2935: Chinese Typewriters Jan 3, 2024
You may remember the difficulty with devising a method for Arabic typewriters, though it was eventually solved through various simplifications of the script. This option was not possible with Chinese, even Simplified Chinese writing, which only simplified the characters internally, but not the overall difficulty of the sheer volume of characters. All of these problems were also present for Japanese typewriters using kanji, which were the first developed for East Asia. The benefit for the Japanese is that it can be written in the katana script, which is a syllabary.
It would not work to have a keyboard of the radicals: the strokes that make up each character, for two reasons. First, there are simply too many to practically fit on a keyboard—214 in total—but the radicals can fit anywhere inside the character. This was not as problematic for Korean (Hangul), which builds its syllables both longitudinally and latitudinally because there are far fewer places where each letter goes: usually just top-left, top-right and/or bottom.
Instead, Chinese typewriters worked more like printing presses. The top 2,500 most-used characters were placed around a cylinder, and the cylinder was rotated and slid until a dial was over the chosen character, at which point the mechanism was triggered for that one in particular. Other models used a flat tray, but the process was more or less the same. In many instances, especially with the flat tray, there would be multiple trays in use that needed to be swapped out, again, making this more similar to individually finding keys for a printing press.
There was no systemization about where the characters were—Chinese characters have no comparable system to alphabetization—so in addition to memorizing all the characters in the first place, operators of these machines would essentially have to memorize where on the cylinder each one was. Given how complicated these were, and that China was not the economic power it is now, typewriters were never a common sight, even in offices, as they were in the West.
2934: Chinese Dictionaries Jan 2, 2025
The notion of alphabetical order does not have any particular bearing on language or even writing usually, but it does have a significant impact organizationally. Whether that’s shelving books, or, for our purposes, putting together a dictionary, having a set order is vital.
This poses a problem for languages like Chinese where there is no formal way to categorize the many thousands of characters. Two solutions have emerged, though neither are particularly neat. The first way is that Chinese characters are made up of radicals, to which there is a traditional stroke order. This poses a problem for quick organization as there are 214 which would complicate simple navigation.
The other way is to use pinyin, a system to use the Latin alphabet for roughly approximate Chinese pronunciation. Pinyin has in fact become so prevalent on account of its use for computer keyboards that then essentially autocorrects that many young Chinese report struggling to remember the proper characters needed regularly. This method has also become more popular to organize Chinese dictionaries since it was adopted officially in 1958.
There will be more tomorrow about Chinese typing before pinyin assisted in it.
2922: Possessive Form in Dutch Place Names Dec 21, 204
Many Dutch cities, such as 's-Hertogenbosch, 's-Gravenhage, 's-Heerenberg, and 's-Gravendeel have spelling that looks impossible to an English speaker. The 's beginning is a contraction of the genitive definite article ‘des’, meaning "of the" indicating that these places were once lands or settlements owned by dukes, counts, or lords. For example, 's-Hertogenbosch means "the forest of the duke," and 's-Gravenhage means "the enclosure of the count". Alternatively these places are now more commonly known as Den Bosch and Den Haag (“The Hague”) respectively, which use the dative form (not the subject).
This is a snapshot of fairly old Dutch. In Modern Dutch, this form of the genitive is hardly used, and 's-Hertogenbosch would be “Bos van de Hertog” even in more recent, 19th century Dutch this would have been “Bosch des Hertogs”.
2921: The [City Name]: Uncommon Articles Dec 20, 2024
There are a handful of specific place names in the US and UK beginning with ‘the —’ but these are almost always reserved for very small towns or villages; the only large example seems to be “the Bronx” which is not its own city per se, but the next largest, the Dalles, Oregon, US, has a population nearly 1000th the size. If you can find others that are larger, please write in.
Even in a language like French that includes definite articles for continents and provinces/states, for instance “j'adore l'Europe, mais je déteste la Californie” (“I adore [the] Europe but I hate [the] California”), French does not add articles before cities.
Meanwhile, this practice, while far from the default, is found more commonly in Dutch, most notably in The Hague or Den Haag natively, population 550K. Officially, it's 's-Gravenhage (more on that next post) but it's joined by Den Bosch population 160K and Den Helder population 56K. These places are all named usually after historical estates of wealthy landowners and just describe the land such as ‘den haag’ (‘the hedge’).
