Word Facts

Check out the latest podcast on the Patreon for as little as $1: • It is very easy for misinformation to spread so long as there is a grain of truth to it, such as the line of ' let them eat cake ', which was probably never said by Marie Antoinette. Another such disputed quote is "I return in 3 (or 5 or 8) days; don't wash" said by Napoleon to his wife Josephine. This quote is more likely to have been written than that attributed to Antoinette as he did often write her love letters, but many of the original lines from which the now-famous quote could have been drawn are often contradictory or not so reliable.

Although it is usually translated as 'son of the commandment' the term 'bar mitzvah' (בר מצוה)—the term for a Jewish boy's coming of age ritual—does not use the Hebrew word for son, 'ben' (בן), as found also in names like 'benjamin'. This is furthermore in contrast with 'bat (or bas) mitzvah' (בת מצו ה '—the equivalent for girls—which does use the Hebrew for 'daughter'. Instead, the word comes from an Aramaic word that originally meant 'outside', but later in Hebrew began to mean 'ability', i.e. in this case "someone who is able to fulfill commandments". For more on Hebrew's influence on Hebrew, watch this .

Although there are many frustrations of writing in a non-Latin-based script in todays world, as discussed in the last two posts, but this is not only true of digital media. When it comes to writing music, which is traditionally written left-to-right, this poses a problem for those who write lyrics in a writing system does not follow that pattern. What people who write with Hebrew characters tend to do is to break up the word into syllables; each syllable is written right-to-left but the whole line is written left-to-right. However, those who write with Arabic letters—which by itself is a significantly larger population by up to hundreds of millions—will often, though not always, instead write the notes and every other musical notation right-to-left. See the last related two posts here: CrazyFont Arabizi Support Word Facts on Patreon here: Patreon.com/wordfacts

Following yesterday's post about innovative use of the Latin Script, not only do some people use this writing system as a non-standard alternative for the sake of accessibility, but also now for slang. Arabizi is the name given to Arabic written in the Latin alphabet for online or text purposes predominantly. This started because there was for a long time no way to write in Arabic digitally, but even after progress was made there, Arabizi continues to be used for the purposes of conveying slang, and providing a more informal appearance. Here is how it looks with the Arabizi compared to the International Phonetic Alphabet standard: Arabizi: kif/keef sa7tak, chou/shu 3am ti3mel? IPA: [kiːf ˈsˤɑħtak ʃuː ʕam ˈtɪʕmel] (Arabic: .كيف صحتك، شو عم تعمل) (example from Wikipedia)

There are plenty of writing-systems around the world, each suited in some way or another to a language. However, due to the standardizations from mechanical writing in both printing and now also digital typing, many people are limited in access, especially in comparison to the universality of a pen. Cyrillic is used by hundreds of millions of people, but only in parts of Eastern Europe and Central Asia; outside of that, access to a specific keyboard isn't always easy. People are fairly innovative however, and many Russian speakers or other users of cyrillic will use what is sometimes called "CrazyFont": writing the words out in the Latin script—which is far more dominant on the Internet—and spelling Russian somewhat phonetically. It is non-standard, but fairly common. There will be two more posts about the problem of typing over the next two days. Check out more, and help support Word Facts at Patreon.com/wordfacts

Over this last week with the special series on Grimm's Law , it's definition, it's ramifications in linguistics and wider society, and its shortcomings, but it is still notable, not just as a precursor to Verner's Law , but as the start to historical phonology as a branch of historical linguistics. The basic explanation—that observations between the use of [p] in Latin and [f] in German suggests how languages naturally shift over time—albeit perhaps over simplified is straightforward enough, but these sorts of ideas which laid the groundwork for much of historical linguistics as it is used today. Theories that are now widely accepted as common knowledge today were either small-scale or fringe before the publication of Jacob Grimm's 'Deutsche Grammatik'. This is the final instalment in the Grimm's Law series, but make sure to follow for more content every day. Watch more on Historical Linguistics here. Follow Word Facts  on Youtube and support it on P

According to Grimm's Law , plosive consonants, particularly as the onset of a word first first become stops, and then become fricatives, like: b^w -> p -> f but looking to modern Germanic languages, this is not always true. There is one major exception, wherein looking at counterparts in Latin, Greek, and or Sanskrit, the Germanic equivalent was a b, d or g, which only changes voicing but does not become a fricative as expected. Karl Verner, however, posited that this would relate to other features he outlines, including word-initial stressing. This addition was a very important one, but it relied on the assumption that any sound-law would have to be without exception, which is a matter of theory in some regards as well. Follow Word Facts on Youtube and support it on Patreon and get even more:

