1377: i- Sep 18, 2018

With any piece of language, especially when it comes choosing synonyms, carries with it certain connotations. Latin and Greek are the languages usually preferred for science, medicine, and academia; this is both to keep it from getting confused with workaday words, but also it is culturally accepted as having more gravity. Likewise, technological words have their own cultural influences, even though it is newer. The 'i-' prefix in names like 'iPod' does have meaning—it stands for 'Internet'—but having started in 1994, this practice now is used to denote anything with online capabilities built in. As much as any other practice historically, it is merely a quick way to convey that whatever the matter in question is, it should be compartmentalized in a certain way.

1376: scapegoat Sep 17, 2018

There are plenty of terms that now are used in everyday language but when broken down make no sense. One such term is 'scapegoat', given that 'scape' doesn't have any independent meaning, and 'goat' seems like it could be almost a random term here. However, like with 'ostracize' the modern meaning can only be understood through history. In this case, in Leviticus it is described how a Jewish leader could banish a goat that had both literally and symbolically taken the sins of the people as a sort of replacement. Now, the idea of 'scapegoating' has less to do with sin, and relates more to blame for social or economic woes, but has ancient roots.

1375: primitive and primate Sep 16, 2018

Often, looking at patterns in suffixes and pronunciation thereof can lead to insights about words' histories. For instance, it is often the case that nouns and verbs such as 'graduate' have the same ending when written but are pronounced consistently differently, but in the rare case when this is not possible and there is only a verb, like with 'create', there will be an adjective 'creative' with '-ive'. Coincidentally, the noun 'primate' seems to have a correlate with 'primitive', but aside from the slightly different spelling, this is not much more than historical luck, as neither is a direct derivative of the other. Instead, they simply both come from the Latin 'primus' meaning 'first'.

1374: Postpositive Adjectives: Head Verbs

Generally, in English adjectives come before nouns, but there are exceptions, this is sometimes for pronouns, or simply specific adjectives like 'ago', but also this is sometimes from certain verbs. Linking verbs do this (e.g. 'funny' in 'the man is funny'), but other ones such as 'keep' or ones related to speech such as 'proclaimed' can allow for the adjective to follow, such as in 'the man keeps clean', or 'the psychiatrist proclaimed her patient sane', but 'he is a patient sane' on without the head verb doesn't make sense. If you have other examples, write a comment below.

1373: Discrimination from Accents Sep 14, 2018

Though generally not the most sinister, discrimination based on accent and or dialect is a large problem. Because there can to an association between race or ethnicity and manner of speaking, people transfer over negative views that they previously held, but because speech can be associated generally to gender, sexuality, age or class, the associations that lead to discrimination are inevitable. Moreover, it is a difficult issue to combat, as accents and dialects are hard to pin down in a specific way, and also because most of the reactions are involuntary, it is very difficult to prove on a case-by-case basis. Some people have proposed universal languages in the past to solve these types of problems, but as is evident with the increasing acceptance of English as the dominant global language, this could only ever go so far anyway.

1372: Abstraction from Pictographs Sep 14, 2018

All of the major writing systems began with images rather than letters. Even while there are a wide array of writing systems described here, all either originated from others or were originally abstracted from pictures. This was partly practical, since most writing was for simple commercial transactions, but also because the idea of representing words—which are already pretty abstract—by representing only the sounds with arbitrary symbols is not a quick logical step to make, as history has proven.

1371: hibernia and hibernation Sep 12, 2018

The following post comes from a fan question.
The word in Latin for 'Ireland' is 'Hibernia', still seen today in the combining form 'Hiberno-', and the word 'Hibernianism' (an Irish idiom), but this is not related to the word 'hibernate', or any other term related to winter such as 'hibernal'. Both of those sets of words do come from Latin, and while Ireland may be cold, 'Hibernia' is not originally Romantic. Originally it is from Celtic—not Irish Gaelic—from the word for a goddess 'Ériu' but the word only entered Latin via Greek 'Iverna'. This, in turn, has led certain people to claim that the Irish descended from or were slaves of Greeks. Whether or not this is true, the Latin 'hibernus' ('winter') is ultimately of romantic origin, and only coincidentally sounds similar. However, many Latin writers and ethnographers made puns out of this similarity.
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1370: Direction of Writing Sep 11, 2018

In the Western world, writing tends to be from left-to-right first, and then up-to-down, but when writing originated, it was up-to-down then right-to-left. All of this was due to the medium however, and the switches are not random. When writing was just beginning, it was primarily for keeping inventories, and so was written in a typical list-format still used today, and because tools needed to be pressed into clay, early writers—if the word even applies—would use the typically dominant hand. However, later on, to avoid smudging, the letters were rotated and written right-to-left to that impressions would not be smudged before they dried. Later on again, the Greek alphabet and all its descendants began to write from left-to-right to avoid further smudges as most people write with the right hand.

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1369: Learning off Old Materials Sep 10, 2018

Following of yesterday's post, a necessary element of living languages is that they change. So while this poses a challenge for revival efforts, this is most often an issue for people interested in studying a language with few speakers and or little documentation. Famously this was a challenge for those studying Dyirbal, which within a generation changed to become unintelligible, and records needed to be almost entirely remade, but even in popularly learned languages, this can can be a challenge. Usually, unlike with Young Dyirbal, the grammar doesn't change significantly, but enough of lexicon may alter that someone learning off of old materials may come across as stilted.

1368: Living vs. Merely Revived Sep 9, 2018

One thing that separates Modern Hebrew from Cornish is that it changed. Like any second language learner will know, sometimes the textbook-version of a language will be technically correct but sound odd to native language speakers. This is because languages are constantly evolving, and the writers of language learning tools can both only work so fast, and want to try to follow patterns more closely than otherwise. When efforts to revive a language take place, one thing everyone involved must keep in mind is that the original form of the language should not be identical to what's being taught. This, in large part, is why even when languages like Cornish or Latin are taught to people—including children—they are still considered dead, but Hebrew is living; only a living language can evolve.

