2112: augur Sep 26, 2020
Today, the word 'augury' refers to anything which is a sign for the future, or in particular a sort of omen, whether seen to be good or bad. 'Augur' is now used as a verb but it started as a noun as the '-y' suffix suggests, denoting a specific Roman official who observed signs in nature to predict the future. Most especially this would depend on birds, and though it is uncertain some suggest that 'augur' comes from the Latin 'avis' (bird) and 'garrire' (to talk). Otherwise, it could be related to 'Augustus' meaning 'growing (in might)'.
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2111: Inconsistency of Prepositions Sep 25, 2020
Prepositions are considered to be in a closed lexical class, which essentially means it's very difficult to create new ones, unlike with nouns and verbs for which new words are created daily. This is because they indicate grammar more than meaning. Indeed, even though some prepositions like 'up', 'down', or 'on' and 'off' which seemingly have a consistent meaning aren't so consistent, such as how different dialects will say either "in line" or "on line" to refer to cueing. Another humorous example can be seen with
"The alarm went off, so I turned it off"*
This is also not to mention that translating prepositions is particularly difficult, because each holds so many varied meanings that the relations are not always one-to-one.
*(technically this is post-positive but they are classes as prepositions)
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2110: No Word for ‘Yes’ in Ancient Hebrew Sep 24, 2020
Latin doesn't have one word for 'yes', which is why so many Romance languages' words for it are different to each others. Another ancient language not to have a word for 'yes' is Hebrew, which today uses the word כן (ken). In older forms of Hebrew, this word, also spelt כאן meant 'thus' or 'so', and it is not difficult to see how people took the meaning of 'it is so' and turned it into a more generic exclamation for agreement.
2109: echidna Sep 23, 2020
'Echidna' today refers usually to an Australian egg-laying and hedgehog-like mammal, but this was also the name of a sea monster from Greek mythology: half woman and half snake who was the mother to many other Greek mythological monsters. Many people believe that the animal was named for the mythological figure i.e. like a woman who also lays eggs. Others would point to the Greek word 'ekhinos' meaning 'sea-urchin' but originally meaning 'hedgehog', though it is possible this came from or is at least connected to 'ekhis' meaning 'snake (eater)', and if so then the two etymologies are linked.
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2108: Mixed Origins for Yiddish Gender Terminology Sep 22, 2020
Yiddish vocabulary is at least 80% Germanic but the more technical or academic terms tend to come from Hebrew. The words for gender come from Hebrew, but Hebrew only has 2 grammatical genders whereas Yiddish has 3. In Yiddish, the word for 'masculine' is זכר (zokher); 'feminine' is נקבה (nekeyve), both of which are Semitic, whereas the term for the neuter gender is נײטראַל (neytral). Someone familiar with this alphabet could tell this without even needing to know Yiddish or Hebrew because Yiddish adopts the spelling for Hebrew loanwords, whereas for any other word, such as with נײטראַל, the vowels are included.
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2107: midwife Sep 21, 2020
The word 'midwife' looks to be made up of the word 'wife' and the prefix 'mid-' as in 'middle', and while it is a compound, it is not exactly what one might think from Modern English. It actually comes from 'wife' (wīf) which was the Old English word for 'woman', and 'mid' meaning 'with' as in the German 'mit'. That comes together to meaning another woman who stays with the mother, i.e. during birth. Modern German too has the term 'Beifrau' (by-woman) with a similar history.
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2106: morale Sep 20, 2020
English spelling is known for being inconsistent. Some of this has to do with standardizing before a major sound-shift but also that much of the vocabulary was borrowed. That said, in at least a few cases, the words were respelled, such as with 'morale'; it actually originated in French with 'moral' and so was modified as to disambiguate the meanings, but that being said, it was only adopted into English by way of misunderstanding. French now too distinguished between 'le moral' as in the temperment of courage (in the masculine) and 'la morale' as in 'morality' (in the feminine).
