2092: "Hair of the Dog" and Other Hangover Cures Sep 6, 2020
There are a lot of phrases that people probably use without even knowing the full version. For instance, the phrase "hair of the dog" refers to drinking more alcohol to cure a hangover, but the full phrase is "hair of the dog that bit you" as was once a cure for rabies (not sound medical advice, by the way). The idea of using more of the problem as a solution exists in many languages as a reference to alcohol especially, but it will often come in different forms, like in Slavic languages which reference using a wedge to remove a stuck wedge, or in other Germanic languages meaning 'repair-beer', like the Austrian German 'Reparatur-Seidl'.
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2091: Gender in German Country Names: Articles Sep 6, 2020
In German, countries will not need a definite article ('das') if the country is neuter, but for masculine and feminine one is required. Most countries and other words for places like continents are neuter, which is easy in this case. It means for instance that while one would say “Deutschland liegt in Europa” (Germany lies in Europe) which lacks an article, people would say “der Irak liegt in Vorderasien.” (Iraq lies in the Middle East). Most Middle Eastern countries are masculine in German.
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2090: Turkish Special Letters: İ and ı Sep 4, 2020
Most people, regardless of language would associate the i (with a tittle) with being lower case, but this would not be true for the Turks. The Turkish writing system is modified from the Latin alphabet including <ğ> <ç> and <ş>. Along with those İ/i and I/ı represent different phonemes, and so have separate lower- and uppercase forms. Azerbaijani, a Turkic language, also has a special letter ə, capitalized as Ә.
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2089: Original Meaning of Comma, Period, and Colon | Sep 3, 2020
Today, commas, periods, and colons are all terms for punctuation, but this was not any of their original senses, looking back at those words’ histories. Indeed, all of them were rhetorical terms or used for poetry. A comma in Latin referred to a short phrase, line of a poem, or a clause of a sentence; period referred a complete sentence or “full pause”, and colon just referred to a part of a poem, and comes from Greek, literally ‘limb’. Of those, ‘colon’ has likely changed the most, as it referred to far more substantial divisions than it does now.
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2088: week Sep 2, 2020
Time has many subdivisions, but the more natural ones are related to seasons and the cosmos. 'Month' comes from the same root as 'moon' for instance, but there is a similar situation with 'week'. It comes from the Proto-Germanic root *wikǭ meaning 'change', or alternatively 'bend', as in the cycles of the moon; a week is roughly 1 quarter of a full lunar cycle, but the specific 7-day period was only adopted with the spread of Christianity anyway. This makes the word 'week' also related to 'vicar' and the prefix 'vice-', through the sense of 'alternate'.
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2087: Functions of Diacritics in Hebrew Sep 1, 2020
Hebrew uses an abjad rather than an alphabet, meaning the vowels are not written. There are diacritics (known as nikudos) written above (e.g פֿ / פ), below, or inside the letters (e.g. תּ / ת). Some of these will indicate vowels, but other functions exist as well, including for cantillation and changing the nature of consonants, as with the examples before, depending on tradition. Because they can be written in multiple places and have different functions—only included later in history—in certain texts multiple per letter will be used. In the special case of the 10 commandments, the word תִּֿרְצָֽח (“you will murder”) has 3 diacritics on the first letter in some versions, because the dot inside תִּֿ as well as the line above function the same but are used in different traditions; merely תִּ is more traditional here though because line known as 'rafe' is no longer used for Hebrew and so is just less practical.
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2086: vicar Aug 31, 2020
Now used exclusively by the Church, the terms 'vicar' and and 'diocese' come from Roman administrative terms, used in the government of that empire. 'Vicar' was used to mean 'second in command' in Rome but it came to mean 'deputy' (i.e. a divine proxy) ecclesiastically. It actually comes from the root 'vicārius' meaning 'change' refers more to the idea of 'interchange' like 'vicarious' means today. In the case of the Vicar of Bray (1540) though, he famously was a Catholic vicar twice, and also a Protestant vicar in the span of 48 years in the same place, making the meaning more literal.
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2085: Feminine Origins of 'Kilt' Aug 30, 2020
People would probably not be terribly surprised to learn that the word ‘kilt’ comes from the same root as ‘skirt’; they are both from Old Norse and basically look the same. What people might not have guessed is that the root of kilt is a lot more feminine than that, as that root has been traced back to the Proto-IndoEuropean root ‘gelt-’ meaning ‘womb’. Indeed, the English word ‘child’ ultimately comes from that root, as do other child-rearing related words like the Swedish ‘kilta’ (to swathe/swaddle).
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2084: novel Aug 29, 2020
The adjective 'novel' and the same word's use as noun have seemingly very different meanings. In German, French, and Dutch a novel is called 'Roman' from the French 'romanz' meaning 'common language'. In English, 'novel' in both senses (at least originally) meant 'new' with the book coming from the Italian 'novella storia' (new story) but the generic nominal form was eventually replaced by 'novelty'.
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2083: Im-parsable Verbs Aug 28, 2020
There are certain instances when a contraction can’t be used, such as at the end of “that’s just the sort of nice man *he’s”. The reason for this is because there are multiple uses of certain types of verbs including ‘have’, ‘do’, and ‘be’. It is not for that same principle though in the reverse as to why it doesn’t work. The imperative verb ‘don’t’ in “don’t you dare!” cannot be parsed further into “do not you dare” because it is idiomatic, but in “do not/don’t go in there!” this makes no difference. The reason is actually because imperative verbs, verbs that give a direct command, don’t have a subject, and to include a subject one would need to add a different, modal verb “you must not dare”. Dare is actually somewhat of an exceptional verb, so check out more here.
