2140: Semantically Similar; Etymologically Different: -ment & -wise Oct 24, 2020
A lot of word in English that take the nominalizing ‘-ment’ suffix come from Romance languages, but this is not really related to the adverbial suffix in French ‘-ment’ such as with ‘finale’ + ‘-ment’ for ‘finalement’ (finally), nor its equivalents in other Romance languages like the Spanish ‘-mento’. This comes from the Latin the ablative form of ‘mens’, which means ‘mind’. In effect therefore, it is conceptually and functionally similar to the English ‘-wise’ that mean ‘in the manner of’ like ‘clockwise’, but which comes from a word (‘wise’) meaning ‘mind; manner’. The Latin was a feminine word, and hence the forms of the words to which it affixes are feminine, such as ‘vivement’ (lively) coming from ‘vive’, the feminine form of ‘vif’. The English -ment is also from Latin, but in this case it comes from a completely different word, ‘-mentum’.
Watch the newest video, about historical languages.
Get Word Facts Merch.
Support on Patreon.com/wordfacts
2129: -ling Oct 13, 2020
The suffix '-ling' is used as a suffix to make nouns, often but not always diminutive. These range from things like occupations (e.g. 'underling' and 'hireling'), terms for relation like 'sibling', 'youngling' and 'darling' (sort of), and certainly the diminutive uses like 'duckling', 'gosling', or ‘sapling' and even some rarer ones like 'nestling' (bird chicks, or also baby rabbits). 'Fingerling' is the name for baby bony fish too, following this pattern, but the first half refers to the fact that young salmon among other types of these fish have stripes. There are plenty more, and while this suffix is somewhat productive, it is used generally for older words these days.
1802: wizard vs. dullard Nov 20, 2019
'Wizard' and 'dullard' today mean very different things, one of which is magical and the other is simply pejorative, but they come from same template. Indeed, the '-ard' suffix is simply to nominalize an adjective. In the case of 'dullard', this is easily parsed meaning 'dull person', but 'wizard' parses as 'wiz' originating as 'wise'. The early meaning of this word was a sagely, non-magical person. There will be more on this tomorrow.
Support Word Facts on patreon.com/wordfacts
1715: Diminutive Suffixes in German Dialect Aug 25, 2019
About 80% of Yiddish vocabulary is from German, more or less depending on dialect, but when it comes to grammar the number is harder to discern. For instance, it is common for Yiddish to have the diminutive suffix -l (ל-), even using this in place of the word for small 'kleyn' (קליין) as is the case in German. For instance, 'city' in German is 'Stadt' (pronounced like SH-t [ʃt]), and in Yiddish it's 'shtot' (שטאָט), but a town—when not a village—is sometimes 'Kleinstadt' or just 'kleine Stadt' in German but 'shtetl' (שטעטל) in Yiddish. However, this Yiddish feature is Germanic, not Slavic or Hebraic, and does appear infrequently in some dialects. For instance, the Austrian town Neustadtl an der Donau (literally: New Little Town on the Danube) uses this convention, which is not really standard for German.
1277: Affixes on Loan Words: -ous Jun 9, 2018
There are a lot of affixes in English which are able to attach them selves to a lot of words, but some are less productive. For instance, the suffix '-ous' can affix itself to words like 'danger' or 'courage', but this is not always where it will be present. In this situation, it is a suffix, but many if not most of the word where it is found cannot be parsed because those words were adopted wholesale from French (mostly Old French), and Latin, such as 'horrendous', 'enormous', or 'tremendous'.
Make sure also to check out Word Facts' video which came out today with an analysis of the film, Arrival.
1261: Clusivity May 24, 2018
English lacks a lot of the semantic variety that pronouns in Spanish have. To start, English has neither a distinction for formal pronouns nor second person plural, both of which are present in Spanish, but there are still many more facets which neither language have. Clusivity is a feature of language in which something can either be inclusive (of interlocutors, tense etc) or exclusive. For instance, 'we' is both inclusive and exclusive; it has the ability to include everyone—either literally each human, or just a speaker, addressee, and third person—or it can exclude the addressee, such as in "we like you" where 'we' does not include the listener. Other languages include this distinction, and will have three first-person pronouns, which may be wholly distinct pronouns, or sometimes will coincide with the informal and formal forms for the first person.
To see some hypothetical Word Facts, visit Patreon.com/wordfacts. Check out the latest Youtube video too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqYX2heE0T0
1242: Pronouns versus Anaphors in English May 4, 2018
English doesn't have a 4th person for verbs, and indeed most languages don't. However, it is with the 4th person that Greenlandic (Kalaallisut) distinguished between when a third person object of a third person subject (e.g. 'him' in "he loves him") is referential or not. Instead, English uses 'himself' and 'him' to show when one is referential and the other is not. Therefore, any direct object pronoun of a third person subject will refer to another person; in “Brian loves him”, ‘him’ can only refers to someone else, always. Where this gets tricky in English but wouldn't necessarily in Greenlandic is when there are multiple clauses, e.g. "Brian said that she loves him" where 'him' could refer to anyone except for the 'she' in question, because even though 'himself' exists, it cannot appear here *"Brian said that she loves himself". These are rules which any English speaker knows without being aware of necessarily.
Today there was a new Word Theory on the Patreon, so check it out: https://www.patreon.com/posts/de-pressed-word-18598896?utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook&utm_campaign=postshare
1228: English Right-Hand Rule Apr 20, 2018
There is a reason why negative affixes are going to be prefixes in English is the same reason why derivational affixes such as '-al', '-ness' and '-ate' will be suffixes. English has what is called the "English right-hand rule" which states that usually, the right-most element is the head of the word, and will determine the syntax and or meaning. This is true of most adjectives, compounds where the first element acts almost like an adjective, and affixes. With the latter, negating prefixes such as 'in-', 'un-' and 'non-' all can be attached to adjectives (among other things) and the word will still remain an adjective (or whatever else) whereas the aforementioned suffixes will all make a word of one part of speech become a word of another lexical class. This is the case with most affixes in other Germanic languages as well, though there are a few notable exceptions within each, and is one of many significant reasons why English will not be considered a Romance language despite strong influences from vocabulary.
To see some hypothetical Word Facts, visit Patreon.com/wordfacts. Check out the Youtube too: https://youtu.be/Kgg5P7IIzvk
1218: Inflection for Proper Nouns Apr 10, 2018
In heavily inflected languages like Kalaallisut (a.k.a West Greenlandic), names change in form where necessary for case. For instance, the capital of Greenland, Nuuk in English, is also 'Nuuk' in the ergative case, but in the locative (i.e. locations like "in Nuuk") becomes 'Nuumi'. This is also true of names for people etc.. With English however, there is a general aversion to modifying proper nouns. Partly this is because case is limited in English, but even where there is case such as the genitive -'s following an [s] or [z] in a coda, the word doesn't change, such as "chris's (dog)". The other reason is that it is conceptually odd; the other common inflectional morphology in English is with the plural, but it is uncommon for there ever to be a plural proper noun. For more on this, see the video about proper nouns out today.
376: -ty Dec 19, 2015
Everyone learns the number system in preschool and kindergarten, and in comparison to certain other languages (like French) the number system is relatively easy. After the first nine numbers, the larger units (hundreds, thousands) are counted by simply putting a number in front. Decades, and teens are both irregular and due to Old English forms of ten. Fourteen, for example is four+tīen, and the 'ty', or in Old English, 'tig', is another form used for groups of tens.