Over the last few days this blog has talked about the linguistic aspects of Grimm's Law , and while these may seem minor, at the time even to a non-linguistic community this was earth-shattering. While the notion of the Indo-European language family was posited as early as 1786, some of the most conclusive evidence came with Grimm's Law. This suggested that there was once a common language, culture, and genealogy to most of the peoples across Europe, and some of the Middle East and India, which, in an age of legalized racism and colonialism did not sit well with many people. However, as discussed in the post about the term ' aryan ', this idea was quickly adopted by both sides of any extreme view on the issue. Follow Word Facts on Youtube and support it on Patreon and get even more: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNofHfYEoM2l7fu2340gsDQ https://www.patreon.com/wordfacts

No one is quite sure about why sound shift like those described in Grimm's Law took place. What this means, however, is not that people are looking for social and cultural factors as to why this happened, because language doesn't necessarily change from those sorts of influences. Instead, looking at the chains like: 1) [b] → [p] → [f] 2) [d] → [t] → [θ] ([θ]as in 'THin') 3) [g] → [k] → [x] ([x] is also CH found in German) it is a matter of figuring out whether the newer forms changed first and other sounds had to replace the gap, or whether it was the other way around, and some sounds had to change in order to differentiate words that now sounded the same. It is largely thought to be the former, but ultimately both sides can be argued for. Follow Word Facts on Youtube and support it on Patreon and get even more.

The idea of comparing an older form of a language with the more modern one, it’s possible to get a sense for what sounds and other features change and what stays the same, but this is only useful for specific examples. However, with the acceptance of Grimm's Law , it became possible to systematically estimate language change over time. People could make educated guesses as to how, if there were certain ways that languages would tend to split systematically, then linguists could predict the earlier steps and create a proto-language. This was how Proto-Germanic was recreated, but also even more ambitious theories, like the recreation of Proto-Indo-European. These same principles were used in the creation and acceptance of fairly robust proto-languages from all over the world.

As mentioned yesterday in the first of the in the Grimm’s Law series, Jacob Grimm noticed a pattern of related terms across Indo-European languages wherein certain vowels could shift over time, in predicable ways. Some of the most important pattern found: 1) [b] → [p] → [f] 2) [d] → [t] → [θ] ([θ]as in 'THin') 3) [g] → [k] → [x] ([x] is also CH found in German) These trends helped to show the way in which older Indo-European have shifted over time, certainly from ancient languages to more modern ones, but the two major shifts in German sounds, as not only will a different dialects separate from each other and become new languages over time, but even a language on its own will eventually become unrecognizable to itself. For this reason, while the examples yesterday compared Latin to German, this also helps to show how English and German have split from each other over time, such as the English ‘penny’ and the German ‘Pfennig’. Over the rest of this week, there will be pos

This is the 1,500th Word Facts blogpost! Thank you for your ongoing support and feedback. Jacob Grimm is perhaps best known for his work with Grimm's Fairy Tales, but he also was a linguist, still renowned today. In 1854 he put out the most comprehensive German Dictionary to this day, and he also discovered what is now know as Grimm's Law. This phenomenon began with the observation that many stop consonants in languages like Latin and Greek would become fricatives in Germanic languages, such as 'penna' (Latin) and 'pteron' (Greek) that are 'feather' and 'Feder' in English and German respectively. This expanded the way linguists looked at language families and language development generally, and the academic and social consequences of this will be looked at through the rest of this week. As decided in a vote on Patreon.com/wordfacts , posts over this next week will be on the topic of Grimm's Law. Please consider supporting Wo

The Irish language is not difficult to learn on the basis of grammar for another speaker of an Indo-European language speaker at least, but on the matter of pronunciation it is a different story. In terms of spelling there will likely be some confusions, but more than that, Irish Gaelic contains a considerable amount of elisions: when two sounds merge into one, or certain vowels get dropped. This is true in English in contractions like 'I'm', or how 'in-' changes depending upon the preceding consonant [1]. In Irish however, this can occur with vowels before a stressed vowel, with any initial vowel, or following a pause. There are also instances of elision occurring for the indicators of certain features like grammar, which makes each utterance faster to say, but harder to get a grasp of for the sake of learners. Tomorrow's post will be the 1,500th, so stay tuned for the special week on Grimm's law, and support Word Facts on Patreon.com/wordfacts

In linguistics, there are many unknown and perhaps unsolvable questions, such as what a word is , what a language is, and how it is that something is considered grammatical or not. Nevertheless, one can still make claims about how certain word orders are grammatical in a given language and not another. This apparent contradiction may come from many sources, but aside from the fact that some notions are simply traditional, the issue here is that sometimes, as with the case of grammar, everyone understands that it exists, but disagree on how. In other cases, like the concept of a word, which some would indeed say does not exist, it is either spoken about as simply a shorthand, or people will talk around it and use units like phrases or morphemes . In two days, the 1,500th post will be up, and will be the start of a whole week on Grimm's Law. Make sure to follow to stay tuned.

