2535: Why 'Un-' Doesn't Assimilate Like 'In-' (Ir- Il- Im-) Nov 21, 2021
The prefix 'in-' assimilates to different sounds depending upon the context, becoming 'im-', 'il-', and 'ir-', but this is not true of 'un-', which is similar both semantically but more importantly, phonetically. For instance, 'in-' + 'responsible' is 'irresponsible', but 'un-' + 'responsive' is 'unresponsive'. This was true of the negating prefix 'in-' in Latin whence this use was borrowed, and while 'un-' is distantly related to this, it is really considered to be of a Germanic root where this does not happen.
2287: brief & mirth Mar 21, 2021
Not terribly alike in sound nor in meaning, 'brief' and 'merry' are not only related, except of course if brevity effects happiness. These two words are considered doublets, i.e. they diverged from the same word, but they are quite old and show many traces of historical divergences, such as how 'mirth' is how to express 'merry' as a noun, despite appearing fairly different. That said, the relation between [m] and [b] shouldn't stick out too much between 'mirth' and 'brief' since the former is just the nasalized form of the latter (just try saying [m] with a really blocked up nose) and [f] is a common way the TH becomes alters. Semantically however, these two words only eventually diverged after the original meaning of "short; small; or (counterintuitively) slow" when 'merry' began to describe the passage of enjoyable moments passing quickly, without care, and eventually described the emotion behind that. Initially as well 'merry' had the sense of 'fine' or 'pleasant' in a more general sense than it has today.
2286: wrath + -th = wroth...? Mar 20, 2021
'Wrath' and 'wroth' are obviously related, both in meaning and spelling, but not in the way one might assume upon first glance. Rather than being variants in the way 'swim-swam-swum' or 'raise-rise' are with internal vowel change, the Old English for 'wrath' was 'wrǣþþu', equivalent to 'wroth' plus '-th': the same suffix in 'warm-warmth'. 'Wroth' therefore was originally an adjective (Old English: wrāþ; Middle English: wrað), roughly synonymous with 'cruel'. These two are not immediately related to 'wreath', 'writhe', or 'wry' (each related to the others) though many like to connect the sense of twisting to that of anger, in a similar way to what happened with 'wrong' and 'worry'.
2190: Plural as the Default Dec 13, 2020
Usually, plurals are formed from the singular, but this is not always the case. Exceptionally, in Welsh for instance there are words for which the plural is the base and singulars are formed off of that. This is on top of the fact Welsh has plurals where no non-affixed form exists: ‘merlen’ (a pony) and ‘merlod’ (ponies), but no *merl. Now, take the examples of
Llygod (mice, pl.) but llygoden (mouse, sg.)
Erfin (turnips, pl.) but erfinen (turnip sg.)
These have the same singular ending as with ‘merlen’ but the plural form is indistinguishable from a root, lacking any additional morphology. Keep in mind this is unlike languages like Latin or Finnish where endings indicate not only singular–plural, but also case. There is no particular reason why the singular will resemble the root if one would have to, but looking at how exceptional this is, it could be said to make intuitive sense. Celtic languages did once historically have cases which one could try to explain this with, but so did English, French, and many other such Indo-European languages where this does not happen.
2149: Celtic Mutation, & Vowel Harmony Nov 2, 2020
Learning a language and its irregularities can be a real frustration, but some languages make this harder than others. Hungarian, Finnish, and Turkish feature so-called vowel-harmony, where the vowels near each other change regularly depending on the how affixes are attached (and there are a lot). For instance in Hungarian, -nek/-nak are the same dative suffix, but change depending on the vowel in the root word.
város város-nak 'city'
öröm öröm-nek 'joy'
On the opposite conceptual end, Celtic languages have mutations, meaning—as in the chart below—that based off of the surrounding words there is consonant mutation. For example
coeden goeden nghoeden choeden
meaning 'tree' in Welsh are all different forms of the same word, depending on what comes before it, and this process is how words are formed normally.
Celtic Vowel Mutations (imagine: public domain)
1266: Why 'Go' is Irregular May 29, 2018
The two most commonly used irregular verbs in English are 'to be' and 'to go', but both of them have conjugational forms derived of multiple words. Many so-called 'irregular verbs' are regular within less common systems of conjugation (see the video below here), but 'go' to 'went' follows no system. In fact, 'went' was originally the perfect form of 'wend' which is related to 'wonder' and 'wind'. It follows the same patter of 'lend-lent' and 'bend-bent', meaning that 'wend' is a regular verb, but 'go', which used to be regular too, no longer is. For a comparison with the even-stranger "be-am/are/is-was/were-been" click the link here.