2920: Tadpole Dec 19, 2024
The word ‘tadpole is as unrelated to ‘frog’, etymologically, as ‘cub’ does to ‘bear’, yet the connection isn’t as random. ‘Tadpole’ comes from Middle English ‘tadpolle’ that combines tadde, meaning ‘toad’ with ‘poll’, meaning ‘head’. The reason is pretty clear—they only appear to have the head and a fin in the early stage—but ‘poll’ as a word for head, there is simply no word like it now in English. ‘Poll’ in the sense of a tally of heads does exist, but this is no longer clearly linked to heads except metaphorically.
Cognates in a few rare dialectal forms of other Germanic languages, but those too have mostly faded. Rather it used to refer to any top or dome, from there it referred to the tops of trees—unrelated to 'pole'—and also took on the context of ‘head’ in certain places.
2919: Arabic Typewriters Dec 18, 2024
Some alphabets lent themselves to type writers relatively easily, for example Greek, Cyrillic, Latin, and Hebrew because all the letters are separate and can be rendered with minimal complication for monospaced fonts. Others, like Arabic, were enigmatic for many years.
Arabic’s writing system presents several notable challenges. Each of the 28 letters usually takes 4 forms, whether it's at the beginning, middle, or end of a word, or standing alone, which would lead to far too many characters to reasonably fit. Compounding that is that since it is a connected, cursive font, the letters need to be able to line up with each other, and need to at times both go above or below the line of type. Further complicating the matter is that of width, though an automatic double-space was comparatively not hard to solve.
In the end, there were many attempts in the years around the turn of the 20th century, but the most successful patent was filed by Selim Haddad. Earlier attempts had tried cylinders—like how later electric typewriters would work—but this proved ineffective. Rather the arabic typewrite from Haddad used a simplified form of the 4 letters: connected that also served as word-initial, or disconnected which also served as word-final (for instance: سـ connected, and س disconnected). Lacking capital letters, this was performed similarly to what was done for English with the shift key. The point of connection was made level for all letters. A few exceptions had to be made where the final forms and isolated forms were too distinct to reuse and required two separate keys, but these were paired on keys with other exceptional letters that don’t have a connected form. Diacritics, while traditionally always included in Arabic writing, were by and large ignored. This reduced Arabic from requiring, by various estimates, at least 638 to merely 53 keys, compared to 44 on an English typewriter.
2918: Cyanide Dec 17, 2024
Cyanide gets its name from the vibrant blue pigment known as Prussian blue, one of the first synthetic dyes, discovered in the early 18th century. The pigment, made from iron salts and cyanide compounds, was widely used in art and textiles. The name ‘cyanide" is derived from the Greek word κύανος (kyanos), meaning ‘blue’—hence ‘cyan’.
To be clear, that is the usual translation of κύανος, but when dealing with historical descriptions of color it is not usually cut and dry.
It was probably not the dark, Prussian blue, but also not certainly a light greenish blue evoked with the English ‘cyan’ either. It most probably was linked to the color of a copper patina based off of ancient descriptions as well as related words in other languages, but other historical descriptions compare κύανος to darker or even slightly reddish blue hues. In modern Greek it represents the slightly lighter blue-spectrum compared to the darker μπλε (blueh): between sky blue and azure, but not necessarily with the green tint ‘cyan’ connotes.
2916: Mine and Mineral Dec 15, 2024
The words ‘mine’ and ‘mineral’ trace back to a common, Latin origin. This might not seem so surprising—they are semantically and phonetically quite similar—but unlike say ‘mine’ to ‘miner’ these do not have any morphological connection ‘mine’ → ‘miner’ → ‘mineral’. Rather, the word in Latin was ‘minera’ meaning ‘ore’ which in English became ‘minera’ + ‘-(a)l’, and now refers to anything naturally inorganic from the ground, not necessarily mined, while ‘mine’ comes from the Latin ‘mina’ of the same meaning.
2915: Potatoes Around the World: Surprisingly Diverse Dec 14, 2024
For a newly discovered food—potatoes were only brought to Europe in the 16th century and were only commonly eaten by people centuries after that—there are a remarkable amount of different etymologies for words for the potato in the Old World. In some regions, including Swedish, English, European Spanish, Turkish and Arabic, the word comes from a Taino word referring not to a potato but a sweet potato, ‘batata / batana’, botanically unrelated. Other languages like French, some Southern German dialects, Polish, and Serbo-Croatian use a term meaning “apple of the earth”. The last major group is usually something like the German ‘Kartoffel’ from the Italian ‘tartufolo’ meaning ‘truffle’, in reference to its being grown underground, and this includes also Russian, most Caucasian languages and Kurdish.
