6 Year Anniversary—Pluralization Week: Starting Dec. 9, 2020

2 weeks until Word Facts turns 6 years old!

Starting Dec. 9, 2020 will be Pluralization Week: all 7 posts will focus on different aspects of pluralization and the notable grammar surrounding it considering languages from all around the world.

2171: Albania and Shqipëri Nov 24, 2020

The country of Albania is known by that name or a similar cognate in most other languages, but in the Albanian language it is called 'Shqipëri'. While the name 'Albania' comes from Latin in the 2nd century, Shqipëri is only attested from the 14th and was not popular until the 17th or 18th centuries, before which they called it 'Arbëri'. The newer has a somewhat contended origin. It is commonly thought to come from 'shqipe' (eagle), especially considering the national symbolism, as seen on the flag. That said, other explanations also place the meaning as coming from 'shqipoj' (to speak clearly), which is historically a pretty common way to name a people, as with 'Slovenia' meaning the same thing, but from a Slavic root. Another idea connects this name to the city of Skopje, the capital of Northern Macedonia, originally from Greek meaning 'observe', denoting the mountains of the area. Considering the various ethnic groups of the Balkans and the way territory and demographics have shifted around throughout history, any of these explanations could be said to have a solid basis.

2170: The Productivity of בן (Ben) Nov 23, 2020

The Hebrew בן (ben) or Aramaic בר (bar) both are used to mean 'son', but unlike in English it has other constructive uses, especially historically. For instance, it is still used to indicate age, with הוא בן שש (hu ben sheish) translating effectively as "he is 6 years old" but meaning literally "he is a son of six". Likewise, though it is no longer productive in Modern Hebrew, it was used to describe possession or ability, like ‏בן דעת‎ (ben da'at) literally "son of knowledge" to refer to someone who is logically competent.

2169: Squash and Cucumber Nov 22, 2020

The Latin name word for New World squash—genus: Cucurbita—different to Old World version, Lagenaria. The African variety is called so because its primary use was as a flask, like the calabash, and in Latin the word for 'bottle' is 'lagena'. The word 'cucurbita' instead comes from the the same root "cucumis, cucumer-" that gave English 'cucumber'. This root however also led to the Persian ḵarbuz (‘melon’), and the German Kürbis (squash) so it is pretty varied. It may also be related to the Sanskrit चिर्भट (cirbhaṭa) for “long melon" hence the Persian word, and definitely the Latin 'corbis' (basket).

2168: *Ghos-ti-: guest and host Nov 21, 2020

There is a theorized root *ghos-ti-which is the origin of 'stranger; guest', (but not 'ghost') and illustrates a pattern of relation between being a guest and being a host. Indeed, 'guest', 'host' and even 'xeno-' (as in 'xenophobia') all come from the same root. This Proto-Indo-European root, like with the relation between words mean 'give' and 'take', leads to words meaning both 'host' and 'guest' and it is estimated that the original root of the word would have referred to someone with whom one has reciprocal roles in hospitality. In the case of the Greek 'xeno-', this was extended beyond 'guest' to 'stranger' and then now 'foreigner'.

2167: corduroy Nov 20, 2020

It has been postulated that 'corduroy' comes from a compound of 'cord' as the name of a fabric and 'duroy' a another course wool but 'cord' is not found on its own in this way until after 'corduroy' so this is not so likely. Another idea associates 'corduroy' with the French "corde du roi" (cord of the king) but this is not true either because in French it is "velours à côtes". Another more reasonable connection has been made between this and 'paduasoy' (another corded fabric) as an influential source but there is no obvious true origin.

2166: Green Line, Purple Line, Blue Line Nov 19, 2020

The borders of Israel have been established with the so called Green Line (1948) and Purple Line (1967). Many people believe that the Green Line was named because of natural barriers from trees and other plants that separated Israel and Jordan and Lebanon etc. but actually it was just because it was made with a pen with green ink drawn onto the map. Likewise, the Purple Line defining the Syrian-Israeli armistice border and Blue Line defining Lebanese-Israeli border, all officially named as such, were done so in reference to the UN maps and UN itself respectively.

2165: yemen Nov 18, 2020

The country of Yemen occupies the southernmost point of the Arabian Peninsula, but its name comes from Arabic اَلْيَمَن‎ (al-yaman) meaning 'on the right' or 'right-hand'. For one looking at most maps now that would mean East, but since maps were oriented ('orient' itself meaning 'East', found on the top of map) with east on the top, it effectively just means 'South'. Similarly, the name in Hebrew, תימן (teimán) means 'south'.

2164: Collective Plurals Nov 17, 2020

While English has a number of single-syllable collective nouns that have the same plural and singular forms (sheep; fish; folk), this used to be somewhat more systematic. While some of these patterns are still true for certain regions, weights, measures, and units of time did not use -s. This is mostly retained in more traditional dialects, and would look like “4 pound_ of flour,” “the rope was yard_ long”, or “over 3 year_ ago“. This can also be true of strong nouns such as ‘foot’ but in any case overall this process, starting in the Middle Ages, effected nouns to be treated as plurals of count nouns rather than collectives [mass nouns].

