1492: Birth Rate vs Fertility Rate Jan 12, 2019
Often used in statistical modeling, 'birth rate' and 'fertility rate' are both useful terms to describe demographics, but are not quite synonymous. A fertility rate is calculated to be the average number of children born to women ages 15-44 in their lifetimes. 'Birthrate' is often misused to describe this statistic, but it refers more specifically to the number of live births per 1,000 people in the population every year. Clearly these are used in similar situations, but the numbers look quite different.
1491: Pronunciation of ת Jan 11, 2019
Over thousands of years, Hebrew has transitioned from a living language to a liturgical language to again a living language, and while the language has stayed remarkably similar, there are some dialectal differences. There are many different features, but one of the most famous is of the pronunciation of ת. Sephardi (of Spain & North African) Jews pronounce it always as a [t], whereas Ashkenazi (Central & Eastern European) Jews pronounce it as an [s] in the middle or at the end of words. It is thought however, that both of these pronunciations are non-traditional, and like Yemenite Jews, originally it represented something like [θ] (as in THin). Therefore, both dialectal pronunciations involve the tongue moving forward or back respectively.
https://youtu.be/jTKKSf35LSE
1490: little and leprechaun Jan 10, 2019
Regarding the word 'leprechaun', the word is thought to come from 'lú' meaning 'small', and the latter half comes from the same root as 'corp'; read more about it in the link here. The first form, 'lú' is Old Irish, a Celtic language, but it is closely related to many words from Germanic languages, like the German 'lütt and lützel' or the West Frisian 'lyts', which all have the same vowel, even though it is written differently across the two language. Indeed, the original Old English 'lȳtel' is related, but that vowel isn't used for English anymore, so the similar one in 'little' is used instead today.
1489: "Let Them Eat Cake" is Wrong" Jan 9, 2019
The phrase 'let them eat cake' or in French "qu'ils mangent de la brioche" (it should actually be 'brioche' in English not 'cake', but it's more culturally appropriate) is attributed to a great princess—often thought to be Marie Antoinette—but this is not possible. This phrase was used in Rousseau's autobiography, written when Antoinette was nine years old; he never specified the princess, and many belief it was completely anecdotal, but history was not favorable to Antoinette, and neither is pop-culture here.
If you want more about history, watch the new Paleolinguistics video that just came out:
1488: Why Money is 'Notes' Jan 8, 2019
For more on how things came to be, watch How Writing Began
1487: Declaratives and Word Order Jan 7, 2019
As mentioned in another post, some adjectives are able to come after the noun they modify due to certain verbs, which is weird for English. This happens when the verbs are 'declaratives', as discussed in the video here, and essentially this happens when someone uses the language to make a change happen in the word, such as 'He declared the action unlawful'. It acts a bit like a linking verb, but depends on the declarative verb.
1486: How to Differentiate Language Families Jan 6, 2018
English belongs to the West Germanic language family, which belongs to the Germanic language family, which belongs to the Indo-European language family. All of this is fairly straightforward, but in other types of classifications—such as taxonomy with its "domain; kingdom; phylum; class..."—there are different names. One might expect linguists would be very happy to create new words or new definitions, but commonly this doesn't happen. However, for clarity, this is often talked about in the terms of 'primary language families' and so on, with primary language families not having any further relations, such as the Indo-European, Afro-Asiatic, and Kartvelian language families respectively.
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1485: Scripts for Multiple Languages Jan 5, 2019
Some writing systems, such as the Georgian Script or the Hebrew Script are often talked about only as they relate to the languages that bear the same name, but this is often misleading. For instance, all Kartvelian languages use the Georgian Script, and while sometimes this is just because of external political factors—such as in this case how most speakers of Kartvelian languages live in Georgia—often the scripts themselves are better for representing certain sounds. It is rare for a script to be used for only one language, but this too does happen, such as with Armenian Script, (excluding historical uses) pictured below.
1484: Different Greetings Jan 4, 2019
Every language will have greetings, though these often come in a variety completely different ways. Many Indo-European languages have words like English's 'hello', but these don't really relate to anything concrete. In other languages, such as Hawai'ian 'aloha' famously, or Hebrew's 'shalom', these can be used for greetings or for farewells because they just mean 'love' and 'peace' respectfully; there are some examples like this in English but these are less popular. In Georgian however, the word for a greeting is 'gamarjoba’, which means ‘victory’.