Some other languages have completely unrelated words to any others; Czech’s ‘brambor’ and Hungarian’s ‘borgonya’ refers to ‘Brandenburg’ and ‘Burgundy’, with the former being introduced specifically by a Prussian policy from Frederick the Great, encouraging commoners to eat potatoes in the War of the Bavarian Succession, so as to not deplete wheat stores. The Hungarian etymology is unclear. Finnish uses a word, ‘peruna’ meaning ‘pear’, from Swedish, even though Swedish uses a different word.
Meanwhile, no European country uses the native Quechua word ‘papa’ which actually means potatoes, natively, but that word is used in Spanish of the Americas. No other language adopted a native word that actually referred to a potato, but many did take words referring to sweet potatoes, apples, pears, and even more widespread, truffles.
2914: Solder: L or Not Dec 13, 2024
Solder is pronounced differently, regionally. In general, Americans pronounce it without the L, /sɑd.əɹ/ while those in the UK say /sɒl.dɚ/, with the L. This is a classic case of letters being added in to align with Latin but not with how people were actually pronouncing it as English spelling was being standardized in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. In Old French records, before it influenced English, it appears as both ‘soldure’ and ‘soudre’ (among a few others) but it was a time in which the L was being phased out; now the word is ‘souder’. Re-Latinizing the word to connect it back to its origins of ‘solidare’ (hence ‘solid’). Despite the spelling being altered to reflect the etymology in the 15th century, and further losing the U from ‘soulder’ to ‘solder’ in the 17th century, it only lost its traditional pronunciation in Britain in the last century or two.
2913: Noms de Guerre Dec 12, 2024
A nom de guerre refers to a name adopted for the use during military involvement. The practice is not so common today; recently it has come up in the news as the Syrian rebel leader used the nom de guerre, Abu Mohammad al-Julani, but now after recent success is attempting to pivot back to his birth name, Ahmed Hussein al-Sharaa. Perhaps the last major use of a nom de guerre was in the 1970’s with Pol Pot, born Saloth Sâr, who kept it after he became General Secretary in Cambodia.
The practice originated with mandatory use of the nom de guerre in the French military. This practice dates to the 15th century, usually giving people pseudonyms based on geographic origins, and became a mandatory practice in the early 18th century. Not used for the officers, it was a form of identification, phased out with the advent of identification numbers.
They are now often taken up by paramilitary leaders and many communist leaders to avoid indicting themselves, though whether a name taken by a revolutionary not directly involved in fighting is a nom de guerre is debatable.
2912: Hallmark Dec 11, 2024
The term ‘hallmark’ might evoke thoughts of greeting cards and cheesy movies, but it originates from the medieval practice of marking precious metals with a stamp. The ‘mark’ element is clear, but the ‘hall’ in question derives from a guildhall. These hallmarks were not maker’s marks as such, but a symbol of the guild as a sign of the quality and authenticity.
In England, the hallmarking system dates back to the 14th century, with official assay offices ensuring the metal's purity and the maker’s guild membership. In early America, however, the practice diverged and resembled maker’s marks, from an individual, and eventually in the 19th century this was all replaced with marks like 925 for sterling silver (i.e. exactly 925‰ silver, usually alloyed with copper or nickel) still used to denote authenticity and quality.
2911: Chicago as the "Second City" Dec 10, 2024
Chicago is still called "The Second City" despite losing the title of America's second-largest city to Los Angeles four decades ago, in 1984. The descriptive term “second city” is used for lots of other countries’ cities, like Birmingham in the UK or Marseille in France, but those have shifted over the decades, unlike with Chicago. Part of the reason is simply that people got used to this nickname.
Many will say it has nothing to do with population, and rather the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. Then, when the city was largely destroyed and rebuilt, it became a symbol of resilience. Moreover, Chicago was not at all the second largest city—though it was growing rapidly, and incorporating surrounding areas into the municipality. The problem with this story is that the first use of Chicago as the Second city was in 1952, some seven decades later. The nickname "The Second City" is still in use, despite its inaccuracy and likely mythical origin.
2910: pain|staking pains|taking Dec 9, 2024
‘Painstaking’ is an unusual word. In many dictionaries, the pronunciation guides will show that people frequently produce the word as /ˈpeɪnˌsteɪkɪŋ/ where the word breaks up effectively as “pain + staking” which, is not the etymology. That pronunciation isn’t so strange—it is what would be anticipated through the Sonority Sequencing Principle (SSP)—but what is strange is that in Germanic languages, in nominal compounds, the first element acts like an adjective and shouldn’t be modified. Consider the US WWII-era military strategy of island-hopping (hyphenated for clarity) where obviously the islands would be plural, but this isn’t normally grammatical in English. There are exceptions, as of course with ‘painstaking’, though anyway this is more of a quirk with no singular ‘paintaking’ as such, but then this leads to confusing pronunciation.