Many languages from across Europe have a word like 'kaput', each with relatively similar meaning, with perhaps one major exception. The French word 'capot' only refers to a specific move in the card game piquet, but this word 'capot' is the origin for all the rest of these words. As it happens, it is thought that the French term did originally come from another meaning 'castrate', but has since moved on, whereas the rest of these European words stuck with a meaning like 'destroyed'. Follow Word Facts on Youtube and support it on Patreon and get even more: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNofHfYEoM2l7fu2340gsDQ https://www.patreon.com/wordfacts

The Arab Spring was so named for a season, but it began in December of 2010. Much like how the combining form [1] '-gate' started from Nixon's 'Watergate' scandal but are now affixed to other scandals like 'deflategate' and 'pizzagate', the Spring in question here was actually in 1968. The Prague Spring was a revolution in Czechoslovakia, and though again it started in the winter, largely took place in—and largely was reported during—spring. Certainly the Arab Spring took place partially during the springtime, but the name is from an older pattern. Follow Word Facts on Youtube and support it on Patreon and get even more: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNofHfYEoM2l7fu2340gsDQ https://www.patreon.com/wordfacts

When two vowels combine together in one syllable, it's a diphthong , but orthography doesn't always represent this. For instance, while writing one vowel to correspond with one sound should be easy enough, in words like the English 'I', what is actually two sounds [ai] is represented with one (note that 'eye' accomplishes this). In German, where spelling tends to be more standard, that same sound is represented by writing <ei>, and so that is maintained, but the sound [i]—as in 'key'—in German is usually written with two letters [ie], even though this is not a diphthong. Ultimately, in any language with a written history, tradition will supersede reason at times. Follow Word Facts on Youtube and support it on Patreon and get even more

The Scotland is famous for many things, but neither 'great scott' nor 'off scott free' relate to the country or its people. The former is simply a standin for 'G-d' , though these are pretty common, especially in Victorian English speech. In the latter case, there is a common misconception that the word comes from the Dred Scott Decision, but actually it comes from the Old Norse 'skot' meaning 'payment' or 'tax'.

Thai, like many other East Asian languages has its own writing system, but unlike many other writing systems all over the world that do not have distinct symbols for numerals, the Thai system does. The numerals follow a base-ten system with the Arabic numerals , but this should not be surprising since they both followed from the same Hindu origins. However, while not represented in the numeration, the name for the number 1, nèung, changes to become èt when it is at the end of other numbers, like 11, or sìp èt (literally: ten-one). 0: ๐ 1:๑ 2:๒ 3: ๓ 4: ๔ 5: ๕ 6: ๖ 7: ๗ 8: ๘ 9: ๙

Often used in statistical modeling, 'birth rate' and 'fertility rate' are both useful terms to describe demographics, but are not quite synonymous. A fertility rate is calculated to be the average number of children born to women ages 15-44 in their lifetimes. 'Birthrate' is often misused to describe this statistic, but it refers more specifically to the number of live births per 1,000 people in the population every year. Clearly these are used in similar situations, but the numbers look quite different.

Over thousands of years, Hebrew has transitioned from a living language to a liturgical language to again a living language, and while the language has stayed remarkably similar, there are some dialectal differences. There are many different features, but one of the most famous is of the pronunciation of ת. Sephardi (of Spain & North African) Jews pronounce it always as a [t], whereas Ashkenazi (Central & Eastern European) Jews pronounce it as an [s] in the middle or at the end of words. It is thought however, that both of these pronunciations are non-traditional, and like Yemenite Jews, originally it represented something like [θ] (as in THin). Therefore, both dialectal pronunciations involve the tongue moving forward or back respectively. https://youtu.be/jTKKSf35LSE

Regarding the word 'leprechaun', the word is thought to come from 'lú' meaning 'small', and the latter half comes from the same root as 'corp'; read more about it in the link below [1]. The first form, 'lú' is Old Irish, a Celtic language, but it is closely related to many words from Germanic languages, like the German 'lütt and lützel' or the West Frisian 'lyts', which all have the same vowel, even though it is written differently across the two language. Indeed, the original Old English 'lȳtel' is related, but that vowel isn't used for English anymore, so the similar one in 'little' is used instead today. http://stonewordfacts.blogspot.com/2016/05/99-leprechuan-mar-17-2015.ht

