1339: Why Latin was Liturgical Aug 11, 2018

Latin, especially Ecclesiastical Latin, is often associated with Christianity, but it took a non-Roman to do it. Back in the early centuries of Christianity, the religion spread throughout all of the Roman Empire, and this included Berbers of North Africa. The Roman elites at the time stuck with Greek as the liturgical language, but in the 2nd century North Africans used Latin. The 14th Pope, Victor I (pope 189-199) was a Carthaginian Roman, and in many ways introduced Latin to Christianity, which subsequently became the dominant liturgical language in Europe for more than a millennium.
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1338: Acrostics Aug 10, 2018

There are a lot of similarities between initialisms and acronyms, but also there is sometimes confusion between those and acrostics too. While all of them take the first letters (or slightly more) from a series of words and create a mnemonic, what separates them are the outcomes. Initialisms are the simplest wherein only the letters are said, such as F.B.I. and acronyms make up their own words. Acrostics are very similar to acronyms in that it makes a word, but only one that already existed.

1337: leech Aug 9, 2018

Historically, leeches were an animal that doctors and physicians often used medicinally. In Old English in fact, the word for 'doctor', 'remedy', and 'leech' were all the same: lǣċe. This is only because a word thought to approximate *lēgios was the Proto Indo-European for 'doctor' or 'medicine', and this was then applied to the animal 'leech', as these were a popular type of medicine. Indeed, while similar-sounding words for doctor crop up over lots of these such Indo-European words today, in most Germanic languages and Romanian, the name was applied to the animal.

1336: Jamais-vu Aug 8, 2018

People have all sorts of shorthands for laypeople to express the less-usual psychological processes that one may experience, including ‘déjà-vu’, ‘tip-of-the-tongue’ or ‘baader-meinhof phenomenon'. Related to all of these is the less-commonly used ‘jamais-vu’, which describes the feeling of familiarity to something completely new. This is not strictly linguistic, and is sometimes associated with amnesia and epilepsy, but often people will describe this sense as it relates to newly learned words, or words repeated ad nauseam.

1335: Welsh in Patagonia Aug 7, 2018

The best ways to preserve a language spoken by a population are to have relative isolation and institutions to support it. This is how Welsh is still spoken in a Patagonia, where the community has resided for 150 years. In the towns of Trelew and Trevelin there are three schools taught at least partly in Welsh, which gives the community a boost in terms of making sure that the language won't simply die out, and will have some more practical uses. While it is true that just about all of that community also speaks Spanish, the relative separation that that region provides from larger areas also makes the language less likely to be abandoned by that one community, unlike what may happen in a larger city.
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1334: Overt Prestige Aug 6, 2018

People change the way they speak to fit in with small groups, as was described yesterday, but the reverse happens as well. If one way of speaking, be it pronunciation, lexicon or whatever else, those overtly prestigious variables can help to make anyone sound of higher status, whatever that might mean in the context of the conversation. Going back and forth between manners of speaking is called ‘code-switching’. Women are far more likely to chance the way that they speak to use overt prestige than men, as traditionally there were fewer ways for women to elevate their statuses if they were not in the workforce.
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1333: Covert Prestige Aug 5, 2018

Accents are relatively easy to impersonate, but they also change subconsciously. As people move around in different groups, be it by age, gender, socioeconomic, geography, etc., the way they would speak changes to become more accommodating. The variable here is "covert prestige": when way of using language is seen as more useful in a certain group. Politicians are often criticised for modifying their accents or lexicons depending upon where they are, but most of the time this goes on unnoticed by the speaker. Another key factor for triggering this switch is formality, and this will be talked about tomorrow.
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1332: Palindromes Aug 4, 2018

As this is the 1331st Word Facts post, the focus of today is on palindromes.
Conceptually these are pretty straightforward: something with the same spelling read in either direction; it is usally a word, but can refer to numbers, music, etc.. There are also other forms of constrained speech which use lines of symmetries, such as word-squares, which is an acrostic that reads the same left-to-right as up-to-down. One famous example found in Pompeii even depicts a word-square that is also a meaningful palindrome from Latin, generally thought to mean something to the effect of "the farmer uses a wheel for his work".
SATOR
AREPO
TENET
OPERA
ROTAS

Normal palindromes, however, can be single words, like 'civic', phrases like 'racecar', numbers such as 1331, or be whole sentences, such as Peter Hilton's "Doc, note: I dissent. A fast never prevents a fatness. I diet on cod". To see more about the etymology of this word, check out this link.
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1331: Researchers' Caution about Proto-World Aug 3, 2018

Some linguists have tried to argue for the existence of a proto-language labeled Proto-World that has lead to all subsequent ones, but this is mostly not believed. Somewhat less extreme conclusions from less academic sources however, are often displayed as being fundamentally human in some way or another, and researchers often try to clarify that. Even researchers who make observations such as the rarity of words for first person singular pronouns to contain consonants like [p], [b], [t], [s], [r] and [l] are qui, for instance, will make it clear that when this happens, usually certain words are older or that the research is only looking at selective words, and shouldn't be taken to be consistent across the board.
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1330: Semordnilaps Aug 2, 2018

People are naturally very good at spotting patterns without even trying too much. In addition to all of the anagrams, palindromes, and other such patterns, there is the so-called 'semordnilap'; these are words with a different meaning when spelt backwards, and the name was chosen by Martin Gardiner as it it the reverse of 'palindromes'. An example of this is the word 'stressed', which is 'desserts' spelled backward, and of course 'semordnilap' is a semordnilap itself. Comment some of your own favorites.
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1329: Feminine as Neutral Aug 1, 2018

