1435: Mnemonics pt 2: Lyrics Nov 15, 2018
Ever wonder why it can be so easy to memorize favorite song lyrics compared to straight speech? Some of this is probably from the frequency with which people listen to music, but as mentioned yesterday, abbreviations as mnemonics are not simply more to remember and can be helpful. Like with initialisms, it is easier to remember something in a pattern in part because it is easier to see when something is missing from the pattern. This is true of stories as well. Stories today only rhyme usually when they are written for children, but historically epic poems were dominant because oral histories were best, and very often, conveyed lyrically to help with memory, as a way to both break up text into small units and to create a metrical and or musical pattern. In school these methods may also be employed to differentiate important speech from other forms of talking.
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1434: Mnemonics pt 1: Abbreviations Nov 14, 2018
Mnemonics can take lots of forms, but these usually verbal cues—which help with memory—are also just another thing to remember. These can range from simple initialisms and acronyms [1] or be more complicated rhymes and even full lyrics, but these are all easier to memorize than straight speech, and this latter category will be looked at. What all of these do though, even if it may be more to remember, is to provide a sort of rhythm, and moreover provides a way to check if one of the elements of any given initialism is forgotten. After all, these are treated grammatically as distinct words, independent of their wholistic meaning. Indeed, the majority of these initialisms are three letters, even when they shouldn't be, like with DoE (Department of Education), as three is better than two for creating a distinct and memorable pattern.
1433: Definitions for Language Families Nov 13, 2018
English and West Frisian are in the same language family as they are the most similar languages to each other, but Old English would have been a lot more similar. Moreover, around 60% of English's vocabulary is Romantic in origin, and yet English is not considered to have descended from Romance languages. This is somewhat of a quirk of the definition for language families as languages are not considered to be part of the same language family if one is the origin but no longer is spoken. Moreover, the grammar and syntax is far more important for determining the language family than vocabulary.
1432: Effects of Latin Participles Nov 12, 2018
It is because of Latin participles that there is a 't' in 'commit' but an 's' in 'mission', even though they come from the same word. In Latin, it was common that if the stem of a verb ended in a 't' that the participial for would have an 's' there instead. There is no particular reason that this happened, but it affects many languages now. For instance, in English, 'compromise' is a noun and also a verb, and stressed the same way too. In German though, 'Kompromiss' is only the noun, and the verbal form is 'kompromittieren', and indeed comes from this same Latin pattern
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1431: Received Pronunciation Nov 11, 2018
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1430: Oh: Too Meaningful to Define Nov 10, 2018
There are words invented specifically to not have a real meaning, called ghost-words, but some natural words are hard to define. 'Oh', for instance, is an exclamation used to show just about any emotion, including anger, surprise, and joy. Moreover, it is a discourse marker, used to indicate meaning that may relate more to the context of the conversation than to the conversation itself. In this way, 'oh' doesn't really have any definable meaning, and relies solely on the context to imprint meaning onto it.
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1429: Jewry vs. Israel Nov 9, 2018
Over the last century, the term 'Israel' has gained a new meaning, as it refers to the modern nationstate. Before this, it usually denoted 'the Jewish people' or would refer to the ancient kingdom. However, to clear up this newfound confusion, the term 'Jewry', which has existed for hundreds of years, can be and often is used. Indeed, after the land was set aside in the 1920's, the usage of the term 'Jewry' soared, and it clears up the confusion that the term 'Israel' can cause. This can be seen in the graph below.
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1428: Simplification in Language Nov 8, 2018
There are languages with over a dozen genders, languages with 4 or more voices, with clicks, with lots of cases, or with tones, but in general these are rarer than the alternative. Of course, some languages are simpler than others and still complex, but it is usually the case that these features don't exist or indeed fall out of fashion because—by and large—people don't mind phrases that are just as meaningful yet slightly longer, or indeed may even lose some nuance. Even this is true of pronunciation; it is possible that a language could be tonal and have clicks and every other distinguishable sound possible, but while this language would be very quick to articulate, it would be very arduous to learn.
1427: embassy and ambassy Nov 7, 2018
Looking at the history of spelling in English, there is a tendency for spelling to be less consistent in some ways over time. This happens especially when it is difficult to draw certain distinctions, either concerning affixes or other sounds that would otherwise follow a pattern. This is the case with 'embassy' but the related 'ambassador'. Historically the word was written 'ambassy' but as this word changed, 'ambassador' did not change with it. However, even if they do represent different sounds (and this is not necessarily the case) the two do sound very similar before an [m].
1426: East Germanic Languages Nov 6, 2018
Today there are only two main branches of Germanic languages, West Germanic and North Germanic, but there used to also be East Germanic languages. Unfortunately for scholars, the only one of which written samples are found is Gothic. Certainly there were other Germanic languages known to be spoken in Estonia and parts of Russia, but these were all usually German or Yiddish speaking immigrants. There were theoretically dozens of identified tribes who could have used different East Germanic languages. In this way, while the concept of "write or die" exists now in academia, this same principle applies to languages.
