2678: Strong Verbs Are Weakening–But Not Uniformly Apr 20, 2024

In English, there are strong verbs, those modified with internal vowel changes (e.g. “swim; swam; swum” or “rise; raise”) while weak verbs derive via an affix (e.g. “start; started”). Far and away, weak verbs are more common in English. Despite the occasional creation of a new strong form like “sneak; snuck”, with ‘snuck’ becoming more popular than ‘sneaked’ by the start of the 2010’s, strong verbs are increasingly weakening. For instance, the past tense of ‘knit’ has traditionally been ‘knit’ (no change), likewise with ‘put’, ‘wed’, and ‘whet’, but all of these aside from the most commonly used, ‘put’, are starting to take the ‘-ed’ suffix past tense. However, when this is taken into context, the waters are muddied, as some uses are changing faster than others.

Take “lawfully wedded [wife]”, which has been more popular than “lawfully wed [wife]”, at least in writing, since about the year 1800. Likewise, the phrase “wed to the idea” has never been in mainstream use, rather the phrase is with “wedded”. Compare that to the phrase “we wed” and “we wedded” where the weak form, ‘wedded’, actually peaked in the late 1820’s and is almost unheard of today, at least in writing. This verb is funny anyway insofar as it is almost never used in the present tense imperfect, and along with ‘whet’ is probably helped for that reason.

Things are different with “knit sweater” compared to “knitted sweater”, where the weak ‘knitted’ is actually now less popular since the late 1960’s, but “I knitted a sweater”, compared to “I knit a sweater” is more popular since the late 1990’s. It should be noted in the last example that it is also highly variable, and the relative popularity of ‘knit’ or ‘knitted’ as a verb switched several times throughout the 20th century.

2561: aorist Dec 17, 2021

People will be familiar with past or present tense, but fewer will have heard of the aorist tense. This is really only applied to Ancient Greek verbs which were simple and undefined. Unlike the typical understanding of tense, this exists outside a description of time, but still exists alongside all verbal moods (e.g. indicative; subjunctive), persons, voices (e.g. active; passive), etc.. This is used for many purposes, one narrative use being for stating things as truthful, or generally consistent, not bound by time per se.

2497: Antipassive Voice Oct 13, 2021

People might be familiar with the active and passive voice—and fans of Word Facts may remember discussion of the passival [1]—but less likely to be acquainted with the antipassive voice. This doesn't really exist in Indo-European languages, and instead is a feature mostly of ergative-absolutive languages [2]. The reason for this is that while the passive voice deletes the agent and promotes the object to be the subject, the antipassive operates by deleting the object of the sentence, and promoting the agent. This might sound like it would just be a normal active form then—hence the term 'antipassive'—but in ergative-absolutive languages, the subject takes different endings depending upon whether there is an object of the verb. In this way, the antipassive promotes a noun that would take the ergative case to be in the absolutive.

[2] https://www.wordfacts.org/blog/2017/10/1048-no-subjects-in-ergative-languages.html

2489: Referential Pronouns in Non-Standard Constructions Oct 5, 2021

"I love myself some coffee" while allowed in some dialects for emphasis, is not strictly grammatical. It could be formed as an omission of the words "to get", as in "I [would] love to get myself..." Indeed, this environment could also allow 'me' in place of 'myself' ("I love me some coffee") which is even less standard but insofar as it is used, shows that the version with 'myself' might not be formed with the underlying structure of "...to get...". It should also be noted that the use of 'some' before a mass noun (i.e. it is understood as a mass and not separate units) cannot exist without the referential pronoun, either 'myself' or 'me', as "I love some coffee" would instead indicate some specificity instead of mere emphasis, that is, not all coffee here.

2478: Hebrew Jussive: Not Just the Future Sep 24, 2021

There is a myth that Hebrew has no jussive subjunctive (such as English "let's" or "let there be"), as in most cases this looks to be the imperfect , signifying uncompleted action. For instance, the line in the opening of the Bible:

יהי אור ויהי־אור (yahi ohr vayahi ohr) can be translated as "let there be light, and there was light" or "there will be light, and there was light". In some instances this has led to obvious mistranslations, because the truth is in most contexts, there is no difference in the form of the word between the two. There are some instances where the two would differ however—proving that there is a difference in form—such as: ישם in

ישא יי פניו אליך וְיָשֵׂם לך שלום

pronounced (yasem) for the subjective meaning "may he place" as opposed to יָשִׂים (yasim) "he will place".

