Word Facts

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.

There are lots of different names for sandwiches, including in the United States 'hoagies', 'submarines', 'po'boys', 'heros' and 'grinders'. All of those have distinct origins, relating to shape, ingredients, and in more than one case, pejoratives for Italians. In the United Kingdom however, it is generally more common to nickname something by abbreviation, which shows itself to be true here with 'butty' (from 'buttered sandwich) and 'sarnie'. In the latter case, there is noticeably the insertion of [r], however, this probably—at least at first—had less to do with the pronunciation, and just represented a lengthened vowel, as is often the case in non-rhotic dialects [1], such as British English. Support Word Facts on patreon.com/wordfacts [1] https://stonewordfacts.blogspot.com/2018/10/1412-rhoticitys-relationship-with.html

For various reasons throughout history many cities and even countries change their names. Sometimes this is for colonial reasons, as was the case recently with the switch from 'Swaziland' to 'Eswatini' or 'Rhodesia' to 'Zimbabwe', and at other times it is just to reflect demographics or other things like with 'Burma' to 'Myanmar', which wanted to reflect that not all of its citizens were ethnically Burmese. However, when people started calling 'Peking' 'Beijing', this was not for some colonial issue, but just that both were attempts to transliterate the name of the Chinese capital. The only curious part is that many Chinese officials are upset when English speakers say 'Peking', but when Germans, French, or the Spanish say 'Peking' or 'Pekín, or 'Pékin' respectively, this doesn't seem to be an issue. Support Word Facts on patreon.com/wordfacts

While it is today associated with short, often news-related literature, the word 'pamphlet' actually comes from a familiar form of the name Pamphilet. This comes from the Latin poem 'Pamphilus, seu de Amore' (Pamphilus, or of Love), which doesn't have anything itself to do with pamphlets, but the poem was circulated widely and wasn't very long, so in essence connoted the same things how it is today. Support Word Facts on patreon.com/wordfacts .

The Christian Bible was written in 3 different languages, and each shows a different history of the people within it. The first 5 books were in Hebrew originally, and then later as the prophetic writings were often in Aramaic. Later on, the New Testament was written in Koine Greek, but while none of these were completely separate, such as marginal notes and other commentaries of the first 5 books being written in Aramaic. This is relevant to keep in mind when reading translations, but it also helps to explain, for instance, why later languages often have so much influence from Aramaic, as this was still actively used by some groups until the ninth century, and many words were extracted from the religious texts after then. For more on this, watch the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTKKSf35LSE&t=32s

As has been covered a few times here before, 'apple' has given its name to many different varieties of fruits and vegetables in many different languages around the world, from 'apelsin' meaning 'orange' in Swedish literally translating to 'china-apple', as well as both 'pomme de terre' in French and תפוח אדמה in Hebrew translating literally as 'apple of the earth' but meaning 'potato'. However, this is also true historically of things that don't even have the same shape or size of an apple at all. The word 'chamomile' comes to English via French and Latin from the Greek 'khamaimēlon' (χαμαίμηλον) which also means ‘earth-apple’. In this case however, it is not from a visual resemblance, but because the flowers apparently spelt like apple. For more about the difficultly in describing smells, watch this video: https://youtu.be/3zz9Hf2KUbg

In American English, collective nouns (i.e. nouns that refer to groups of things like 'family' or 'committee') are almost always treated as a singular, but this is not always the case in British English. In British English, collective nouns do usually have singular agreement (e.g. 'family is' not 'family are') but this is only when the group is being referred to as a whole. At other times, if one wanted to emphasize the individual parts of said group, one using British English conventions would opt for plural agreement, such as 'the family is convening' but perhaps 'the family are quarreling'. Support Word Facts on Patreon.com/wordfacts

Even in the few forms of a second-person plural English pronoun, such as 'y'all', 'yous' and 'yinz', they pretty much all originate from combinations. While there are dozens of varieties of English, the main two sort of standard models are the Standard American and Standard British styles; neither of these have a distinction between the singular and plural forms for the second person pronoun but the other pronouns worked their ways out of this same word. 'Y'all' is just the elision of 'you all', and 'yous' comes from the '-s' form for general pluralization . 'Yinz' comes from 'you -uns'. which is shortened form of 'you ones'; originating in Ireland, it follows the same pattern as 'youngin', but gained greater popularity in Appalachia and the Midwest in the 19th century.