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1792: black gate (Newcastle) Nov 10, 2019

The Black Gate at the Newcastle Castle was indeed the site of 19th century slums, but the gate was not named to describe its appearance. Indeed, no one actually knows what the façade looked like exactly in the Middle Ages, but that still doesn't matter. The name comes from Patrick Black, who was a merchant who lived in the building in the 17th century.

To access bonus content from yesterday's video, click here.

To watch the original video, click here.

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1791: 7 in Hebrew and Indo-European

The Hebrew word for 7 is 'sheva' (שבע), which is very close to other Indo-European words, including, 'seven', 'septem', (Latin) 'hepta' (Greek), or 'sextan' (Gaulish), and no one really knows why. It could be that it is just random, but there is also similarity between words for 6 two, even though Hebrew is not related to Indo-European languages. It could be borrowed, for instance, from Hittite, in this case 'šipta-', or those languages could have borrowed from Hebrew, but either way the similarity has been the topic of discussion for a good long while.
For more on 7 in the Bible, check out: https://youtu.be/4TkSQGGPvOI
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1790: jessica Nov 8, 2019

Jessica commonly ranks in the top 10 most popular girls' names in the US and the UK, but the form of the name is actually fairly modern. The first known use was by Shakespeare in Merchant of Venice. It is assumed that this is from the Hebrew יִסְכָּה‎ (yiskah), meaning "one who looks forth", though it is only used as a given name and not a regular word.
The next Word Facts video will be out tomorrow, so make sure to subscribe to the YouTube page for a notification: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNofHfYEoM2l7fu2340gsDQ


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1789: Grass-Widow Nov 7, 2019

'Widow' now refers to a woman whose husband has died, but in older compounds, it meant anything but. Indeed, the word originally referred to any lonely person, but eventually extended to loneliness or separation from marriage. In compounds like 'grass-widow' or 'straw-widow', however, the resulting meaning was 'mistress', with grass and straw here referring to basic bedding, but these words too eventually connoted a woman who had children out of marriage. Moreover, 'grass-gown' in the phrase "give a woman a grass-gown' was a euphemism for the loss of virginity.
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1788: hysteria, delphi, and delphyne Nov 6, 2019

Not only do 'dolphin' and 'Philadelphia' come from a Greek word meaning 'womb', but so do 'hysteria', 'and Delphi' (the island), and the mythical dragon 'Delphyne' whom Apollo killed there. In the latter cases, this is because there, the people worshiped Gaia, the Greek goddess of the earth. In the former case, this hysteria was believed to only happen to women due to the movement of the womb until relatively recently.

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1787: Unternehmen and Undertaking Nov 5, 2019

English and German are very similar in some ways, but some words develop extra connotations over time. 'Unternehmen' and 'undertaking' come from the same two elements looking at the words parsed, but they aren't always used in the same contexts. 'Unternehmen' most often means 'business', but can also mean '[military] operation', as in 'Unternehmen Barbarossa'. In English, 'undertaking' can relate to more general tasks, or alternatively a promise. Of course, these can be quite related, but not entirely the same.
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1786: Pet Sematary Nov 4, 2019

Stephen King's 'Pet Sematary' purposefully uses a misspelling of 'cemetery' for the title. This was supposed to imitate how a child might think to spell 'cemetery'. How this relates to the nature of the horror is up to you, but many people instead assumed that this is either the American or British—whichever he or she was unfamiliar with—and the Internet searches back this up.
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1785: Appropriated Girl's Names Nov 3, 2019

So-called gender neutral given-names may be becoming more popular, but insofar as most were still initially from one or another sex, this is nothing new. In the US for instance, 'Robin' is now more common as a girl's name, but comes from 'Robert'. That demographic change only happened in the 1990's (and only in the US) but other names have been appropriated by women, including 'Ariel'—Hebrew for 'Lion of G-d'—in the Ango-sphere despite the traditional feminine form 'Arielle', and even 'Clair'. 'Clair', particularly without the '-e' is the modern form of the given name 'Clara' associated with the Irish County Clare. There are many others apart from this, so leave a comment if you know one.

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1784: Tobago: Island of Despair Nov 2, 2019

Although "Robinson Crusoe" may have popularized the phrase "Island of Despair" it was also used about 50 years before to refer to Tobago. The novel may have been based a story of another man from on Robinson Crusoe Island (formerly 'Más a Tierra') but the name was due to the difficulty in colonizing Tobago; from the Spanish to the Dutch even Latvians each attempted multiple times with limited success to colonize the island due not only to political, but also natural factors of the island.
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1783: New Uses for the Agentive -er Nov 1, 2019

Following from yesterday, there are plenty of English nouns which cannot be verbalized, including 'fact' and 'truth'. It would even be ungrammatical to add the agentive suffix '-er'. Even though this would be conceptually fine, it just doesn't really occur. However, informal usages have emerged for 'truther' (not 'facter' though) to mean 'believer in a conspiracy theory', such as '9/11 truther', in a similar pattern to 'flat-earther'. Indeed, you can see in this comedic exchange from "Drake and Josh" that 'truther' on the pattern of 'liar' is possible.

Be a Word Facter at patreon.com/wordfacts where this idea is explored further.