2474: Hebrew's (Potential) Accusative Case Sep 20, 2021

Biblical Hebrew uses the suffix -ה (a-) to indicate motion-towards: a common feature of the accusative case, which otherwise is used to mark direct objects. Hebrew already has a direct object marker for definite nouns—‎‎את (es)—but no way to mark indefinite nouns. Historically however, it would seem that this suffix -ה (a-) would have, whether or not the noun was definite. This accusative form was mostly lost with this one lingering use and a few potential vestigial forms in vocabulary, but some have even suggested that on top of that an early variety of Hebrew had a nominative */-u/ ending for subjects, and genitive */-i/ ending for possessives, but there is less evidence here.

2459: Semitic Definite Article Sep 5, 2021

Two Semitic languages, Hebrew and Arabic, have on the surface two differently sourced definite articles, ה־ (ha-) in Hebrew and ٱلْـ‎ (al-) in Arabic, but some linguistics think otherwise. They surmise that originally there was a form هل۔/הל־ (hal-) used in a proto-Semitic language and as they two diverged, this form did as well, splitting in two separate ways. Not everyone agrees with this, and even those who would agree to the idea principle, they propose different forms. Some of these include in Arabic لا (lā) either through metathesis or as a different particle that eventually took on the meaning of a determiner.

2424: Hebrew Definite Attributive Articles Aug 10, 2021

In Hebrew, the definite article ה־ (ha-) not only applies to nouns but to attributive adjectives leading to the difference in

"a small boy" ילד קטן (yeled katan) compared to "the small boy" הילד הקטן (hayeled hakatan).

Part of the benefit of this system is that it distinguishes these attributive adjectives from being understood as a predicate adjective (i.e. "the boy is small"). This would still be a function when there is no definite article marker, such as with proper nouns. This is one argument for the idea the ה־ prefix is a semantic and morphological feature, rather than per se a definite article in its own right, though this could be contested.

2421: Mesoclitics Aug 7, 2021

It is not difficult to imagine clitics—the shortened half of a contraction—at the beginning or end of a word, but they can also exist in the middle. While this is by no means the most common manner for a clitic to take, so-called mesoclitics are when the clitic is found between the stem (or 'host') and an affix. For instance, Portuguese and many other Western Romance languages will insert forms of object pronouns in between verbs and the verbal suffix, such as perhaps most prominently Portuguese:

"Escrever-te-ei uma carta" (I will write you a letter)

where the object pronoun 'te' ([to] you) is placed within 'escreverei' (I will write), which itself is made from the verb 'escrever' + the ending '-ei'. Here also, it affects the stress. It is also theoretically possible that having a clitic within a root itself exists, but reports of this are still novel. If confirmed, these would be known as 'endoclitics'.

2416: Particles Aug 2, 2021

In grammatical terms, a particle is a function word associated with word without any lexical meaning of its own. These would include terms like 'not', 'oh', and 'to' (as a marker for infinitives) since these are integral for overall meaning and syntactic structure, but cannot be defined independently. In this way they are considered to be in their own lexical class, though in older definitions a particle was just anything that could not be inflected and could be part of other lexical classes like articles, conjunctions, prepositions, and even adverbs. Since particles indicate grammatical relation between words, language with lots of inflection tend to have fewer, and languages with little to no inflection, like Mandarin, will use particles instead of things like affixes to indicate grammatical functions.

2415: Clitics Aug 1, 2021

Contractions of words can occur from a shortening at the beginning, known as an proclitic or at the end of that word, known as an enclitic. These are considered then to join with the following word, such as 'you' shortened to y' in 'y'all' or to the preceding word, such as 'will' to 'll in 'he'll'. Both of these types of elements are produced from a general lack of emphasis and often stress, making them phonetically dependant on the words to which they attach, even if syntactically it is a whole word. This is why in orthography, different languages have many varying ways of treating clitics.

2406: "For To" Infinitives Jul 21, 2021

There is a non-standard infinitive construction—"for to" as opposed to merely "to"—originating in Northern Ireland, which is used interchangeably with a standard infinitive marker but is particularly used to indicate a purpose clause. This made its way over to North America and in particular the American South which was dominantly settled by Irishmen, Scottsmen, and Welshmen. For instance, in the song Oh! Susanna:

"I'm going to Louisiana / My true love for to see."

This is actually even less standard than its normal use which might look more like, "I want for to meet them" since in that way this can be seen as a variant of other purpose clauses in Standard English which might appear like "I want for Bob to meet them". The difference is that the subject of the main clause (preceded by a small clause) takes the preposition 'for' to mark purpose, whereas in the "for to" example, the subject of the main clause and the small clause are the same.

2383: Inflected Prepositions Jun 27, 2021

Mostly, inflection is thought of as relating to nouns or adjectives, but this process can also be applied to prepositions in certain languages such as those in the Celtic or Semitic families. For instance, the Welsh word meaning 'to him' is 'iddo', which broken down from 'i-' (to) with a special ending, whereas saying *i fe (to + him) would be ungrammatical. These types of words wherein a preposition is modified with person and case are found in very few languages but are seen in Hebrew and Arabic as well where a modified form derived of the personal pronoun can be added to a preposition. A handful of exceptional cases are found such as with Portuguese.

