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.
1791: 7 in Hebrew and Indo-European
1790: jessica Nov 8, 2019
1789: Grass-Widow Nov 7, 2019
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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
1786: Pet Sematary Nov 4, 2019
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.
1784: Tobago: Island of Despair Nov 2, 2019
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.
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
"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)
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.
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.
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.
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
1775: clout Oct 24, 2019
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.