Word Facts

While languages have many exception to any convention or rule, ultimately they are systematic. In the video " How Writing Began ", it was discussed that despite all of the many ways writing appears, it is always going to be systematic; only 1 language on earth is known to use some sort of synergy . There is one book however, the Voynich manuscript, that is written in an unknown language that looks to use Latin letters with a few unknown ones as well. No one knows what it says or even what language it would have been from. Many people thought the person who discovered it had fabricated a book, but carbon dating proved it to be real, or at least if it were a scam, the person who discovered it wouldn't have known for sure. The tricky thing about that too is that it is systematic, with endings and other letter-combinations showing up regularly together. Some people have taken this to mean it is its own language, while others believe it is a code, but no language is completely...

Contronyms certainly do exist, when a word is its own opposite, like 'inflammable', but there are also words that have negating prefixes and mean the same thing, again like 'flammable' and 'inflammable', which can—though not necessarily will—mean the same thing. A common misconception is that 'invaluable' is synonymous with 'valuable', but this is not really true. Given that 'invaluable' means that it is so indispensable as to make it impossible to put a value or price on it, it is more precious than something merely valuable. In this way, while 'inflammable' and 'flammable' can synonymous or antonymous, 'invaluable' and 'valuable' are never truly synonymous, though neither are they totally opposite. For more Linguistics in the Wild, see this: https://stonewordfacts.blogspot.com/search?q=LITW

In a dictionary, it will list the forms of 'grind' including the participle 'ground' and "(rare) grinded". Some spell-checking programs will even count 'grinded' as a misspelling, but this is becoming less accurate. 'Ground is still used dominantly for most grammatical objects, but in newer usages of the word the preferred participle is 'grinded'. This tends to crop up when the subject matter is about dancing, sex, or relating to marijuana, for which any form of 'grind' is fairly new. This could be because people don't care about traditional grammar, or because they are consciously trying to distinguish the two.

Some countries have stricter laws concerning given names than others, and arguably, some of the strictest may be in Scandinavia. In Sweden, names have to be approved if parents wish to buck certain traditional names, or use alternative spellings. Moreover there are tens of thousands of surnames reserved for royals, and no one else is allowed to have these. These have even led people to go to court, such as when parents sued for not being allowed to spell 'Albin' as 'Brfxxccxxmnpcccclllmmnprxvclmnckssqlbb11116' or later 'A', though obviously these people weren't doing this for the name, but as a protest of the rules. However, in Iceland it may be stricter, since there are only 1,700 approved names for boys and 1,800 for girls, and the surname must be a parent's first name plus '-son' or '-dottir' for sons and daughters. Check out the newest Word facts Video: https://youtu.be/dntJLHmkfhw , and give your support on Patreon: https://www...

In German, the suffix '-lein' such as in 'Fräulein' is a diminutive suffix. There are some distant relatives of this in English, but clearer traces of it can be found in given names. For instance, 'Emmeline' uses this suffix on a word that originally meant 'work', so it should be clarified that diminutive doesn't always directly translate to 'little' and does have an emotional component as well. However, not all names with '-line' come from this. 'Caroline', which is the French diminutive of 'Charles' has a similar—though not identical suffix—but Madeline (spelt many different ways) comes from '(Mary) Magdalene', such that what looks like a suffix is built into the name, as is likewise the case for 'Evangeline'.

As mentioned the other day , 'like' as a preposition or a conjunction is a bit of a Germanic anomaly, but in some ways so is 'as'. While 'like' is pretty much on its own in terms of linguistic relatives, 'as' is related to the Dutch and German 'als', however, the context in which all three are used is very different for the most part. In German, 'als' can mean 'as', but would normally translate as 'than', and would be able to introduce comparative relative clauses in a way that 'as' usually does not, and in Dutch it functions mostly the same as German, though not completely. In this case—as would probably be imagined—German is more traditionally Germanic than English, as 'as' relates to 'also' and used to be able to introduce more clauses than it can now, or if you will, "it introduced more clauses as [it is able to] now". Moreover, 'similar' also has a shared root to 'as...

