1454: Versatility of Writing Systems Dec 4, 2018
As discussed yesterday, writing systems don’t really determine how a language will or will not be expressed. This was, in a certain way, exhibited in English fairly recently with the advent of texting, and therefore texting language. Especially when it was the case that phones could have only 12 buttons and people would have to click several times to select any given letter, people economized on characters and gave the bare essentials, but these essentials were pretty much always consonants, especially when the vowels are in between them. In a certain way this became a bit like an abjad, which marks the consonants and usually only marks vowels at the bookends of words, or for diphthongs, like with Hebrew writing. This is not used as much anymore by necessity, but its use—in any capacity—shows the way in which people can be very flexible about writing systems in general.
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1453: Languages and their Writing Systems Dec 3, 2018
When discussing the status of a writing system, it cannot be spoken about only as the system for characters and also has a lot to do with the language used to write it. This can be illustrated by taking a look at the writing of Hebrew. Hebrew is not the only language to utilize the Assyrian writing system, though it may be the most prominent of those today. This writing system is also used for Yiddish, Ladino, and other Jewish languages over the years, except while Hebrew did not represent all of its vowels as also occurs with the Arabic and Ge’ez script, but even using all of the same characters Yiddish and Ladino do. This means that for the former it is an abjad whereas for the latter two the same system of characters is an alphabet. And indeed, when Hebrew is transliterated into Latin characters—while there is no standardization for this—it almost always will be vocalic. In this way, a writing system only really can be assessed as it applies to an individual language. There will be more about this tomorrow.
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1452: shekel Dec 2, 2018
As discussed yesterday, terms for money often outlast—at least in an etymological way—economic systems. In addition to 'capital' and 'buck' which both came from terms for animals, 'shekel', the modern currency of Israel and historically other Middle Eastern nations also comes from farming. In this case however, it is from a unit of barley, though 'shekel' comes from the Hebrew 'šeqel' whose root means ‘weigh’. These sorts of agricultural terms do have a specific biological necessity and therefore value, so when moving to coinage and paper money—which does not have a definite value—the notion similar valuation stuck.
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1451: capital Dec 1, 2018
Fiat currency is now dominant globally, but barter has left its mark on it. The word 'capital', though not strictly financial, denotes anything that is an asset to an individual. It originally related to cattle however, counted in heads, or in Latin, 'caput'. For a long time in many societies, including some today, wealth was measurable in livestock, so even as many societies moved away from this model, the derivative word remained. The post tomorrow will look at another way farming influenced monetary terminology.
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1450: derby Nov 30, 2018
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1449: Directions in Place Names Nov 29, 2018
A lot of places are named for their directions, but this only works when the direction are relative. For instance, the East Indies and the West Indies are named so for their relation relative to India as is fairly clear from the name, but a name like 'Austria' which denotes the south, or its native German name 'Österreich' meaning 'Eastern Empire' is all in relation to the other German states, though there is a (not particularly important) discrepancy here because it is indeed both south or east depending upon which German states are being selected. However, this gets even more thrown off considering The Philippines, which were named in Spanish first as Islas del Poniente (Islands of the West) not because much is very close in that direction except a very large ocean, but because it was sailed to from Spain first from the West, even though it is much closer to Spain from the East. Ultimately, because the Earth is round, directional names like this don't work without counterparts, perhaps best exhibited in 'North Dakota' and 'South Dakota'.
1448: nitpicking: What's a 'nit'? Nov 28, 2018
Chances are, most people don't know the name for a louse-egg, even though this is part of a phrase many might use daily. 'Nitpicking' is the process of being scrupulous about unimportant details, but very few people would know that a 'nit' is a louse-egg, and ridding oneself of these very tiny things—historically by hand—is 'nit-picking'. This just goes to show the way in which compounds like these—even though they have a very sensible summative meaning unlike 'butter-fly'—exist on their own, and not necessarily by mentally combining the elements.
1447: 'The' in Countries' Names Nov 27, 2018
'The' in the names of countries does happen sometimes, but it is usually purposeful. In the case of 'The Netherlands', it is named so because of the flat area, especially compared to the German highlands, even though in German the name is simply 'Niederlande' without the article before. With Ukraine, often said as 'the Ukraine' in English, this is because the name derives from the meaning of 'borderland' and so while 'the Ukraine' has never been official, it caught on and stuck. In the case of the Philippines, there is less of a reason now, but originally the Spanish name was Las Islas Filipinas, and so while now no name for the nation includes overt reference to the islands, there is a sort of covert reference.
1446: Origin of 'humble pie' Nov 26, 2018
It's not such a bad thing to be humbled generally, but 'eating humble pie' used to actually refer to food. The 'humble' in question came from an earlier 'numbles' or sometimes 'umbles' which denoted the entrails of a deer. These would be given out to the lowest status people to eat, so while for a wealthy or noble person to eat numbles pie would be a humbling experience, this word was only used in the phrase as it is today because of similar sounds and later misunderstanding completely. There will be more on this tomorrow.
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1444: acadia and cajun Nov 24, 2018
In the US and Canada, many of the place names either come from native words, are named after places in the Old World, or were named as a description of the land; in at least one case however, it may be all of those. The name for the French colonies in North America (mostly modern-day Quebec and some surrounding areas) was called 'Acadia' ('Acadie'). It is not totally certain where this comes from though. Likely, this comes from the ancient Greek city Arkadía (Ἀρκαδία) described in pastoral poetry. However, it is also not unlikely that the word comes from the native Mi'kmaq word 'akadie' meaning 'fertile land'. In situations like this, one could have reinforced the other, depending upon the initial intentions, but no matter what, this is also where the word 'Cajun' comes from, as the Louisianan French mostly migrated from Canadian colonies, but kept the name.
