2301: galvanize Apr 4, 2021
When people talk about galvanizing, it is either in terms of inspiring action, or with covering one metal in a thin layer of another. Really though, the word originated from a name, Luigi Galvani. This French scientist experimented with electricity and is known for his experiment in which he caused frog-legs to twitch. This then got applied to the sense of energizing the spirit of a person.
2300: Rocky Origins of QWERTY Apr 3, 2021
The Sholes and Glidden typewriter, marketed as the Remington No. 1, saw the introduction of the QWERTY keyboard, so named for its arrangement of four rows of keys. in the order we are familiar with now around the globe. It was not until the Remington No. 2 however that this would gain any popularity. For one thing, it only had capital letters, and it was not possible to see what was being written as one wrote, known as a blind writer. It was also expensive and took training to operate, with all of these factors and generally poor marketing leading to a popular lack of enthusiasm. Still, the 1874 design did lay the foundation for its more successful successor, and now ubiquity among the adoption of its keyboard layout, at least with English. Other languages such as French will use different arrangements of keys for the same keyboard; in the case of French it is known as the AZERTY. In both cases, there were competitors who introduced other layouts, but these never caught on.
2299: Hebrew's Alternative Plus Sign: ﬩ Apr 2, 2021
Numbers in modern Hebrew writings, including in math equations, are written left-to-right, even though Hebrew is written right-to-left. This means that math and numerals in general are exactly the same as in Europe for instance, with one exception. The plus-sign, conventionally + for most places, is often written ﬩ as a sort of inverted capital T. This is because historically, the Jews using the symbol wanted to avoid writing something that resembled a Christian cross but even in secular settings now the symbol remains present.
2298: piker Apr 1, 2021
Seemingly unrelated to 'pike' would be the word 'piker', as in a miserly person, actually is related, but no one is quite sure how. Some hold that it goes by the sense of 'pike' as in a road, relating to the original sense of 'piker' as 'vagrant', though it has been written that in America at least it comes from the name of a county, Pike, Missouri. That said, the Middle English word 'piker' meant 'thief', in the sense of picking, which would be therefore at least not so directly related.
2297: turnpike Mar 31, 2021
The word 'pike' by itself refers to the point of a shaft, or often a whole spear, but it also led to 'turnpike'. The earlier, vaguer sense of the word was extended to any beam of wood, including those to make barricades for horses to keep them off certain roads. Eventually, this led to the sense of a toll on road, and the 'turnpike road' was just shortened to 'turnpike'.
2296: (New) Hebrew Stress Mar 30, 2021
Traditionally, Hebrew stress was almost always placed on the final syllable of the word, though there is a pattern which places it on the penultimate syllable. Increasingly however the stress is placed on the penultimate syllable outside of that aforementioned pattern, in general colloquial use, names, and loanwords. Previously, the stress was always predictable depending on syllable weight—i.e. the syllable length and whether the syllable had a coda—but the stress now is phonemic, insofar as it is now used to distinguish between words of different meanings, such as
/ˈboker/ (בּוֹקֵר)—"morning" /boˈker/ (בֹּקֶר)—cowboy
2295: Prosodic Stress Mar 29, 2021
In addition to the way that an individual word will have stress, stress in a sentence adds or indeed creates meaning. For instance:
[*x* indicating stress]
*He* didn't rob her (indicates someone else was a robber)
He didn't rob *her* (indicates someone else was robbed)
This sort of differentiation of meaning can be seen in practically any part of a sentences, even though the literal, structural form will be the same. This is known as prosodic stress since it is the prosody of the sentence which acts to add meaning. Any fun examples of this, write in the comments.
2294: Disfix Mar 28, 2021
There are many types of affixes, including ones which are not only additive, whether in the middle or on the ends [1]. One more for instance is the so-called 'disfix' which is a type of affix (such as in French a suffix) which is subtractive, meaning is causes a loss to the stem. Usually, this happens to the final segment of the stem, just before the disfix. For instance, with this pluralization from French:
bœuf (cow) as [bœf] --> bœufs (cows/cattle) as [bø]
such that the [f] is deleted in the plural. This also happens with adjectives such as
fausse (wrong (fem.)) as [fos] --> faux (wrong (masc.)) as [fo].
