2446: Times New Roman Aug 22, 2021
The most popular font of all time, and one of the most recognizable is Times New Roman, created in 1931 by The Times, a London newspaper. The Times only used this for 40 years of its 236 year history though, from 1932 to 1972, and since then the paper has changed fonts on five occasions, in part due to changes in the actual paper and overall layout styles. Still, these new fonts are mostly variations on the Times New Roman classic, which itself tried to draw on traditional italian styles of the early printing presses, hence the 'Roman'.
2445: X-SAMPA Aug 21, 2021
X-SAMPA was a system for transcribing, theoretically, any vocal sound in a standardized way. In 1995, this was not the first nor last attempt at something like this, notably coming about a century after the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) which was and is more dominant. What X-SAMPA brought to the table was that it allowed people to transcribe these sounds on a normal QWERTY keyboard as a way to get around IPA's special characters, even if they should have Unicode support. This is still used today, but X-SAMPA does not have a one-to-one correspondence with the IPA and in the current updated version there are IPA symbols that can't be transcribed in X-SAMPA.
2444: garbage Aug 20, 2021
The '-age' suffix forms nouns indicating the action of a verb it modifies (i.e. 'leverage' or 'package') or aggregates as in 'mileage' or 'percentage'. That of the word 'garbage' does not fit neatly into one of those categories. It is not entirely clear where this word even comes from, but it is akin to the Old English 'ġearwian' meaning 'to make ready' or 'adorn' leading also to 'gear', and 'garb' as in clothes. This relation, also extended to Old French 'garber' (to refine; to neaten), eventually lead to its sense as kitchen scraps, especially of bits trimmed off meat. It is also probably related to or even influenced by 'garble' which used to only mean 'remove dirt/waste from spices'.
2443: Georgian's Backward Familial Terms: დედა and მამა Aug 19, 2021
In Georgian, mother is დედა (dada) and 'father' is მამა (mama). These sounds are fairly standard for what parents are called, but swapped as it is usual to see a nasal consonant for mothers. This pretty exceptional case is not that all the rest have some particular etymology, but it is understood the nasal vowels are easier to produce while nursing hence the association with mothers, and for fathers, words with either [p] or [d] at the beginning are normal, as these will likely be the first non-nasal consonants an infant will utter in general. This is found around the world, but one of a handful of deviations to those rules happens in Georgian to deviate from both rules.
2432: θεός & Deus: Unrelated Aug 18, 2021
The Greek θεός (theos) meaning 'god' or 'divine' and the Latin 'deus' meaning 'god' are not related, despite the clear similarity in sound and meaning. θεός comes from a root meaning 'to place' in Proto-Indo-European while 'deus' is from a root meaning 'sky' and is related to the Greek 'Zeus' and 'Iupiter' as well as the 'Tiw' of 'Tuesday'. The Greek word is also related to the Latin 'fēriae' (festival), 'fānum' (temple), and 'fēstus' (festive).
2431: cant Aug 17
'Cant' can refer to any whining, empty, or hypocritical speech, or jargon of criminals in particular. It comes from the Latin 'cantāre' (to sing) also leading to English's 'chant', 'cantor' etc.. This switch from referring to a song to referring to this basically unwanted speech due to 'cant' having mostly religious connotations. It was associated strongly with beggars and eventually to a lesser extent with hypocritical religious singing, or at least that done without emotion and thought behind it. Even in the 17th century it was noted for slang for undesirable, later criminal language.
2430: interest Aug 16, 2021
The original sense of the Latin word for 'interest', 'interesse', meant 'to be important'. This sense was not gotten from the Old French 'interest' though, even though this is exactly the same root, because at the point English took from French it meant 'damage; loss', and it was at this point the -t was added to the other English word. The early meaning having a share in ownership. It is not clear how this sense transferred to its current meaning of money to pay back on top of repaying a loan. The financial senses were cemented by the 16th and 17th centuries considering certain connotations, but the emotional sense was a little earlier.
2429: kidnap Aug 15, 2021
When kids nap, that's usually a good thing, but when kids are napped it's a cause for terror. This apparent discrepancy is pretty much accidental though, but not as random a compound as, say, 'butterfly'. The '-nap' in question is simply a variant of 'nab' as in 'take', but the 'kid' is not random either. While this term now is also used for the abduction of adults and children alike, in the 17th century a 'kidnapper' abducted children for servitude, often as laborers in the Americas.