1425: baron Nov 5, 2018
Over time, the meaning of words often reverses. These contranyms like 'liberal' and 'peruse' often goes unnoticed. 'Baron' is another of these terms. It originally referred to a type of lord in British nobility, but the term referred to the lowest order. Now, it doesn't refer to land-owning nobility, but instead a very important person in business. Not only has the connotation moved away from nobility, but a baron nowadays is by no means thought of as the lowest order in business, and is usually assigned to quite successful, influential people.
1424: Short and Long Scales Nov 4, 2018
The values of numbers are absolute, but the scales and terminology are not always the same. Largely this is cultural, and is part of the reason that the day, or even geometric circles are divided the way they are. Even with larger numbers there are two scales: the long and short scales. These use a base a base-ten system, so are roughly similar, but the short scale—the more common of the two—uses powers of one thousand (i.e. a 'billion' is a thousand millions) whereas the long scale uses powers of a million. In this scale a 'milliard' is a thousand millions, and a 'billion' is a million millions, so it increases with 'million', 'milliard', 'billion', billiard' etc. This is no longer popular in English, but some languages like German use this system.
1423: Candelabrum or Candelabra Nov 3, 2018
Even though English adopts so many words as easily as it does, no language tends to adopt the morphology with it. For all the words with Latin plurals, like 'flagella' to 'flagella', there are many more words that have become anglicized. However, there are a few for which neither is quite true, such as 'candelabra'. The traditional singular is 'candelabrum' with 'candelabra' as the plural, but in practice it is often singular, with 'candelabras' as the plural. This is now the more common usage, with it now becoming standard. This is true of other words like 'bacterium' and 'datum', but not necessarily to the same extent.
1422: hebrew and the letter h Nov 2, 2018
It is argued that there are no irreligious words that have come to English directly from Hebrew. This is because of geographic distance, but also because for most of Hebrew's history, nothing that could be called English today existed. These factors combined mean that any few words there are usually went through languages like Greek first. Interestingly, neither word for 'Hebrew' in Old French—the language from which the English word was directly loaned—or the original Hebrew '‘iḇrî' had the [h]; most French words don't allow this anyway, but 'Ebreu' wasn't even spelt with one. Nevertheless, both the late Greek and modern English words, relevantly, do. There isn't a specific reason for this—there never really would be—but it could just have been a switch from a glottal stop to an [h], which isn't historically uncommon.
1421: chauvinist Nov 1, 2018
It isn't uncommon for words to come from names like 'john' or 'dolly', but usually these have to be very general. A few specific words, however, come from very particular source, such as 'chauvinistic'. This word, describing an extreme, blind sort of patriotism, as characterized by Nicolas Chauvin, a Napoleonic veteran, in the play 'Cocarde Tricolore' (1831) by the Cogniard brothers.
1420: Real Words from Sci Fi Oct 31, 2018
It's much easier to introduce meaning to an old word than to make a new one. This is true of words in the sci fi genre that have since become common parlance. A few words like this include terms like 'deep space', 'zero-gravity', and arguably 'robotics'. All of these come from fictional works in the 1930's and 1941, and to varying extents, scientists have embraced all of these in an official capacity. The reason that 'robotics' is debatable here is that 'robot' is a much older word, but the first known use with the suffix comes from Liar!, written by Isaac Asimov. In this way, it is a bit like how Shakespeare created words.
1419: practitioner but no practition Oct 30, 2018
The suffix '-er' is very productive, meaning that it can lead to the creation of many news words. With words like 'practitioner' however, this is a sort of overproduction, because there is no 'practition'; there is the term 'practicer', but this is not quite the same as 'practitioner' really. In this case, 'practition' never existed, but 'practician' did. The problem here is that 'practician', which is a synonym of 'practitioner' as it refers to a person, is the origin, but it is not as simple as just adding the suffix in the ordinary way, as this would have been redundant. Rather, it is just a way in which language evolved over time, not always so sensibly.
1418: Verbal 'friend' and Nominal 'react' Oct 29, 2018
Usually, a top-down approach to language change doesn't work; it's why people still end sentences with prepositions for instance, or indeed why we don't speak Old English. It could be argued that this can happen when something popular enough introduces a new way of using language. Famously, 'friend' is now a verb due to Facebook, and while 'befriend' is still used for non-virtual connections, its use is quickly adopted and now quite pervasive. It is not all Facebook's doing however, as the usual phrase was "added as a friend" and things to this effect even on the website; likewise, the increasingly popular nominal 'react' (as in sort of a codified reaction) is now in use, but not because this is how the website began to speak about the feature. In this way, the perpetuation of these words is now encouraged by the website in a way that traditional grammar-books could envy, but it didn't begin with Facebook alone.
1417: West Germanic Mutual Intelligibility Oct 28, 2018
Ask a monolingual speaker of Dutch, German, Yiddish, Frisian, or even Afrikaans could probably understand a good amount of what a speaker of any of the other three was saying as these are all West Germanic Languages. However, when it comes to English, which is also West Germanic language, there is not that same intelligibility. The vocabulary is saturated with far more French- and Latin-based words, and even North Germanic words. However, this is not the only reason. It is generally the case that isolated peoples' languages will develop very separately, but moreover, those Germanic tribes who settled Britain did so, often before the other languages split off from each other. This is how Frisian is the closest related language to English today, and yet a Dutch speaker would have an equally difficult, perhaps even easier time understanding.