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1483: white noise Jan 3, 2019
Sounds don't have colors objectively tied to them in anyway, yet we still use the term 'white noise'. The term white noise comes from the association to white light, which contains all frequencies of the spectrum of light in equal amounts as to appear white. With white noise machines, the frequencies all use the same intensity, the sounds don't have to be anything recorded in particular, even if the associations are with natural sounds perhaps. This is why there aren't any other types of noise that 'white noise' overtly disambiguates itself from, despite the use of the adjective.
For a related look at 'blackmail', click here.
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1482: MeToo as a Verb (LITW 8) Jan 2, 2019
The # MeToo movement has since done a lot to highlight language-use, but the post today doesn't relate to PC language. Although certainly not exclusive to this word, MeToo eventually became a verb, but what this shows is not only the manner in which not only a phrase like 'me too' becomes one part of speech, but how it becomes a single word. No doubt this was helped by the commonality of the phrase in a variety of contexts, but also it was removed of distinct linguistic context as it is used in a hashtag. Once it is used as a hashtag, it doesn't need to fit into a sentence in the same way as another phrase would. For evidence, here is a tweet from Lena Dunham, though her assessment of the grammar is wrong.
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1481: Biblical Magicians & The 3 Wise Men Jan 1, 2019
In the biblical story of the Three Wise Men, these men are referred to either as that or as kings, but this isn't the whole picture. One of the dangers of only reading translations is that historical significance of and connotations to words change. The word used in the Bible is 'Magoi', which is the origin of 'magician' in English. Indeed, magi of the time were often involved in politics—hence 'kings'—and also 'priest', but their duties at the time included interpreting dreams and performing ritual sacrifices. Even the gifts they bring with them are from traditional magical practices. However, after centuries of this translation, it is hard to imagine changing the popular conception, and at this point anyway the idea of 'magician' has shifted significantly.
Notably, the suffix '-ic' has the ability to turn some nouns into adjectives, but in the word 'magic' this is only historically true. The words 'magic' and 'magician' all come from the same root as 'mage' and 'magus' (the singular form of the perhaps more famous 'magi').
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1480: Multilingualism and Healthcare Dec 31, 2018
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1479: Envelope and Lexical Stress Dec 30, 2018
In some words like 'rebel' or 'isolate', the accentuation changes from noun to verb. This is true of 'envelop' and 'envelope'; the only real difference between it and the earlier examples is that the spelling is also different, but the fact that as a verb the stress is at the end yet as a noun it comes at the start. However, the meaning of 'envelope' is not as broad as its counterpart, and really just relates to letters and packaging. This has only been true since the 18th century though, and beforehand it just related to anything that was enveloping.
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1478: Semaphore Dec 29, 2019
In general, semaphore is a signal of moving hands or flags in a specific way as a way to represent an alphabet. However, while this is often used to describe the specific and globally-accepted for as depicted in the photo below—used for instance on airfields—there is no limit to how a semaphore can look, just like an alphabet. Indeed, even other gestures that are used to give directions are often informally called a semaphore, as with someone guiding a driver how to park.
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1477: Language and Class: Wikipedia Dec 28, 2018
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1476: The Most Official Languages Dec 27, 2018
The country with the most official languages is listed in the Guiness Book of World Records as Zimbabwe, with 16 languages (listed at the bottom), but this number is hard to tally sometimes. First of all, most of the world's languages are not codified or standardized, so a county like Papua New Guinea where an estimated 11% of the world's languages are spoken does not—and cannot—list every one of them. Likewise, Bolivia has around 37 official languages, but this includes a few that are extinct, and most—except Spanish— are not official on a national level, but only in smaller subdivisions of the country.
The languages of Zimbabwe include: Chewa, Chibarwe, English, Kalanga, Koisan, Nambya, Ndau, Ndebele, Shangani, Shona, sign language, Sotho, Tonga, Tswana, Venda and Xhosa.
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1475: Language Families with Little Relatition Dec 26, 2018
Many names for language families are done more for the sake of simplicity rather than with much scientific precision. For instance,m the Khoisan, Papuan, or Australian language families respectively can have relatively little relation between the languages that make them up. With the Australian languages, these are made up of as many as 28 distinct language families, which includes some language isolates, unrelated to any other language. Often, this is very political however, such as how Khoisan peoples use the term to raise political support and awareness for multiple minority cultures.
Watch more about language families from Word Facts here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLzKhTxYYlal1d1-XhqPh122t6bgaNpI7A