2909: Baby Ruth and Babe Ruth Dec 8, 2024
You might think the baseball player, Babe Ruth would have sued the makers of the chocolate bar, Baby Ruth, but it was the candy bar company that took legal action against the baseball legend. The bar’s origins are steeped in controversy, with its creators claiming the candy was named after President Grover Cleveland's daughter, Ruth Cleveland, despite her passing decades earlier, and likewise the president’s no longer being in office almost 25 years. Babe Ruth, suspecting otherwise, attempted to launch his own candy bar, sparking a lawsuit from the Baby Ruth company. The candy makers argued that their product had no connection to the famed slugger and successfully blocked his venture. Modern companies clamber for endorsements from sports players, but this went, at least in the eyes of the law, went in the opposite direction.
2908: Irish Lenition: Celtic Mutation Dec 7, 2024
In Irish, lenition and eclipsis are two types of mutations that alter the beginning of a word, often depending on its grammatical context. Lenition, literally softening, affects consonants by making them voiced or spirantized, changing for instance "b" pronounced [b] to "bh" pronounced [v]. This mutation often occurs after certain prepositions or possessive pronouns. Eclipsis, on the other hand, involves replacing the initial consonant with a different one, such as "b" becoming "m" . Eclipsis typically follows the definite article or certain prepositions. Both mutations play a vital role in marking syntax, and are not merely allophonic (i.e. the same sound altered in different environments).
These mutations are not just linguistic quirks but essential parts of Irish grammar that indicate possession, number, or other syntactic features. For instance, ‘madra’ (dog) becomes “an mhadra” (the dog) when triggered by the definite article. This is different for instance to Hebrew’s system of gemination, the phonetic effect of which looks quite similar, but which is triggered by phonology, not grammar.
2907: Southpaw from Baseball Diamonds Dec 6, 2024
The term southpaw, commonly used to refer to left-handed individuals, originates from the world of baseball. In the 19th century, baseball fields were typically designed so that the batter faced east to avoid the sun blinding them during games. This layout placed left-handed pitchers facing west, with their pitching arms pointing southward when they stood on the mound. Sportswriters, quick to coin colourful terms, began calling these left-handed pitchers "southpaws." Over time, the term expanded beyond baseball to describe any left-handed person, especially now in the sport of boxing, blending its sporty roots with everyday language.
2906: And Then There Were None Dec 5, 2024
Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None holds the distinction of being not only the best-selling mystery novel of all time but also a text with a complex history of title changes, reflecting shifting cultural sensitivities. Originally published in 1939 under the title Ten Little N******, the book took its name from a British nursery rhyme central to the plot. In the United States, the title was softened to Ten Little Indians, another reference to the rhyme, though also incredibly racially insensitive. By the mid-20th century, recognising the inappropriateness of these terms, the book was renamed And Then There Were None, derived from the rhyme's final line and resonating with the novel's chilling denouement. The rhyme is crucial to the plot of the book, and features heavily, but many editions will now write “ten little soldiers…” instead.
2905: Scientific Terms from an Egyptian God Dec 4, 2024
The ancient Egyptian god Amun, with his ram's horns, contributed to a number of scientific terms. ‘Ammonite’’ referring to the spiral-shaped fossil, was named for the similar tightly curled horn shape. Less obviously, ammonia’, a pungent compound, and "sal ammoniac," a type of salt, both derive their names from "Horns of Ammon" due to their historical connection with the temple Jupiter Ammon at Siwa in Egypt, where these substances were first extracted.
Interestingly, this connection has no relation to the biblical figure Ammon, or the Ammonites, an ancient Semitic people. The "horns of Jupiter" refer to a different symbol entirely. As far as the connection of "Jupiter Ammon” the figures were both depicted with horns, and as Egyptian and Roman cultures grew increasingly close, the worship would become fused, hence it is also referred to as “horns or Jupiter”.
2904: Margerine and Margret Dec 3, 2024
The names Margret and Margery share a common origin in the Greek word margaritēs, meaning "pearl." Margery is a variant of Margret, with its own unique linguistic history. Interestingly, the same Greek root also gives us the word margarine, coined in the 19th century for its pearl-like appearance. This shared etymology highlights a fascinating connection between these names and the spread of margarine, illustrating how language intertwines with both personal identities and everyday products.