The phrase 'let them eat cake' or in French "qu'ils mangent de la brioche" (it should actually be 'brioche' in English not 'cake', but it's more culturally appropriate) is attributed to a great princess—often thought to be Marie Antoinette—but this is not possible. This phrase was used in Rousseau's autobiography, written when Antoinette was nine years old; he never specified the princess, and many belief it was completely anecdotal, but history was not favorable to Antoinette, and neither is pop-culture here. If you want more about history, watch the new Paleolinguistics video that just came out:

Before there was fully fledged paper money but after people realized that carrying large amounts of gold and silver around was impractical, individual banks would give out notes—essentially like a check or an I.O.U.—that were redeemable at the banks themselves for a specified amount of, usually, gold. These notes were called 'promissory notes', and even though major economies moved off of a gold standard years ago, the term 'note' stuck. In Scotland however, printed bills are still only promissory notes, and are not legal tender even in Scotland. For more on how things came to be, watch  How Writing Began 

As mentioned in another post, some adjectives are able to come after the noun they modify  due to certain verbs,  which is weird for English . This happens when the verbs are 'declaratives', as discussed in the video here , and essentially this happens when someone uses the language to make a change happen in the word, such as 'He declared the action unlawful'. It acts a bit like a linking verb, but depends on the declarative verb.

English belongs to the West Germanic language family, which belongs to the Germanic language family, which belongs to the Indo-European language family. All of this is fairly straightforward, but in other types of classifications—such as taxonomy with its "domain; kingdom; phylum; class..."—there are different names. One might expect linguists would be very happy to create new words or new definitions, but commonly this doesn't happen. However, for clarity, this is often talked about in the terms of 'primary language families' and so on, with primary language families not having any further relations, such as the Indo-European, Afro-Asiatic, and Kartvelian language families respectively. Save the date: January 19th for the 1,500th post special. Vote here on what you want it to be here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/1-500th-blog-23683917

Some writing systems, such as the Georgian Script or the Hebrew Script are often talked about only as they relate to the languages that bear the same name, but this is often misleading. For instance, all Kartvelian languages use the Georgian Script, and while sometimes this is just because of external political factors—such as in this case how most speakers of Kartvelian languages live in Georgia—often the scripts themselves are better for representing certain sounds. It is rare for a script to be used for only one language, but this too does happen, such as with Armenian Script, (excluding historical uses) pictured below.

Every language will have greetings, though these often come in a variety completely different ways. Many Indo-European languages have words like English's ' hello ', but these don't really relate to anything concrete. In other languages, such as Hawai'ian 'aloha' famously, or Hebrew's 'shalom', these can be used for greetings or for farewells because they just mean 'love' and 'peace' respectfully; there are some examples like this in English but these are less popular. In Georgian however, the word for a greeting is 'gamarjoba’, which means ‘victory’. Vote on Patreon for the 1,500th post: https://www.patreon.com/posts/1-500th-blog-23683917

Sounds don't have colors objectively tied to them in anyway, yet we still use the term 'white noise'. The term white noise comes from the association to white light, which contains all frequencies of the spectrum of light in equal amounts as to appear white. With white noise machines, the frequencies all use the same intensity, the sounds don't have to be anything recorded in particular, even if the associations are with natural sounds perhaps. This is why there aren't any other types of noise that 'white noise' overtly disambiguates itself from, despite the use of the adjective. For a related look at ' blackmail ', click here. Don't forget to vote on the series' topic for the 1,500th post.

The # MeToo movement has since done a lot to highlight language-use, but the post today doesn't relate to PC language . Although certainly not exclusive to this word, MeToo eventually became a verb, but what this shows is not only the manner in which not only a phrase like 'me too' becomes one part of speech, but how it becomes a single word. No doubt this was helped by the commonality of the phrase in a variety of contexts, but also it was removed of distinct linguistic context as it is used in a hashtag. Once it is used as a hashtag, it doesn't need to fit into a sentence in the same way as another phrase would. For evidence, here is a tweet from Lena Dunham, though her assessment of the grammar is wrong. This is Linguistics in in the Wild #8 Don;t forget to vote here before the 1,500th Word Facts blog-post. https://www.patreon.com/posts/1-500th-blog-23683917

In the biblical story of the Three Wise Men, these men are referred to either as that or as kings, but this isn't the whole picture. One of the dangers of only reading translations is that historical significance of and connotations to words change. The word used in the Bible is 'Magoi', which is the origin of 'magician' in English. Indeed, magi of the time were often involved in politics—hence 'kings'—and also 'priest', but their duties at the time included interpreting dreams and performing ritual sacrifices. Even the gifts they bring with them are from traditional magical practices. However, after centuries of this translation, it is hard to imagine changing the popular conception, and at this point anyway the idea of 'magician' has shifted significantly. Notably, the suffix ' -ic ' has the ability to turn some nouns into adjectives, but in the word 'magic' this is only historically true. The words 'magic' and