Word Facts

English has plenty of words for the different people in a family such as 'brother', 'sister', 'mother', 'father', 'grandparent', 'aunt', 'cousin' etc. This is fairly typical for other languages; words for things that are important and fairly basic will have simple one-to-one translations to most other languages usually, while other things may require a full sentence, like words for snow in Inuit  or indeed the Inuit word 'iktsuarpok' which denotes an excited anticipation waiting for something and repeatedly checking its arrival (e.g. when excitedly waiting for friend or an event and constantly checking the time). Nevertheless, some languages have more or very occasionally fewer words for family-members than English does. It is thought that Proto-Indo-European had more words for family-members , such as a single term for "son's wife" which English needs to construct with multiple words, and plenty of languages...

The English alphabet has 26 letters, but has as many as 45 phonemes (sounds), depending on accent and somewhat upon the researcher. Plenty of languages have more, including !Xóõ (a.k.a. Taa) a click tongue which has over 120 phonemes and between 2 and 4 tones, but some have only around a dozen. Rokotas is considered to have the smallest phoneme inventory of any known language, with as few as 11 phonemes, though this does not mean necessarily that the words get especially long on average to theoretically compensate. Interestingly, the alphabet has 12 letters, similar to Hawai'ian , but the S and the T both represent /t/; S is only used before I and in the name for the language. The only other language that has been claimed to have fewer is debatably Pirahã .

Because people can add on new information to a sentence or clauses with adjuncts or subordinate clauses as well as other modifiers, theoretically anyway, a sentence in English could go on forever and there is an infinite number of possible sentences, even though there are a finite number of words. This is the case for very nearly every language, except (at least) one, Pirahã, which is quite famous for being different in a number of ways to most. In addition to having an incredibly small phoneme inventory and not having words for numbers , Pirahã also does not allow for recursion for strings of adjectives into serials like in "large blue soft old (pillow)" nor recursion for possessives like in "my mother's uncle's cat's (toy)". Due to these observations made by Daniel Everett, as well as his conclusion that embedded clauses in this language can only have one level of depth i.e. "he knows about making food" would be acceptable but "he kn...

Intonation of individual words in a sentence, both in tonal language and non-tonal languages conveys syntactic information that is not present in written texts. Generally, because there are conventional ways to arrange a sentence, including information from word-order or even adjective-order cues, as well as having a knowledge of lexicon , this fact does not hinder readers. Nevertheless, certain sentences, sometimes called "garden path sentences" may appear initially ungrammatical at first but when stressed differently will make sense. One famous example is “fat people eat accumulates” which may be initially read with the phrase 'fat people' instead of thinking of them as two nouns, i.e. 'fat [that] people'. This type of confusion can come from all sorts of factors, but perhaps the most common reason is the use of substantive adjectives or the lack of hyphens in many compounds . It should be noted that this is not the same as syntactic ambiguity, because h...

Looking at feminine nouns and given names, and the adjectives and pronouns that agree with them in Indo-European languages, especially in those from Europe, there is an tremendous amount ending in '-a' and '-e', while there is not such a broad trend for masculine or neuter words. The exact pronunciation of which varying slightly from language to language, but usually it is close to [a] or [ǝ]. In Spanish for instance, around 89% of feminine nouns end with '-a', and in given names the number rises to 98%. In Romance languages, this quality comes from the predecessor Latin, for which many feminine nouns and their adjectival and pronominal counterparts ended in '-a', as did many given names, a number of which were originally words anyway. Nevertheless, the trend among other language families such as Germanic or Slavic languages, while less prevalent in nouns, is still quite noticeable in given names. Some of the proper nouns would have ended in '-a'...

Every person will have experienced the feeling of having a word on the tip of the tongue, so to speak, and not be able to think of something but feeling that it should normally be simple. The name for this phenomenon is, unimaginatively perhaps, "tip of the tongue" (TOT), and though the knowledge of the neurological mechanisms for this need more research and there are several distinct theories about it, the experience of TOT is understood to be fairly universal, with people often remembering certain syllables, certain—usually first—letters, or only remembering words that are similar, either semantically or phonologically. TOT has implications in psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics, but also other fields which relate to memory or (meta)cognition.

There are lots of ways to estimate the meaning of words—determining from context, looking to words that appear related, etc.—but sometimes words will only be found once for a certain author or in a certain language. This is called a hapax (legomenon), and it exists for dead languages and living ones, but for different reasons. In dead languages this happens sometimes because there is a limited, often small collection of words that survive, like for Old English with 'uhtceare' which meant ‘lying awake before dawn and worrying’, however, this can also occur in living languages, either by mistake , or when people use a word humorously, such as with ' runcible spoon '. There is no single way which these words' meanings can be determined, and even for words with established definitions, arguments among translators still occur.

There is really nothing present in languages that can be said to be universal. Many ideas, even incredibly general ones like, to paraphrase, "a language will have nouns and verbs" or "a language will have sounds" are based on logical assumptions about the way people think but are then disproven by the existence a feature of even a single language, an idea which will be discussed more in the future. Furthermore, to continue the idea from yesterday about the relationship between motion and time, it is quite common to have words, including English prepositions, conjunctions, adverbs, and some verbs that relate to both forward movement or position and the future, or oppositely backwards movement and the past. Perhaps the clearest examples of this would be the fairly common phrases "look forward to [some future event]" or "put the past behind you". This exists—in some form or another—across numerous languages, but there is one that is quite famous ...