There's a pretty obvious link between the English 'arm' and the word 'army', but in German, French, and Russian—all belonging to different language families—the words are also very similar to the English. The words 'armee', 'armée' and 'армия (armiya)' respectively are clearly related to the English word 'army', but only German has a word that is also related to the body part 'arm' ("Der Arm"). This might seem to suggest that French and Russian—if not other Romantic or Slavic languages—borrowed their word from some Germanic language, but 'army' in this case comes from Latin, where it originated from 'arma' which meant 'tools' but lead to the verb 'armare' meaning 'to arm'. It is only a coincidence that French and Russian took other words for 'arm' and did not use the same Info-European root. Coincidentally, 'armoire' and 'amber' also come from this root,...

In English, like is a preposition and conjunction having the same meaning as 'as', but this is not usual either for West Germanic languages or even English historically itself. The use of 'like' as a conjunction has been around since the 15th century, in the early days of Modern English. Still, many prescriptivists consider it to be incorrect. Even looking at 'as', it is still different to most West Germanic languages which use 'wie' or something similar. 'As' is related to words meaning 'similar' whereas 'wie' is also the word for 'how' wherein there is an implied "how (something) is". Check out the newest Word facts Video: https://youtu.be/dntJLHmkfhw , and give your support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/wordfacts

Often, dictionary entries for etymology will either give a clear route by which a word was adopted and or adapted over time, or will say the origin is unknown. In a few cases, such as with the suffix '-ious', there are two; this is not to say it is contested in linguistic circles, but that it has two—albeit related—origins. Words with this suffix can either come from French, in which case the original word would have had the '-ieux' suffix, and words from Latin would have had '-iosus'. However, by mutual influence within the history of the English and French language made both of these sound the same, and have the exact same meaning as a adjective. However, while with works with some words like 'caution' becoming 'cautious', it is sometimes a moot point with words like 'facetious'. Check out the newest Word facts Video: https://youtu.be/dntJLHmkfhw , and give your support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/wordfacts

Writing developed independently in three places independently: Mesopotamia, Mesoamerica, and China, but only alphabets developed from the Sumerians. This process of continuous abstraction from images was described in the Word Facts Video released today, but part of the reason that the symbols look more abstracted was because they were turned 90º. The reason for this was that it was originally written up-to-down, but to avoid smudging the clay, it was shifted right-to-left. However, while the scribes found this easier, those who had learned to read up-to-down struggled with this, and so the scribes simply wrote the letters sideways, to that both parties could work more efficiently. Watch the rest here: https://youtu.be/dntJLHmkfhw

It is sometimes difficult to find accurate etymologies of new words and in particular slang terms; part of this is due to the fact that they are likely less studied by chance, but also many people will make up their own origins. Though not a word in the traditional sense, 420 is something for which people have ascribed many false origins, including that it related to a the police code for smoking marijuana, or that it was the number of strains etc.. The reason for the former and most prevalent faux-theory is that those who originated the term spread fliers through a few cities in Southern California as a way to get in touch with people to meet up and smoke gave that as the reasoning, but it goes back much further. In the early 1970's a group of high-schoolers would smoke after school at 4:20pm, and would use that term as a code to not get in trouble around other people.

Following off of yesterday's post , the principles that apply to the creation of new words also apply to companies. Traditionally, businesses were named after owners, or just say the name of the product with the name of the towns it was from, or another defining feature. When these stopped being so localized, the tendency was to shorten, either by abbreviating or initializing, or changing the name to something catchier, as to be more distinctive. As business shifted over to the internet and to apps, not only could fewer names be used, but shorter names that were easier to type were highly sought after to attract the most customers. Due in part to the scarcity of short names, and also to try to sound edgy, many startups would use variant spellings of ordinary words like Lyft™ from 'lift', or would simply make up words that were easy to remember. Context is significant in the history of names.

With any piece of language, especially when it comes choosing synonyms, carries with it certain connotations. Latin and Greek are the languages usually preferred for science, medicine, and academia; this is both to keep it from getting confused with workaday words, but also it is culturally accepted as having more gravity. Likewise, technological words have their own cultural influences, even though it is newer. The 'i-' prefix in names like 'iPod' does have meaning—it stands for 'Internet'—but having started in 1994, this practice now is used to denote anything with online capabilities built in. As much as any other practice historically, it is merely a quick way to convey that whatever the matter in question is, it should be compartmentalized in a certain way.

There are plenty of terms that now are used in everyday language but when broken down make no sense. One such term is 'scapegoat', given that 'scape' doesn't have any independent meaning, and 'goat' seems like it could be almost a random term here. However, like with ' ostracize ' the modern meaning can only be understood through history. In this case, in Leviticus it is described how a Jewish leader could banish a goat that had both literally and symbolically taken the sins of the people as a sort of replacement. Now, the idea of 'scapegoating' has less to do with sin, and relates more to blame for social or economic woes, but has ancient roots.