This process is common in certain North American native languages like Alabama, Choctaw, or other Muskogee languages.
2293: Secondary Stress Mar 27, 2021
Much like with personal matters, words can have not only primary but also secondary stress, especially in certain environments. As the name implies, there is a level of stress that most languages have that introduces phonetic distinctions, but there can also be a secondary level which is less extreme in its change of volume/pitch, but still has a function. In some languages like Hawai'ian or Estonian, this is a part built into every word or at least sentences no matter what, and is therefore predictable. In English, this not predictable, but common in certain structures such as with compounds where the first syllable has primary stress as in:
laundry-cleaner, where the first syllable of 'cleaner' has secondary stress. This makes it easier to determine when listening that there is indeed a compound rather than two distinct words.
2292: Ellipses around the World Mar 26, 2021
While the function of punctuation is the same across the board , there are many different styles that these take around the globe. In the case of ellipses (...), these are generally used to indicate that text is missing or otherwise abbreviated, and in German these are used even for an omitted letter. Sometimes the style is different, such as whether to include an exclamation point or question mark before as in the Russian (!..) (?..) or after. Japanese ellipses are elevated from the line instead and use 6 dots rather than 3; Chinese also uses 6 dots, but in 2 sets of 3 with a space. Other languages ditch the dots altogether and have separate symbols like in Thai (ฯ) or Laotian (ຯ). Mongolian, which in its traditional script writes top to bottom uses vertical ellipses of 4 dots (᠁).
2291: Stress in Tonal Languages Mar 25, 2021
It would be reasonable to assume that tonal languages, which already rely on changes in pitch to distinguish between words don't have stress or meter since those functions also involve volume, length, and even pitch. This assumption would be incorrect however. While it is true that these features are less relevant than in certain non-tonal languages, stressed syllables have been found in Mandarin for example by utilizing change in the fundamental frequency of the pitch (i.e. the swing in pitch of one individual tone) greater than that of the unstressed syllable, which would therefore have a more narrow change in pitch by itself.
2290: Simulfix and Transfix Mar 24, 2021
While suprasegmental patterns exist in order to distinguish between certain English nouns and verbs—e.g.rébel (n) - rebél (v)—this is not the only sort of suprasegmental morphology. For instance, these same patterns exist of course with strong verbs and strong nouns, like 'ring-rang-rung' or 'tooth-teeth' wherein the change is internal and is not only additional, unlike for instance the '-ing' suffix which removes no part of the root-word. This affix is known as a simulfix. Something similar exists within Semitic languages known as a transfix wherein a series of regular, patterned vowels (and at times, other consonants) are effectively inserted into meaningful templates of 2-4 (usually 3) consonants. Unlike with simulfix, the transfix is is attached to roots which cannot be used on their own, whereas the roots in languages that take a simulfix rely on existing phonemes that are usually but not always vowels.
2289: Suprafix Mar 23, 2021
If one wanted to make 'like' past-tense, all that's needed is a suffix: a term for a concept which is fairly well understood. For other matters though, there are processes that are more complicated to observe and are certainly less well known. For instance, in structural linguistics, the idea of the so-called 'suprafix' developed, which is a suprasegmental element added from a pattern such as with tone or stress, such as in English with the difference between
ímport (noun) - impórt (verb)
2288: dean & 10 (Expanded)—Mar 22, 2021
There are a lot of words related to 'dom-' like 'don', 'domain', and relating to control, leadership, and in the case of 'don', 'education', and yet 'dean' is not related. Instead, 'dean' is from the Latin 'decanus' meaning 'leader of ten (soldiers)', unsurprisingly . Indeed, the Roman army's arrangements of tens led to multiple words in English including 'decimate'. Quickly however, the meaning took on other settings such as in the Church and eventually, in English, in education. There was actually a similar word in Old English, teoðingealdor, but at any rate 'dean', and the related 'decan' and 'doyan' are here to stay.