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2082: A Reason for Long Hawai'ian Words Aug 27, 2020
English has more distinct words than just about any other language, depending upon the metrics, and that fact alongside more flexibility with consonant clusters means that compared to Hawai'ian—with a relatively short vocabulary, fewer letters, and an inability for two consonants to appear together—the words in English can more easily be shorter. For instance, the word for 'zoo' in Hawai'ian is 'kahua hōʻikeʻike holoholona laka ʻole' meaning something like "lockable animal display site".
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2081: Frolic is a Verb... Aug 26, 2020
The '-ic' suffix is used for forming adjectives and certain nouns such as 'psychic'. That sound-combination exists in other places of course, but those will typically have a -k, making a word like 'frolic' look slightly exceptional. Indeed, 'frolic' was originally an adjective, from the Dutch 'vrolijk' meaning 'merry' or 'cheerful', though these days it is usually a verb, or the noun associated with that verb meaning "to move joyously".
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2080: Digraph Capitalization Aug 25, 2020
Usually words will not have multiple capital letters outside of acronyms or certain surnames, but digraphs are not treated uniformly. English has plenty of digraphs like CH and TH and so on, treated as one letter for the sake of pronunciation, but two for everything else including capitalization. In Dutch however, digraphs like ij, often even written like ÿ, are both capitalized often, such as with 'IJsland' as opposed to 'Ijsland'. Each language will have its own rules, but usually only one is capitalized. In South Slavic languages which alternate between both Latin and Cyrillic scripts, a Latin digraph—written as only one letter in Cyrillic—will also only capitalize the first Latin letter.
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2079: guadalupe Aug 24, 2020
The name for 'Guadalupe' in Mexico comes from Spanish, sort of. Any further than that, there is some debate, though most experts would say that is is from the Arabic وَادِي ال 'wadi' (valley from a dried up river) and the Latin 'lupum' (wolf). This combination was then applied for the patron saint of Mexico. Some others may say however that it was originally from a Celtic hydronym, i.e. a name for a waterway. A disproportionate amount of European river names are from Celtic, and it was possibly borrowed from one of these.
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2078: maudlin Aug 23, 2020
Along with the name 'Madelyn', the Biblical character of Mary Magdalene gave rise to the word 'maudlin'. These days, it cas come to mean tearful or sentimental, but in the past it meant 'weeping'. It is from that sense that the modern definition arose, and it comes from the understanding of Mary Magdalene as weeping in repentance, often depicted as such in art. At one point in time, 'maudlin' also meant 'drunk'.
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2077: Biblical Origins of 'Madelyn' Aug 22, 2020
Other names like 'Jocelyn' and 'Kaitlyn' have the '-lyn' ending as a sort of Germanic feminine suffix, but this is not the case with 'Madelyn', or indeed ‘Madeline'. This name actually originates from 'Magdala'. In English, there is a Biblical figure Mary Magdalene, but in Latin this is Maria Magdalena, or literally 'Maria from Migdal' (a city in Israel). The given name 'Madelyn' as such originated as with many other modern ones as a surname.
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2075: ẞ & ß, or: The Limits of Lower Case Aug 20, 2020
European alphabets in use today like the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic alphabets are all bicameral, meaning they have both upper and lower cases. However, there are some exceptions to this. For instance, the German ß representing SS (or technically SZ) did not have a capital form ẞ until 2017 because it only appears in the middle of words, and would only be used for all-caps use; this therefore is still pretty rare and not accepted everywhere. There will be more on capitals tomorrow.
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2076: Troy Weight Aug 21, 2020
There are lots of systems for measurements, often with internal variations. For instance, there are long and short versions of both hundreds and hundredweights. There are also Troy weights, which are an alternative weight system alongside avoirdupois called Troy weight, started in Troyes, France, but used officially in England in the 15th century until 1824. All of the weights were based on the grain like the current Imperial system, and indeed, most of the terminology was the same, so it does mean that even though writing from the past may reference similar terms, there will be slight discrepancies.
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2074: Sign Language for 'Shut Up' Aug 19, 2020
Lots of languages have phrases meaning "shut up", relating to mouths, and in American Sign Language, this is not so different. Even though sign languages by nature do not involve speaking, the cultural connotations to (vocal) speech as communication led to the association with the sign for 'shut' covering one's mouth, and likewise the sign for 'shh' is the index finger in front of the lips. Of course, not all or even most signs in ASL—nor any other sign language for that matter—are related visually to the meaning they convey.
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2073: The Shavian Alphabet Aug 18, 2020
Along with the Deseret alphabet of the Mormons, there was another somewhat and temporarily successful phonetic alphabet designed for English, and also Esperanto. The Shavian alphabet, designed by Bernard Shaw—a member of the BBC's Advisory Committee on Spoken English—has 40 letters that correspond 1:1 with some English phonemes and diphthongs. It has no visual correspondence with the Latin alphabet but does use its own logic based around the height and shape of the letters, and often will represent related sounds with a rotation of the basic symbol. It also has no capitals, but does have a diacritic which functions with the same purpose. As can be discerned with the fact this post is not written in that system, and that the Shavian alphabet needs to be explained, it was never terribly successful, but it has been used in several books and newspapers.
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