1445: shrewsbury and shropshire Nov 25, 2018
Though not always the case, it is common that English counties will just be named for their county towns' names. Often this is with adding the suffix '-shire', as with 'Oxford' to 'Oxfordshire', or 'Worcester' to 'Worcestershire'. There are exceptions, both to the suffixes and to the names totally, but in a few cases the county may still end in '-shire' but the county town is unrelated. Usually this is because of the historical county town no longer holding power, but in the case of 'Shropshire', there is not nor has there ever been a 'Shrop'. The demonym is 'Salopian' and the county town is 'Shrewsbury', but initially in Old English the county was 'Scrobbesbyrigscīr'; note that 'sc' in Old English is [ʃk] (like SHk). While 'Salop' comes from the Norman interpretation of this name too, 'Scrobbe'—which was probably a personal name—only became 'Shrews(bury)' through the sounds changing somewhat over a long time.
1443: -ic and -ous Nov 23, 2018
The number of adjectival or nominal suffixes may sometimes feel gratuitous; in theory it would only be necessary to have one or two. However, unlike with ‘depth’ and the newer ‘deepness’, not all of these are so flexible or so random. For instance, ‘sulfurous’ and ‘sulfuric’ both mean, broadly speaking, ‘of sulfur’, yet these two are not totally interchangeable. In the names of chemicals, ‘-ic’ denotes a higher valence for the element; that is to say it denotes how easily it can combine with other particles. This is true of lots of other elements as well, where ‘-ous’ is used for both general use and for denoting lower valence, but ‘-ic’ is for a specific type.
1442: rust and rustic Nov 22, 108
Suffixes can have lots of different meanings, but due to English's history, sometimes they can seem quite random. For instance, '-ic' is a productive adjectival suffix that can be added to nouns like 'artist' and 'artistic', or 'sulfur' to 'sulfuric' (more on this tomorrow). In the case of 'rust' and 'rustic' however, there isn't a relation. 'Rust' comes from a word meaning 'red' and is shared with many other words that relate to clay-like dirt, including 'rubric', but 'rustic' does not. However, while 'rust' was from a Germanic root, 'rustic' comes from the Latin meaning 'countryside', related to 'rural'. It is possibly that these words share a very old derivation, but either way, the appearance in English is only coincidental now.
1441: Semantic Transfer: point and prick Nov 21, 2018
People are very good at finding patterns and other relations such that any overlapping connotation an idea has can be tacked onto the relevant word. Like how 'point' can denote a specific position, ideologically or physically and geographically, but originally had the meaning of something that tapers sharply, 'pick' came from 'prick'. Indeed, both 'point' and 'pick' mean 'something being pointed to' or 'something being pricked' (i.e. gestured at by poking). This sort of semantic transfer will naturally happen over time in any language.
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1440: -lect: Formal Combining Forms Nov 20, 2018
There are many times when a commonly used word will lead to the creation of other words. For instance, 'alcoholic' lead to the combining form '-aholic' which relates to any type of addiction, such as commonly 'workaholic', but this can also be done with any other noun. That is slightly informal, but that informality is not always the case. In linguistics, the combining form '-lect' from 'dialect' can be tacked onto other words in order to indicate that it relates to anything dialectal. For instance, 'basilect' is the academic term for the least prestigious (or at least little-prestigious) dialect for a given language.
1439: catch 22 Nov 19, 2018
Sometimes, a pop-culture reference will make its way into common parlance. With the word 'catch 22'—which grammatically is not two words when used as such—can refer to a paradoxical situation or logical fallacies depending upon the idea at hand. It comes from the title of a 1961 book in which the main character pretends to be insane to avoid combat, but his actions are taken to prove his sanity. However, it is possible that many of the people who would use this phrase have not read the book, as now the reference is no longer just a reference, and can exist in its own right.
1438: froggie Nov 18, 2018
Now, a pejorative for French people, though fairly harmless now, is 'froggie'. It is said to have come from the common trope of French peasants eating frogs, but this was not the first use of the pejorative 'froggie' in English's history. Earlier than this, it was used to refer to the Dutch, as they were caricatured as swamp-dwellers; this changed after the Anglo-Dutch Wars, after which point France became Britain's main enemy, rather than the Dutch.
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1437: Names for Scotland Nov 17, 2018
Some countries end up with lots of different names across other languages, including Germany and Scotland. However, with the former case, this is only because the names of different historical tribes ended up being used to describe the whole country, but the situation with Scotland is more complicated. It can and has been called 'Scotland', 'Pictland', 'Caledonia' and 'Alba': all in English. Some of these names, particularly 'Pictland' and 'Scotland' were given based off of the inhabitants, but also the other two were exonyms given by the Romans. Even if this weren't the case alone, Scotland has had many waves of inhabitants, and so many names.
1436: Germanic Roots: walk Nov 16, 2018
English is a Germanic language, but this doesn't mean that all words will have a cognates with other Germanic languages; even words of Germanic origin may not share the relation. For instance, 'walk' is a word with Germanic roots, but in any other Germanic language the translation doesn't even sound similar. In German and Yiddish the word is 'spazieren', in West Frisian 'rinne' (related to 'run') and in just about all of them, a word with the same root as 'go' can be used in relation to walking in a way that is uncommon in English. This is because 'wealcan'—the root word from Old English—originally meant 'to roll' and sometimes 'to wander'. Technically therefore it is of Germanic origin, but it this does not mean that there is a 1-1 correspondence with translations in Germanic languages.
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