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