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2105: Brahmic Abugidas Sep 19, 2020
Any writing system that takes certain shortcuts so to speak such as not including vowels, or including an inherent vowel (as with an abugida) will run into certain problems. Brahmic abugidas such as those used to write Hindi or Bengali use letters which represent a consonant with an attached vowel (usually /a/). A problem then arises when either there is a different vowel or no vowel (both solved with a diacritic), or when there is a cluster of consonants, as this is not treated uniformly; for instance there is a special mark in these systems to indicate the inclusion of /r/. This is further complicated given that all of these systems can combine at least 2 and up to 4 letters into more complex ligatures (i.e. joined together). These systems are used from over India and across much of Southeast Asia, and have even had a significant presence in Japan.
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2104: If Need(s) Be Sep 18, 2020
As with a few other phrases, there is a split between "if need be" and "if needs be", even if there are some slight differences to how the two will be placed in a sentences. The rarer by far is "if needs be"; it’s a linguistically normal phrase, albeit a bit archaic. The ‘be’ part of it is again somewhat dated, a form of the subjunctive, but not wholly uncommon given that fact, such as when considering
“Let it be”
“If it be [is]”
“If need be”
2103: The Many Names of Rosh Hashona Sep 17 2020
The Jewish new year holiday, Rosh Hashona, goes by many names, but 'Rosh Hashona' (ראש השנה), literally 'head of the year' actually only appears once in the Bible—Ezekiel 40:1—and it's much later than when initially mentioned. It is first mentioned in Leviticus as Zichron Teruah (זכרון תרועה) meaning "a memorial of blowing [of the shofar]". It is elsewhere however referred to as Yom Teruah (יום תרועה) meaning 'Day of Blowing' (the Shofar) and prayers it is referred to has Yom Hazikaron (הזכרון יום), though now this is also a secular Israeli Memorial Day and is not so used for Rosh Hashona.
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2102: Paleo-Hebrew (Abjad) Sep 16, 2020
The writing system used for Hebrew is certainly ancient, but it is not the original written form for Hebrew. The paleo-Hebrew alphabet was used in the Israelite kingdoms until the Babylonian conquest. All texts, including the Bible, were written in that script at the time, such as in the Dead Sea Scrolls. The current Hebrew abjad, known as Jewish Square Script is actually from the Assyrians. The Samaritans still use a script based off the paleo-Hebrew writing system.
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2101: How to Abbreviate in Other Writing Systems
In punctuation, a 'full stop' can indicate the end of a sentence, but also periods are used for abbreviations, so how does abbreviation work in other writing systems? Cyrillic and Greek—both also have letters and distinguish between upper- and lower-cases—basically do the same as English: mostly capital letters sometimes though not necessarily separated with periods. In Arabic this is more complicated because there are 4 forms depending where it is in the word (e.g at the beginning, middle, end, or in isolation) as opposed to 2 cases, and the words are written with the letters connected. Abbreviations are rare in Arabic but the few that exist use periods between letters in the isolated form. In cases like with Japanese where whole pictographs are used will simply reduce characters such as 国際連合 (United Nations), which is made of 国際 (international) and 連合 (union) to make 国連: the first character of each part of the compound. Hebrew will put two marks (“gershayim”) between the penultimate and last letters, such as with שב״כ from שירות הביטחון הכללי (Sherut ha-Bitaẖon haKlali), and it is common that these will be pronounced as their own words (in this case 'shabak') and therefore spelt with the word-final letter forms when relevant.
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2100: The Nonsense of "Proper Adjectives" Sep 14, 2020
Although the term 'proper adjective' is used for orthographic purposes, it is syntactically meaningless. In English, people will distinguish a proper adjective as one formed from a proper noun; this does not happen in other languages like German for instance. Proper nouns are nouns which do not take an article, such as given names, which is a syntactically relevant distinction. While a word like 'Austria' would be a proper noun because it's the name of a country, nothing inherently distinguishes 'Austrian' from a common adjective like 'massive in "massive strudel" or 'Austrian strudel", even though both are formed from nouns. Therefore, the fact that it is capitalized will actually not indicate anything about the grammar. This also happens with verbs and adverbs such as 'Americanize'—proper only in name but not functionally different—but these are less common than adjectives usually. Scrabble does not allow for so-called proper adjectives.