2287: brief & mirth Mar 21, 2021
Not terribly alike in sound nor in meaning, 'brief' and 'merry' are not only related, except of course if brevity effects happiness. These two words are considered doublets, i.e. they diverged from the same word, but they are quite old and show many traces of historical divergences, such as how 'mirth' is how to express 'merry' as a noun, despite appearing fairly different. That said, the relation between [m] and [b] shouldn't stick out too much between 'mirth' and 'brief' since the former is just the nasalized form of the latter (just try saying [m] with a really blocked up nose) and [f] is a common way the TH becomes alters. Semantically however, these two words only eventually diverged after the original meaning of "short; small; or (counterintuitively) slow" when 'merry' began to describe the passage of enjoyable moments passing quickly, without care, and eventually described the emotion behind that. Initially as well 'merry' had the sense of 'fine' or 'pleasant' in a more general sense than it has today.
2286: wrath + -th = wroth...? Mar 20, 2021
'Wrath' and 'wroth' are obviously related, both in meaning and spelling, but not in the way one might assume upon first glance. Rather than being variants in the way 'swim-swam-swum' or 'raise-rise' are with internal vowel change, the Old English for 'wrath' was 'wrǣþþu', equivalent to 'wroth' plus '-th': the same suffix in 'warm-warmth'. 'Wroth' therefore was originally an adjective (Old English: wrāþ; Middle English: wrað), roughly synonymous with 'cruel'. These two are not immediately related to 'wreath', 'writhe', or 'wry' (each related to the others) though many like to connect the sense of twisting to that of anger, in a similar way to what happened with 'wrong' and 'worry'.
2285: bias & cutting Mar 19, 2021
The word 'bias' is related to the word 'cut, though clearly none of those sounds are related. The original sense of 'bias' meant something like 'sideways', but the Vulgar Latin ebigassius, originally from Greek, is related via Proto Indo European root *krs-yo, taking from the root *sker-. As discussed earlier, this lead to both 'shear' and 'cut', along with dozens of other terms, some more similar today than others.
2284: cut, shear, and carve Mar 18, 2021
Now replaced by the word 'cut', the words 'shear' and 'carve' used to have more general meanings. 'Carve' now is restricted to cutting a material into a certain shape, engraving, or cutting meat. In the case of 'shear', this actually comes from the same Indo European root as 'cut', that being *ker-, leading to other words including 'carrion', 'curt', 'skirmish', 'skirt', 'scrap', 'shard', 'scar' and many more. That said, now 'shear' also has a fairly specific, restricted use especially relating to hair and other cuttings of top-layers of things.
2283: Folk Etymology: sovereign, foreign & reign Mar 17, 2021
Though the spelling in English can often paint a picture for the history of the language and etymology of words, this is not the case with the word 'sovereign'. This comes from the Latin 'superānus'—also the root of 'soprano'—from the root 'super' (above) which led to the Old French 'soverain'. The connection to the word 'reign' is entirely from folk etymology. It is believed that the -g- in 'foreign' was also added with association to 'reign'.
2282: Length of a Mile: Past and Present Mar 16, 2021
Though most countries have officially switched to the metric system, there are some ways in which imperial terminology has crept back in. For instance, in Norway and Sweden people still use the word for 'mile' to refer to a distance of 10 kilometers. Historically, in those places a mile would have been between 10.688 kilometers in Sweden to 11.295 kilometers in Norway. Earlier still, in both Scandinavia and Germany it was equal to 4 minutes of arc or just over 7,421m (a Roman mile was about 1 minute arc on the Earth's surface). Similarly large, in Russia a mill unit was equal to seven versta, or about 7,468 meters, many times larger than a mile in the US. There is some debate about the length of Aramaic term מיל (mil), but most agree on 2,000 cubits (~3,000ft or close to a kilometer), but some say it is equivalent to the Roman mile since this is where the term comes from.