A fiancé(e) may be a special someone, but linguistically it is special as well. Most of the time in English, when there is an option for a word to be either masculine or feminine, the option will be masculine, as has been discussed here before and is evident in the ongoing use of words like 'actor'. However, both fiancé and fiancée (masculine and feminine respectively) are pronounced the same in English, and the pronunciation is in-line with the French pronunciation for the French form. This could be a matter of English readers being confused by the accent mark, or luck, but this option is certainly rarer. This is also true of words like 'blond(e)' which takes the French feminine pronunciation, but that word has existed in English for 400-odd years before 'fiancé(e)'.
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1328: Early Linguistic Anthropology Jul 31, 2018

Before certain achievements in the fields of anthropology and archeology, were developed, linguists would study languages and draw conclusions about migration patterns and other history. To be clear, this happens today as well, but usually in tandem with genetic information and anthropology. Some outrageous claims, even for the time included the ideas that Germans settled Ethiopia, or that Norwegians settled in North America. The latter happens to be true, however, both of these were tested in the early 17th century based upon lists of "core vocabularies" (familial terms, numbers, natural features, etc.) and other more superficial relations, which were quickly disregarded by academics. The explanations they had will be discussed tomorrow.

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1327: wifi Jul 30, 2018

In addition to 'SOS', there are plenty of words which are neither acronyms or initialisms, but are popularly though to be. Sometimes this happens from in folk etymologies, such as the fabled origins or 'posh', but some words can be misleading. 'Wifi' is neither an acronym nor initialism, but many people believe that it is from the phrase "wireless fidelity". In fact, it just comes from a shortening of 'wireless' and the 'fi' was added on from the pattern of 'hi-fi', but is meaningless. In fairness, 'hifi' in music is short for 'high fidelity', so in a roundabout way, the mistaken etymology of 'wifi' is not so far off.

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1326: chief and chef Jul 29, 2018

Even though both 'chief and 'chef' come to English via French, French doesn't distinguish between the two quite the same way. As can be seen with the Anglicized pronunciation of CH in 'chief', that term has existed in English longer and has had more time to be assimilated, coming from Old French, while 'chef' is only two or so centuries old in English. 'Chef' however comes from "chef de la cuisine" ("head of the kitchen") and so is associated with food in English, but in French it is just synonymous with 'boss' or 'head', or, if you will, 'chief'. The term 'chief' may now have the sense in English of a tribal leader, but this is completely unrelated to any French intentions or origins.
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1325: Spelling and Loan Words: Countries Jul 28, 2018

Spelling is extremely influential to the way that people speak. This occasionally happens when words are loaned from language to another, and was especially true before audio-recordings were readily available. This is why the country Laos is often pronounced with an [s] at the end, even though neither the French colonists nor the locals ever did so, yet Kiribati—only called such since 1979—is known to be pronounced with an [s] at the end even though it is spelled with none. In both cases, the spelling is from non-English orthography being adopted directly, Laos from French which often has silent terminal letter, and Kiribati, which is from the native language whose alphabet has no S and instead uses TI.
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1324: The Oddity of "Aren't I?" Jul 27, 2018

In general, people tend to be pretty good at following rules of grammar, with the exception of phrases. There are a variety of ways that English speakers opt for conventions over rules, but with such little morphology, there aren’t so many occasions to use incorrect verb-forms anyway. However, in the utterance “Aren’t I…?” the verb clearly does not agree with the subject; this is not the case for the statement “I am (not)”, or the affirmative question “Am I?”. This really is because people are quite used to contractions in this type of situation, but for some reason “amn’t” did not catch on outside of a few regional dialects, and moreover the typical contraction “I’m” is in the wrong order for here. It is thought that one of the many causes for “ain’t”—as there was more than one factor—was the elision of the older “amn’t”. Check out the new video, out today: https://youtu.be/2u5SP0tg6Fs

Why People Have Accents

1323: trousers Jul 26, 2018

There are lots of uses for the '-er' suffix, including indicating agents or actions, but other times it is completely coincidental. There are a few cases however, which are a bit harder to discern. One such term is 'trouser', because while there is no word meant by 'trouse' today, there did used to be. Related to the rare word 'trews', which is a Scottish regimental pant, 'trousers' comes from the Scotts 'triubhas'. The '-r' then is clearly not to show agency of any kind, and is instead thought to have been added due to its relation to the word 'drawers'.

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1322: Kidnapping and Intercontinental Interpretation Jul 25, 2018

Some of the earliest linguistic observation was by missionaries, but some of the earliest intercontinental communication was by kidnappers. The likes of Columbus—who brought with him an Arabic interpreter—and Cortéz, when they first made contact in the Americas, would have had to use drawings and ad hoc gestures, but since it takes a long time to learn a language, especially one with no relation whatsoever, it would be a lengthy process to learn the language form anyone. However, for children, this process took slightly less time, and children would probably be less resistant in general, so all of these early explorers and conquerors tended to kidnap a local child who would soon act as an interpreter for the linguistic area. This was especially useful in Mesoamerica wherein one language could be spoken over a large region, and it is because of the success of these interpreters who could communicate with many tribes that the region was conquered so quickly and totally.

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1321: The Effects of Babel Jul 24, 2018

Like any science, linguistics has been used for various agendas. For instance, some people used to believe—and tried to prove—that Hebrew was the world's first language, but while the Afro-Asiatic family dates back farther than just about any other, it is certainly not the first. Moreover, many early scholars attempted to show that Hebrew, Latin, and Greek were all related, even though Hebrew is completely different structurally. Both of these early attempts tried to relate what was known about languages at the time to the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel, and was a hotly contested issue from the start to the finish of the Enlightenment period. These were attempts to make sense of language and linguistic history were early attempts at philology and what would later become the field of linguistics.

Read more about this topic here.