Often, looking at patterns in suffixes and pronunciation thereof can lead to insights about words' histories. For instance, it is often the case that nouns and verbs such as 'graduate' have the same ending when written but are pronounced consistently differently , but in the rare case when this is not possible and there is only a verb, like with 'create', there will be an adjective 'creative' with '-ive'. Coincidentally, the noun 'primate' seems to have a correlate with 'primitive', but aside from the slightly different spelling, this is not much more than historical luck, as neither is a direct derivative of the other. Instead, they simply both come from the Latin 'primus' meaning 'first'.

Generally, in English adjectives come before nouns, but there are exceptions, this is sometimes for pronouns , or simply specific adjectives like 'ago', but also this is sometimes from certain verbs. Linking verbs do this (e.g. 'funny' in 'the man is funny'), but other ones such as 'keep' or ones related to speech such as 'proclaimed' can allow for the adjective to follow, such as in 'the man keeps clean', or 'the psychiatrist proclaimed her patient sane', but 'he is a patient sane' on without the head verb doesn't make sense. If you have other examples, write a comment below.

Though generally not the most sinister, discrimination based on accent and or dialect is a large problem. Because there can to an association between race or ethnicity and manner of speaking, people transfer over negative views that they previously held, but because speech can be associated generally to gender, sexuality, age or class, the associations that lead to discrimination are inevitable. Moreover, it is a difficult issue to combat, as accents and dialects are hard to pin down in a specific way, and also because most of the reactions are involuntary, it is very difficult to prove on a case-by-case basis. Some people have proposed universal languages in the past to solve these types of problems, but as is evident with the increasing acceptance of English as the dominant global language, this could only ever go so far anyway.

All of the major writing systems began with images rather than letters. Even while there are a wide array of writing systems described here , all either originated from others or were originally abstracted from pictures. This was partly practical, since most writing was for simple commercial transactions , but also because the idea of representing words—which are already pretty abstract—by representing only the sounds with arbitrary symbols is not a quick logical step to make, as history has proven.

The following post comes from a fan question. The word in Latin for 'Ireland' is 'Hibernia', still seen today in the combining form ' Hiberno -', and the word 'Hibernianism' (an Irish idiom), but this is not related to the word 'hibernate', or any other term related to winter such as 'hibernal'. Both of those sets of words do come from Latin, and while Ireland may be cold, 'Hibernia' is not originally Romantic. Originally it is from Celtic—not Irish Gaelic—from the word for a goddess 'Ériu' but the word only entered Latin via Greek 'Iverna'. This, in turn, has led certain people to claim that the Irish descended from or were slaves of Greeks. Whether or not this is true, the Latin 'hibernus' ('winter') is ultimately of romantic origin, and only coincidentally sounds similar. However, many Latin writers and ethnographers made puns out of this similarity. Check out the latest video from Word Facts h...

In the Western world, writing tends to be from left-to-right first, and then up-to-down, but when writing originated, it was up-to-down then right-to-left. All of this was due to the medium however, and the switches are not random. When writing was just beginning, it was primarily for keeping inventories, and so was written in a typical list-format still used today, and because tools needed to be pressed into clay, early writers—if the word even applies—would use the typically dominant hand. However, later on, to avoid smudging, the letters were rotated and written right-to-left to that impressions would not be smudged before they dried. Later on again, the Greek alphabet and all its descendants began to write from left-to-right to avoid further smudges as most people write with the right hand. Check out the latest video from Word Facts here: https://youtu.be/3zz9Hf2KUbg

Following of yesterday's post , a necessary element of living languages is that they change. So while this poses a challenge for revival efforts, this is most often an issue for people interested in studying a language with few speakers and or little documentation. Famously this was a challenge for those studying Dyirbal , which within a generation changed to become unintelligible, and records needed to be almost entirely remade, but even in popularly learned languages, this can can be a challenge. Usually, unlike with Young Dyirbal, the grammar doesn't change significantly, but enough of lexicon may alter that someone learning off of old materials may come across as stilted.