2163: Germanic Plural Endings: How -R is Related to -S

In English, non-rhoticity—the loss of /r/ before a consonant or at the end of a word—initially was process that affected by [s] only, thus leading to ‘bass’ from the Old English ‘bærs’, among others, as explained in the video about English vs. American R’s. A process not so conceptually different to this also establishes the connection between the Dutch plural ending -s and the Scandinavian -r plurals, but the process went the other way around. This is to say that the most common pluralizing ending across Germanic languages today is -s but that it has become an -r in Swedish, though to be clear there have always been Germanic inflectional endings of different varieties, including commonly -en (e.g. ox-oxen; Haus-Hausen), internal vowel changes (e.g. tooth-teeth), and -er (Buch-Bücher). Indeed, the -s ending that is now the overwhelmingly dominant form in English was only used for a many masculine nouns, and not for feminine or neuter, making up less than half therefore but still a plurality. So effectively as English used -s more to to others being pushed out, Swedish used plural -s less due to the rhoticity.

2162: Deponent Verbs Nov 15, 2020

Latin, a language whose grammar is notoriously simple to learn (...) has passive-voice deponents: verbs which are passive in form but active in meaning. For instance, the normal active ending for 1st person singular is -o (present tense) or -āvī (perfect aspect) but these do not exist for verbs like 'loquī' (to speak), 'verērī' (to fear), or 'blandīrī' (to flatter) and so on. In these cases, it would look like:

'loquor' (I speak) or 'hortātus sum' (I have exhorted) which would normally indicate the passive. These verbs have lost their active forms to history, and so given there is only one form, there is no way to use them to indicate the passive; one would need to opt for a synonym. It is not the only one to feature these verbs of course, but the list of these others is not too long either, including North Germanic languages like Danish, Ancient Greek, and Sanskrit.

2161: Urdu & Hindustani Nov, 14, 2020

"Is urdu a language?" is not a question I would ask at the tenser parts of the India-Pakistan border, but the answer is not immediately clear, and so worth asking. Urdu is the national language and lingua franca of Pakistan, and many describe it as the Persianized form of Hindustani, but it is also recognized by the constitution of India. Through contact with the Muslim territories to the west, the Indo-Aryan language draws heavily from Persian, especially for its upper register, and is written in the Persian script. Likewise, Hindi, especially in the west around Delhi, has the same basic structure and base of vocabulary (about 99%), but draws from Sanskrit for its higher register and uses the Devanagari script. There is a significant level of mutual intelligibility between the two.

2160: lady & lord Nov 13, 2020

These days, ‘lady’ connotes nobility or otherwise upper class, well-mannered, or even just particularly feminine qualities in a woman, but it originally meant ‘bread-kneader’. That said, even if baking bread is not necessarily what would be thought of with a ‘lady’ today, even in Old English ‘hlǣfdīge’ (loaf-kneader) nevertheless denoted a woman to whom homage and fealty was paid, as in the wife of a lord. This word was also strongly associated with the Virgin Mary, and hence many plants and also ‘ladybugs’ are named from this source. The first half of the word ‘hlǣf-‘ is associated with ‘loaf’ and ‘dīge’ while indicating action, is related to ‘dough’ and also ‘dairy’. The reduction now to ‘lady’ is not so odd considering the there was a common assimilation of the suffix ‘-ig’ in Old English to ‘-y’ in Modern English, but the -f- did not drop out until the 14th century, around the time when the word had gained connotations to higher society and chivalry. Indeed, it was not a form of address for a normal woman until the late 19th century. ‘Lord’ comes from ‘hlafweard’ meaning similarly ‘loaf-guard’, related to ‘warden’, though keep in mind this word was not so common until the Middle Ages before which ‘dryhten‘ was prefered. Moreover, tying this all together, the Old English for ‘servant’ was ‘hlafæta’ or literally ‘loaf'-eater’.

2159: 'Frau', Meaning 'Lord' (*frawjǭ) Nov 12, 2020

Yesterday’s post discussed the odd pronunciation of ‘women’, but consider that most Germanic languages do not use this word. The German ‘Frau’, Dutch ‘vrouw’, Swedish ‘fru’ and so on all come from the same root *frawjǭ meaning ‘lady’, as in the female form of ‘lord’. More on this word tomorrow. Indeed, this root word referred to nobility but also normal women not unlike ‘lady’ does today. The Old English ‘frōwe’ for instance was connected to the OE ‘frēa’ meaning ‘lord’ or also ‘husband’. It is also related to the Russian пра́вый (právyj) meaning ‘right’ (also connected to words for a judge or a master), related to пра́вда (pravda), as in the infamous newspaper meaning ‘truth’. This Russian word is also related to the Latin ‘prōvincia’ (territory; dominion) and might help to elucidate why the connection to lordship exists.

