1930: virtual vs. virtuous Mar 28, 2020

-
Computers and the Internet have created a new sort of necessity for the word 'virtual', but its definition as "like something in essence but not actually" has been around since the 15th century or so. However, the word is a doublet with 'virtuous' which clearly has a very different meaning. Both of these come from the Latin 'virtus' meaning 'excellency; efficacy' or literally 'manliness' (i.e. also like a person) which lead to the split for 'virtue'.
Support Word Facts on patreon.com/wordfacts

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

833: Structure and Inflection Mar 20, 2017

-
There are many ways to classify languages, but it should be noted that due to the inherently flexible nature of grammar, these are only ever really just conventions. One way to classify language is based on how meaning is added on to words. Latin and German, inflectional languages, rely largely on suffixes to indicate the subject in verbs and show the case in nouns whereas with nouns in English depend on prepositions and word-order. Other languages take this even further with agglutination, such as in Turkish or Hungarian with verbal meaning indicated with long strings of infixes and suffixes, and the furthest still with synthetic and polysynthetic languages like Greenlandic. In these languages, entire clauses can be just one or two words. Meanwhile, in Mandarin everything from number, tense, etc. relies on using separate words, and it is said that comparatively this is easier to learn for adults than a polysynthetic language would be. Languages tend to shift closer to analytic struct...
Continue »

1048: No Subjects in Ergative Languages Oct 22, 2017

-
Word-order in English is fairly fixed because it needs to be due to a lack of much inflection that other languages like Latin have. This means that as flexible as the order was in English , classifying Latin as being subject-object-verb (SOV) has more to do with conventions than much else. Nevertheless, Latin had subjects at least which makes this sort of classification possible, but not all languages do. Ergative languages like Basque , Mayan, and even a few Indo-European languages like Gorani do not have subjects; instead what would be the subject of transitive verbs (i.e. ones that take a direct object) is called an 'agent' and behaves differently than the argument of intransitive verbs in that the arguments resemble the object of a transitive verbs. Though this is not the same as distinguishing between nominatives and accusatives, a rough English-equivalent, to alleviate confusion, might look like "she reads it" but "her dies". Classifying these langu...
Continue »

850: cygnet Apr 6, 2017

-
When diminutive suffixes are added to words in English, they tend to be specific to certain words. For instance, a young duck is a 'duckling', a young goose is a 'gosling', but a young cat is a 'kitten', not a 'catling', even though all of those words are of Germanic origins. Some words for animals do not even use suffixes, but employ adjectives like 'cub', though this is equally dependent on individual terms. The term for a young swan, 'cygnet' does not appear so use a diminutive suffix, but certainly does not use an adjective either (unless some people may prefer 'baby swan' for simplicity). While some terms for young animals, as with 'puppy' or 'baby' are completely separate that the word for the mature form, but 'cignet' does have a diminutive suffix after all. The word 'swan' comes from Old English, but the word 'cignet' comes from the Old French 'cigne' ('swan'), so the...
Continue »