One thing that separates Modern Hebrew from Cornish is that it changes. Like any second language learner will know, sometimes the textbook-version of a language will be technically correct but sound odd to native language speakers. This is because languages are constantly evolving, and the writers of language learning tools can both only work so fast, and want to try to follow patterns more closely than otherwise. When efforts to revive a language take place, one thing everyone involved must keep in mind is that the original form of the language should not be identical to what's being taught. This, in large part, is why even when languages like Cornish or Latin are taught to people—including children—they are still considered dead, but Hebrew is living; only a living language can evolve.

English speakers have no problem with impersonal pronouns like 'it' such as "it is raining" . While the word-order in most sentences with a predicate adjective (one after a form of 'to be') can be switched even if it sounded a bit peculiar or archaic to fit different syntactic structures, such as "a man is foolish who..." and "it is a foolish man who". This is not a hard rule however, because while many sentences demand an impersonal pronoun, just about any iteration of the above sentence is possible, such as in "foolish is the man who never reads a newspaper" (-August von Schlözer) though this may not be the most common.

One of the reasons oft cited for the maintenance of English's inconsistent orthography is history, and while this leads to clues of etymology that would otherwise be difficult to recognize, sometimes it is less helpful. For instance, the word 'merry' is related to the word 'mir th '. Think about the meaning this should seem reasonable, and moreover, 'merr y ' is an adjective with an adjectival suffix [1], and seeing a noun with a nominal suffix from the same root should make sense. However, the spelling is not indicative of this, making the confusing spelling in English have less significance perhaps.

There are many different ways to categorize verbs. There are head verbs, main verbs, infinitives, small verbs, etc, but sometimes even tricker to wrap one's head around is the difference between intransitive, transitive, and ditransitive verbs. The first cannot take a direct object, such as how nothing can be either 'smiled' or 'slept', and transitive verbs do have the ability to take one, sometimes necessarily for semantic reasons. Ditransitive are the rarest, and can take two direct objects such as 'gave' in "he gave the man the paper".

There are many different ways to categorize verbs. There are head verbs, main verbs, infinitives, small verbs, etc, but sometimes even tricker to wrap one's head around is the difference between intransitive, transitive, and ditransitive verbs. The first cannot take a direct object, such as how nothing can be either 'smiled' or 'slept', and transitive verbs do have the ability to take one, sometimes necessarily for semantic reasons. Ditransitive are the rarest, and can take two direct objects such as 'gave' in "he gave the man the paper".

The word 'synonym' can sometimes be misleading, as while words may mean the same as each other according to a dictionary, one will likely be more popular, or hold additional connotation for a slew of reasons . For instance, on paper, 'different from', different to' and 'different than' are all essentially the same, but in practice this is not the case. 'Different from' has traditionally been the most common and the most accepted, so while 'different to' may mean the same thing, its relative rarity—especially in America—makes it sound jarring to some. 'Different than' is growing in popularity in part by exposure, but also that it can more freely allow another clause to follow, and therefore lends itself better to a variety of sentences and structures.

Back in the days of Chaucer or Shakespeare, orthography represented the way that people spoke at the time far better than English writers do now, due to very old conventions that may seem too far along to change. Nevertheless, there is some modification even today. Words like ‘through’ an led ‘though’ are often spelt ‘thru’ and ‘tho’ respectively. Moreover, American spellings still differ someone from British ones to be slightly ore apt. Even words like ‘queensboro’ for the so-named bridge in Queens, NY uses ‘boro’ rather than ‘borough’, with seemingly extra letters.

We can say that Shakespeare had a great deal of influence on English, but this is not nearly as significant as the influence that other poets and writers have had on other languages, like on Estonian. The modern standard dialect was heavily influenced by a reformer, Johannes Aavik, in the 1880's who thought that the language needed to be more beautiful and added more vowels to some of the words. He also created a dictionary of Estonian and included many words that he made up from no other etymological background than his own imagination. These words, even as common as 'naasma' ('to return') and 'ese' ('object') are still now widely used. For more on this, visit this link .

There are lots of fairly obscure words used to describe animals, including scientific names, terms of venery , or even meat-names sometimes. ‘Swine’ is different though, because while it is generally more general than ‘pig’ it is not the scientific name (genus of ‘sus’) or the name for meat, ‘pork’, or even the adjective ‘ porcine ’. ‘Pig’ though is also general, not referring to only one species, so ‘swine’ is a rare example of a synonym for an animal that doesn’t differ by its language of origins either.