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2099: Liberal pt. 2 Sep 13, 2020
The word 'liberal' has many connotations today, but most have strayed from the original. Before it had expressly political associations, it really just referred to anything that was suitable for a gentleman, i.e. not tied to a specific trade; this sense is maintained in the term 'liberal arts'. The word also meant 'generous' and eventually 'not bound by restraint'. The political connotations came only recently in history. The word is also probably related to 'frank' (the people-group), as in 'free man' not as in 'honest' necessarily.
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2098: Bécs: Why Vienna Has Different Names Sep 12, 2020
Although there are plenty of places with exonyms—names for somewhere originating outside of that area—names for 'Vienna' have some clearly different exonyms in Eastern European languages. For instance, the German language name is 'Wien' hence the English term, but in Hungarian, Romanian, Turkish, Serbo-Croatian, the word approximates *Bec, even though none of those languages are related. It is presumed to come from Avar or Proto-Turkic. There is also an exception in Slovenian with 'Dunaj', coming from the Danube river that goes through Vienna.
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2097: Temporal Morphology in Somali Nouns Sep 11, 2020
People will probably be familiar with 'tense' as a concept relating to verbs; even words that explicitly relate to time like the adverb 'before' and the noun 'yesterday' don't have tense because they don't change to indicate time in the way that "I swim" does compared to "I swam". In Somali, it is definitely possible for nouns and adjective, and even some other parts of speech like articles and adverbs to change due to tense. For instance, notice the vowels at the end of the nouns in:
A) dhibaatóoyinka adag ee ká tagaan Soomáaliya
problems(-detM) difficult and (abl) arise Somalia
"The serious problems that arise in Somalia”
B) dhibaatóoyinkii adaa ee ká tagaa Soomáaliya
problems(-detM) difficult [+past] and (abl) arose [+past] Somalia
"The serious problems that arose in Somalia”
2096: Semitic Roots: Blood, Man, and Earth pt. 2
As discussed yesterday, there is a clear connection between the words for 'man', 'blood', and 'earth' in Semitic languages from the root א-ד-ם (a-d-m). What is less clear, is how this came to be. There are several theories about the order of this; generally it is agreed that 'blood' was the first meaning, but whether that led to 'man' i.e. someone who has blood, or that 'red earth/clay' was first and the meaning of 'man' is more like 'earthling' is the cause of some debate. Another theory is that this started with the word 'idol' as in 'like a man' but also something for which blood sacrifices (were) made; in that case, it has less of a connection to dirt, but would have a greater connection to the other two meanings.
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2095: Semitic Roots: Blood, Man, and Earth pt.1
There are a number of English words with etymological connections to the ideas of both dirt and red such as 'rust' and 'rubric' (originally referring to a stamp made of clay) but this same pattern is much clearer in Hebrew with the words אדום (adom) for 'red', and אדמה (adama) for 'earth'. This root in Hebrew also makes 'אדום (adam) for 'man' and is related to the Akkadian word 'adamu' for 'blood' from the root '*dam'. There will be more on this in the following post.
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2094: ten-hut Sep 8, 2020
The word 'ten-hut' is a military drill command from the word 'attention', but such as to be easier to yell, sort of. The consonants themselves are indeed different, but given that [h] and [t] constrict airflow more than either or [n], it is if anything harder to project for volume. This is doubly so of the version used with in the air-force, 'tench-hut' which just adds another consonant. Nevertheless, not only it is one syllable shorter, it also has emotional connotation and so the exact consonants aren't necessarily so significant.
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2093: Period or Full Stop Sep 7, 2020
In US, the term for the symbol "." is called a 'period' whereas in the Commonwealth nations it is usually 'full stop'. The word 'period' can be dated back to the times of Old English with a Latin loanword 'periodos', but the meaning has not always been the same. The terms really solidified with printing terminology 'full point', a point being a unit of measure. The use of 'full stop' was used as a way to distinguish from the symbol's use in abbreviations and so on.
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