2158: Pronunciation of 'Woman' Nov 11, 2020

The spelling of ‘woman’ is sometimes controversial due to its assumed relation to the word ‘man’, but even just for how it represents pronunciation it should ring a few bells. For the singular, this is fairly straightforward insofar as the ‘-man’ pronunciation is consistent with other unstressed forms of this like in ‘foreman’, as /mən/. In the first vowel of the singular (woman), this actually began as /i/ (as in ‘wee’) due to the origin with the word ‘wif’ (woman; wife). This got gradually rounded, referring to the posture of the lips and pronounced further back, referring to the posture of the tongue: wʊmən. Regarding the plural form furthermore (women), while it is spelt like the plural of ‘men’, it is not the latter vowel that changes, but that the first vowel becomes [ɪ] (as in ‘in’): thus wɪmən. A nonstandard variant of this, particularly in parts of America does actually change the latter vowel: wʊmiːn; this distinction may however actually be less clear due to the stress of the word.

2157: America's Geographic Easter-Egg—Point Udall Nov 10, 2020

The easternmost and the westernmost in the US are named Point Udall; this is a surname, but it isn't named after the same person. By travel distance in the territorial US, the westernmost part of Guam was named after Arizona congressman, Morris Udall, who was on the House Subcommittee on Insular and International Affairs. Meanwhile in 1968, the easternmost part of the Virgin Island meanwhile is named for his brother Stewart Udall, also a congressman from Arizona. It was explained that the "America's day would begin and end at a Point Udall".

2156: Canaanite Shift Nov 9, 2020

When languages split from each other, often the change comes from sound shifts. These, like the Great Vowel Shift in English, or Grimm's Law encompassing Germanic languages are quite broad in scope, but this isn't always, or even usually the case. The Canaanite Shift describes a process wherein [a] became [o] in long syllables. This affected Northwest Semitic languages like Hebrew and Aramaic, but not South Semitic like Arabic. For instance Tiberian Hebrew שלום (šalom) and the Arabic سلام (salām) share a root meaning 'complete; peace' but differ in the stressed vowel. This shift was so productive that this affected inflections, i.e. it affected the morphology and not only the roots of words, such as the plural ending [at] in Arabic or [ot] in Hebrew:

"Girls; daughters": بَنَات (banāt) versus בָּנוֹת (bānōṯ)

Or with present participles, such as

“Writer; the one writing”: كاتب (kātib) versus כותב (kōṯēḇ)

2155: Rhode Island Just Changed its Name Nov 8, 2020

This week has seen much political change in the USA, but what is getting less publicity perhaps is that Rhode Island just changed its official name. Up until now, it was known as "Rhode Island and Providence Plantations". During the British colonial period, Rhode Island only referred to one island, now called Aquidneck Island and the Providence Plantation was the remaining land, not ulike how Maine is named for the mainland, since most people lived on the coastal islands there. Back in those times, plantations related to farms, certainly, but was another word for colony and in this case had nothing to do with slavery. The fact is, however, that enough people felt uncomfortable with the word through unfortunate historical connotations that it was changed in the election.

2154: Monastic Sign Language Nov 7, 2020

Several different Christian monastic groups take vows of silence, but these people need to communicate, and as a result, so-called monastic sign languages arose. Some, like the Franciscan and Benedictine monks' vows were only bound to certain places or times of day, so only limited vocabularies were developed, perhaps also used as memory aid when also speaking. The Cistercian and Trappist sects however took vows of complete silence, and so developed more thorough systems, but unlike modern sign-languages, these were still bound to the spoken language such that Cistern monks from France use mostly French syntax, and those in the US use mostly English syntax for instance, so because of this they are often not considered languages but lexicons. Some systems began in around the 10th century, and are still practiced today in the case of the case of Cistercian and Trappist sign.

2153: Names for 'Greece' Nov 6, 2020

Greece has had a long and influential history globally, but many countries use totally different names for the country. Essentially there are 4 categories; the most common comes from the Latin 'Graecus', who took the name from the tribe there, now commonly used around Europe and Asia. Then there are names derived from 'Ionia', another tribe, used particularly in the Middle East and Central Asian region, such as the Arabic اليونان (al-Yōnān), Hebrew יוון (Yavan), and Turkish 'Yunanistan'. The other common name, and the one used by the Greeks themselves Ἑλλάς (Hellas), such as in Mandarin. One exceptional name is from Georgian საბერძნეთი (Saberdzneti) meaning "wise people's country". Notably, the word for the Greek residents of Turkey does not follow the Turkish name for the country, and is 'Rumlar' meaning 'Romans' relating to the days of the Byzantine Empire, whereas for Greeks from Greece they say 'Yunanlar'.