common first language, English is still the most-commonly taught second language in the world, and French, particularly in Africa and Southeast Asia, is close behind. To see some hypothetical Wo

Historical reasons for picking a national language have been discussed here before, but there are also other dimensions which former colonies had to grapple with. Some former colonies chose to stick to the language of the past colonial power, as with Nigeria or India, because there were so many languages spoken that it acts as a lingua franca; this is similar in Malaysia where, though the majority speak Malaysian, the government did not want the Malay to be unequally powerful, and all three countries use English. In other countries, such as Indonesia, having a distinct national language was deemed necessary in order to promote national unity against foreign powers, even though at least hundreds of languages are spoken there. Some countries opt for no official language, and will allow for more regionalism, or will use a de facto national language, such as is the case with the US. Check out the video released today: https://youtu.be/tY6_zs7-k5I

The Basque language is mysterious in that no one knows its origins, and it has no relatives, but this is true of the genes of the native speakers. Studies of the DNA of Basque people show that they likely predated any other native Europeans, with signs that they mixed heavily with Neanderthal. Where this crosses over linguistically is that it was observed that there is a word family of terms deriving for the word for 'stone' that relate to different tools, leading linguists to theorize that this feature of Basque dates back to the the Stone Age. This is now very contested, but the so-called aizkora controversy which states that words including the following all go back to the word 'haitz' (stone) for prehistoric culture: (h)aizkora (axe) (h)aitzur (shears) (h)aitzur (hoe) aizto (knife) (h)aiztur (tongs) Word Facts' Podcast, only for Patreon patrons, came out today, so why not support Word Facts and get even more?: https://www.patreon.com/w

There are two types of compounds that are found in English. The first are the most common, and also they are the easiest to create on the spot. Synthetic compounds are words made up of the meaning of the sum of their elements, such as 'bookshelf' which is a shelf for books, or even German's famous rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz which is just a string of nouns (beef labelling regulation and supervision law). On the other hand, idiomatic compounds are made up of parts which only make sense as a whole, such as 'butterfly' [1]. This is similar to how idiomatic sentences like "it's raining cats and dogs' only make sense when looked at as a whole.