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1782: Limits to Nominalizing Verbs

As a rule, nouns can be verbalized by no more than putting the word in the environment of a verb and conjugation it where needed, such as for instance after a pronoun:

"water" to "I water"

However, this is not universally true. 'Fact' cannot be verbalized, but other semantically related words like 'evidence', 'rumor', or indeed 'lie' can be. And even so-called 'factive verbs' like 'know' exist too.

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1781: Polish and Italian National Anthems Reference the Other Country Oct 30, 2019

Not only does the Italian national anthem mention Poles, but the original name of the Polish national anthem too translates as "Song of the Polish Legions in Italy" ("Pieśń Legionów Polskich we Włoszech"). The latter case has a more obvious relation to Italy as it was written to boost the morale of Polish soldiers fighting in Italy during the French Revolutionary wars, when at that point, no Polish state existed at all. In the Italian anthem, Poles are mentioned alongside other groups who suffered against the Austrians:
"Already the Eagle of Austria (già l'Aquila d'Austria)
"Has lost its plumes. (le penne ha perdute)
"The blood of Italy, (Il sangue d'Italia)
"the Polish blood..." (il sangue Polacco)
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1780: Cot- Word Family Oct 29, 2019

Lots of words stem from 'cot', including 'cottage', 'coterie', 'cote', and 'cot' (as in a barn or hut) which all relate to dwelling, but 'cot' (as in a camp-bed) is not among these. In fact, all of those have other related terms in Indo-European languages like Old Norse and Latin, but 'cot' comes from a Hindu word खाट (khāṭ) meaning 'bedframe'.
See more on word families here.

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1779: ToT Triggers Oct 28, 2019

It has been discussed here before how words "on the tip of one's tongue" may still be remembered to have a certain onset, for instance. The Tip of the Tongue (ToT) effect doesn't only include memory of the first letter; it also can include the number of syllables or prosodic accent pattern, as well as internal vowels. Vowels especially, as well as consonants in unaccented syllables, do not figure importantly into the ToT pattern though.

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1778: Pleonasm in the Bible Oct 27, 2019

Pleonasm, even in translations, is a notable fixture of the Bible. This is not the same as clunky writing, which you can see more about in the linked Word Facts video, but often appears as using many separate expressions to indicate the same thing. This is particularly notable in Psalms, and one explanation could be that because there wasn't much literary tradition before it that it mirrors speech, as the level of pleonasm found in speech is similar. However, pleonasm is also common in poetry or lyrics, it may well be a poetic styling.


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1777: Pleonasm Oct 26, 2019

Pleonasm—essentially linguistic redundancy—can exist for many reasons. Sometimes it is just idiomatic, like French "Qu'est-ce que c'est?" meaning 'what's that?" but literally meaning "what is it that it is?", but in some languages it has an a grammatical function. In German, "die alten Männer sprechen" (the old men are talking) features a plural marker in every word of this sentence even though only using a plural noun would suffice; anything else would be ungrammatical in German.
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1776: Bilingual Tautological Expressions Oct 25, 2019

Although English is known to be amalgamated from different languages' lexicons, other languages take this to a redundant extreme. For instance, many languages have pleonasm—basically redundancy—like 'tuna fish' in English or 'Yo te amo' in Spanish, where the '-o' indicates the first person without the need for a pronoun 'Yo'. Some languages, and in particular Yiddish, have this feature bilingually. These are sometimes called bilingual tautological expressions, and in this case it usually relies on having a Yiddish and Hebrew word or phrase back-to-back. For instance, the phrase 'חמור-אייזל' (khamer-eyzl) is used to denote a womanizer, but literally means 'donkey-donkey' in Hebrew and then in Yiddish respectively.
Expect more on this tomorrow.
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1775: clout Oct 24, 2019

'Clout' today has many meanings, including "a heavy blow" and an "influence or power", but a more traditional meaning would have been "to mend a cloth". The origin of this discrepancy is still not totally understood, however the sense of a "heavy blow" does date back to the Middle English. Some may suggest that the sense comes from a connection of 'putting a patch on' to 'hitting hard', but this relation is fairly loose.
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1774: Grassman's Law pt. 2 Oct 23, 2019

Continuing on about Grassman's Law, this principle that an aspirated consonant will become unaspirated when it precedes another aspirated consonant in the next syllable, only applies to Greek and Sanskrit, and not other Indo-European [IE] languages. This suggests it occured after many other major sound changes in IE languages. Also this shift may have occurred when the Middle East was a large Graeco-Aryan speaking area, explaining why these two languages in particular would be affected. The two are similar in other ways though; both Greek and Sanskrit use reduplication to form the perfect, such as

φύω --> πέφυκα (pʰu-ɔː --> pe-pʰuː-ka). This means 'I grow' --> 'I have grown', but notice that π would normally be aspirated—represented with the superscript: ʰ—but isn't here.

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1773: Grassman's Law pt. 1 Oct 22, 2019

Grimm's Law—a set of principles for Germanic consonantal development—was significant and gained deserved recognition, but it is not the only one of its kind. Grassmann's Law, devised for Ancient Greek and Sanskrit, posits, basically, that an aspirated consonant will become unaspirated if there is another aspirated consonant in the following syllable. Unlike Grimm's Law, this is less focused on roots and includes more morphemes in various linguistic contexts. It still helps to explain transitions from Ancient to Modern Greek, such as with the copulative prefix 'ha-' that has become in 'a-', like in the word 'adelphos' looked at yesterday. There will be more on this tomorrow.
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