2369: Abessive Case Jun 13, 2021

Finnish is known for its many grammatical cases: an amount that would put Latin to shame. Still, not all of these are as common as others, such as the abbessive case, a.k.a. caritive or privative case. This expresses a lack of something, and would be roughly comparable to the English '-less', for instance in:

raha (money)

rahatta (without money)

but this is increasingly being replaced with other words like 'ilman' meaning 'without' and is already fairly rare to find in normal speech, though still used to some extent in writing. Hungarian also has suffixes and postpositions for this purpose, but the postposition is not considered a suffix and won't have vowel harmony. Other languages, even related languages like Estonian and many Turkic languages use this case fairly productively, so it's not disappearing universally by any means.

2332: Double Negatives for A.I. May 7, 2021

The phrase 'double negative' is pretty vague considering how negatives really operate, and this fact might be increasingly used as a test to see what's a human and what's a computer. For instance, "I ain't got no satisfaction" is a perfectly legitimate, albeit informal phrase which contains two negatives with a negative and emphatic meaning. Moreover, "it's not unusual to be loved by anyone" is also a double negative but with a basically neutral connotation because this is not the same meaning as "it is usual". Indeed it was a description of this structure which led to the understanding of a rule of two negatives in English establishing a positive if vaguer meaning. Likewise, it has been observed that phrases like "there isn't no other way" can be interpreted as either positive or negative depending on tone and other context. This is still and likely will always be difficult for a computer to intuit, and may be used as a tool for discerning man or machine.

2295: Prosodic Stress Mar 29, 2021

In addition to the way that an individual word will have stress, stress in a sentence adds or indeed creates meaning. For instance:

[*x* indicating stress]

*He* didn't rob her (indicates someone else was a robber)

He didn't rob *her* (indicates someone else was robbed)

This sort of differentiation of meaning can be seen in practically any part of a sentences, even though the literal, structural form will be the same. This is known as prosodic stress since it is the prosody of the sentence which acts to add meaning. Any fun examples of this, write in the comments.

2281: Frequentative, Iterative, and Habitual Aspects Mar 15, 2021

There is a general decline in morphology and general grammatical features in English as time goes on. This is by no means universal, but across Indo-European languages this happens not only with words themselves becoming less morphologically complex, but as in the case of the frequentative, habitual and iterative (grammatical) aspects, syntactically simpler. In a nutshell, each of these expressed repeated action, but in different ways, with the frequentative expressing repetition and intensity of action—think 'chatter' [1] from 'chat'—and the iterative aspect signifying repeated action within one instance, such as 'he knocked on the door'. Those two now are generally more dependant on a word's meaning or historical carryover, while the habitual aspect—signalling continual action that may or may not be presently happening e.g. 'Bob runs' (i.e. 'Bob is a runner')—is somewhat productive, and in certain dialects like African American English is extremely productive, relying on the so-called habitual 'be'.

2277: Optative Voice Mar 11, 2021

In certain languages, there is another mood along with indicative, subjunctive, imperative and the like known as the optative expressing a wish, as might be covered in English by 'if only...'. This was common verbal mood across Indo-European languages historically but these have usually been lost in a gradual process of morphological and syntactic simplification, reducing many distinct specific features for less precise periphrastic constructions. Some languages like Sanskrit and Ancient Greek are well known for this, but it is retained in Albanian, Armenian, and Kurdish, as well as non-Indo-European languages like Navajo, Yupik, Turkish and Georgian. English cannot neatly express this, but modal verbs like 'may' in "may you have good health" convey a similar intent, though this is also possible even with the present tense as in "G-d help us". In Albanian this is known as "mënyra dëshirore" or literally "wishing mood".

2255: Hebrew Contronyms Feb 17, 2021

Hebrew has a causative form for verbs which effectively reverses the meaning of the word, so הוא לומד means 'he learns' and הוא מלמד means 'he teaches', from the same root. It also has a number of contronyms that don't need to change form at all. For instance ללכת usually means 'to go' and לבוא usually means 'to come' but in certain cases that can effectively switch, such as in בא השמש (literally: the sun is coming) referring to a Sunset.

2216: Hebrew Causative Jan 8, 2020

In English, there are intensive adverbs or other adjuncts like 'very', 'well' and in the UK, 'bloody' all merely adding emphasis. In other languages, the intensive usually distinguishes the root meaning of a word, effectively the causative changes the intransitivity. For instance, the phrase הוא בא means "he comes" but in the causative form הוא מביא means "he brings" (i.e. he caused something else to 'come'). Hebrew uses many morphosyntactic systems in order to create meaning in verb stems and other prefixes are added for other tenses/aspects.