1367: Rearranging Sentences around Pronouns Sep 8, 2018

English speakers have no problem with impersonal pronouns like 'it' such as "it is raining". While the word-order in most sentences with a predicate adjective (one after a form of 'to be') can be switched even if it sounded a bit peculiar or archaic to fit different syntactic structures, such as "a man is foolish who..." and "it is a foolish man who". This is not a hard rule however, because while many sentences demand an impersonal pronoun, just about any iteration of the above sentence is possible, such as in "foolish is the man who never reads a newspaper" (-August von Schlözer) though this may not be the most common.

1366: merry and mirth Sep 7, 2018

One of the reasons oft cited for the maintenance of English's inconsistent orthography is history, and while this leads to clues of etymology that would otherwise be difficult to recognize, sometimes it is less helpful. For instance, the word 'merry' is related to the word 'mirth'. Think about the meaning this should seem reasonable, and moreover, 'merry' is an adjective with an adjectival suffix, and seeing a noun with a nominal suffix from the same root should make sense. However, the spelling is not indicative of this, making the confusing spelling in English have less significance perhaps.

1365: Discrimination: Names Sep 6, 2018

There are many different ways to categorize verbs. There are head verbs, main verbs, infinitives, small verbs, etc, but sometimes even tricker to wrap one's head around is the difference between intransitive, transitive, and ditransitive verbs. The first cannot take a direct object, such as how nothing can be either 'smiled' or 'slept', and transitive verbs do have the ability to take one, sometimes necessarily for semantic reasons. Ditransitive are the rarest, and can take two direct objects such as 'gave' in "he gave the man the paper".

1364: Transitivity in Verbs Sep 5, 2018

There are many different ways to categorize verbs. There are head verbs, main verbs, infinitives, small verbs, etc, but sometimes even tricker to wrap one's head around is the difference between intransitive, transitive, and ditransitive verbs. The first cannot take a direct object, such as how nothing can be either 'smiled' or 'slept', and transitive verbs do have the ability to take one, sometimes necessarily for semantic reasons. Ditransitive are the rarest, and can take two direct objects such as 'gave' in "he gave the man the paper".

1363: Different From, Different To, and Different Than September 4, 2018

The word 'synonym' can sometimes be misleading, as while words may mean the same as each other according to a dictionary, one will likely be more popular, or hold additional connotation for a slew of reasons. For instance, on paper, 'different from', different to' and 'different than' are all essentially the same, but in practice this is not the case. 'Different from' has traditionally been the most common and the most accepted, so while 'different to' may mean the same thing, its relative rarity—especially in America—makes it sound jarring to some. 'Different than' is growing in popularity in part by exposure, but also that it can more freely allow another clause to follow, and therefore lends itself better to a variety of sentences and structures.

1362: Future of Spelling Sep 3, 2018

Back in the days of Chaucer or Shakespeare, orthography represented the way that people spoke at the time far better than English writers do now, due to very old conventions that may seem too far along to change. Nevertheless, there is some modification even today. Words like ‘through’ an led ‘though’ are often spelt ‘thru’ and ‘tho’ respectively. Moreover, American spellings still differ someone from British ones to be slightly ore apt. Even words like ‘queensboro’ for the so-named bridge in Queens, NY uses ‘boro’ rather than ‘borough’, with seemingly extra letters.

1361: Literary Influences on Estonian Sep 2, 2018

We can say that Shakespeare had a great deal of influence on English, but this is not nearly as significant as the influence that other poets and writers have had on other languages, like on Estonian. The modern standard dialect was heavily influenced by a reformer, Johannes Aavik, in the 1880's who thought that the language needed to be more beautiful and added more vowels to some of the words. He also created a dictionary of Estonian and included many words that he made up from no other etymological background than his own imagination. These words, even as common as 'naasma' ('to return') and 'ese' ('object') are still now widely used. For more on this, visit this link.

1360: Swine and Pig Sep 1, 2018

There are lots of fairly obscure words used to describe animals, including scientific names, terms of venery, or even meat-names sometimes. ‘Swine’ is different though, because while it is generally more general than ‘pig’ it is not the scientific name (genus of ‘sus’) or the name for meat, ‘pork’, or even the adjective ‘porcine’. ‘Pig’ though is also general, not referring to only one species, so ‘swine’ is a rare example of a synonym for an animal that doesn’t differ by its language of origins either.

1359: False Linguistic History Aug 31, 2018

Linguistics—like any discipline—is a subject to bias and agendas. It has been discussed before how many early philologists tried to relate Hebrew, Greek, and Latin for religious reasons, but scholars also tried to relate New World languages to other European languages. By comparing selectively chosen words and few aspects of grammar, some early linguists made claims that some of the early inhabitants of the Americas were, for instance, Norwegians. While is some historical basis for this idea, this is not true to that extent, and is simply Eurocentric in nature. Most linguists at the time dismissed many of these types of idea, however.

1358: Numerical Punctuation Aug 30, 2018

Like the quotation mark, the symbols (.) and (,) in mathematics used for separating numbers visually are used differently in different cultures, even though it was not always this way. In most parts of Europe, the (,) is used to separate decimals from whole numbers, and the (.) is used to separate groups of 3-digits to make long numbers easier to interpret; in the US and Britain this is the exact opposite. The reason for this is that multiplication sign (•) was commonly confused for (.), but since English people still largely used (X) for showing multiplication, the British continued with this practice, as is typical for most places outside of Europe.