1538: lemur Feb 28, 2019

-
European colonial powers at the time encountered many unique places, peoples, and animals, all of which needed a name. Some of these animals bore native names, others were named from relation to other things, but others were names more descriptively. With the lemur for instance, found only in Madagascar, the name comes from the Latin 'lemures' meaning ‘spirits of the dead’, due to the association made with its apparently specter-like facial features.
Support Word Facts on patreon.com/wordfacts for even more content.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

1511: "I'll be home in 3 days; don't wash" Might be False Jan 31, 2019

-
Image
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.
Continue »

752: Circumfix Dec 29, 2016

-
On this blog, you'll have seen a fair amount about affixes, especially Latinate prefixation. One affix, among the prefixes, suffixes, and infixes, that is often less fixated upon by English-speakers is the circumfix. Other languages, especially Austronesian languages like Malay see a lot of these forms in which both a prefix and a suffix are added at the same time as a single unit. There are some disagreements on what would qualify, but the best and perhaps only examples in English is the 'en- -en' or 'em- -en' circumfix, in such words as 'embolden'. These have grown fairly unpopular and are starting to phase out of use. 
Continue »

1187: A Decline in Declension? Mar 10, 2018

-
Anyone who has studied an inflected language as a native-speaker of an uninflected language may have the question "do people always use cases right?". After all, there are plenty of examples showing that often, the rules of word-order as a method for supplying syntactic information are subverted, as with starting a clause with an object or sometimes just plain broken, as with "...than me" as opposed to "...than I" . The answer to the question is that languages with a lot of morphology tend to lose those agglutinative tendencies over time, as was the situation with Ancient Latin's seven cases becoming five in Classical Latin and then as it morphed into Vulgar Latin (and became the modern Romance Languages), the cases were lost wholesale. Even some speaker of Modern Spanish often use pronouns instead of conjugational endings, as is the case in English. Does this mean that eventually there will be no inflection?—no. Logically, a heavily inflected langu...
Continue »