2428: Bahrain Aug 14, 2021
There are some countries with names that are meaningful descriptions and take 'the' in their names like 'the Netherlands' (the lowlands) and 'the Ukraine' (the borderland). This is also true of 'Bahrain', which in Arabic is البحرين (al-Baḥrayn) meaning 'the two seas', as it is in the dual. It is not clear, however, which seas this is referring to. Some suggest that the island's east and west bay may be the source, or even just natural water beneath the ground and above the surface, as there are many notably natural bubbling springs. Either way, in antiquity and in the Quran this name simply referred to all of eastern Arabia, and it's not clear when the islands took on this name exclusively.
2427: Gaul(e) & Gallia Aug 13, 2021
There are many names of places and people around Europe and Anatolia from the name *walhaz [1] such as in Wallonia, Wallachia, Wales and Cornwall, but even a more quintessentially Celtic name: Gaul. Not only is 'gaul' descended from this root meaning , but also the regions of Spain 'Galicia', Ukraine and Poland's 'Galicia', and Turkey's historical region of 'Galatia'. What is more surprising is that the Latin term for the modern France, 'Gallia', is not related to the French 'Gaule' even though this is often how the region is translated. The French word is from *walhaz, but the Latin 'Gallia' actually morphed through the regular sound shifts into the French 'Jaille' which is found in certain place-names across the country.
2426: Construct State Aug 12, 2021
In Hebrew grammar, simple nouns are discussed as having three states, those being indefinite, definite, and construct. English has the first two types, at least principally, distinguished usually by articles such as 'a; an; some' in the indefinite and 'the; that' in the definite, but the construct genitive is not like anything in English, and can be either definite or indefinite. For instance, בית מדרש (beis medrash) literally 'house of learning' is constructed as a phonetically modified version בַּיִת (bayis) that indicates the following word is possessed; these constructions also have a unique plural form. Traditionally, an article on the definite form would be placed before the possessed word, so in this case בית המדרש (beis hamedrash) meaning 'the house of learning' and was considered that the article was part of the word. In Modern Hebrew however, it is not completely uncommon for the article to be placed in front of the possessor הבית מדרש (habeis medrash), which complicates these distinctions of states, to a degree.
2425: Cakes and Existing: wastel, victual, & gâteau Aug 11, 2021
The French cake 'gâteau' and the far more obscure English word 'wastel' also meaning 'cake' both happen then to be from a root meaning 'to be'. This relation between pastries and existing did not originate with desserts, but with the idea of sustenance. It was in this sense of general food that came out of the Proto-Indo-European *wes- (to be). In the interim period as well, the Old English 'wist' (to exist) and Latin 'victus' hence English 'victual' meaning 'food; sustenance' related also to 'vital' show that this process was not taken exactly at the same time around the world.
2424: Hebrew Definite Attributive Articles Aug 10, 2021
In Hebrew, the definite article ה־ (ha-) not only applies to nouns but to attributive adjectives leading to the difference in
"a small boy" ילד קטן (yeled katan) compared to "the small boy" הילד הקטן (hayeled hakatan).
Part of the benefit of this system is that it distinguishes these attributive adjectives from being understood as a predicate adjective (i.e. "the boy is small"). This would still be a function when there is no definite article marker, such as with proper nouns. This is one argument for the idea the ה־ prefix is a semantic and morphological feature, rather than per se a definite article in its own right, though this could be contested.
2423: Is 'Taurus' (Bull) Semitic? Aug 9, 2021
The Latin 'taurus', Greek ταύρος (tauros) and Lithuanian 'tauras' all could come from the Proto-Indo-European PIE *tau-ro- meaning 'bull', but this could actually be Semitic. The Aramaic for 'bull' is תור (tor), in Hebrew שור (shor), and Arabic ثور (thawr) and so on throughout the whole Semitic family. Meanwhile, many Indo-European languages do not have a word descended from this root, such as in many Indo-Iranian languages, or other related languages spoken further the East. Some notably may have exceptions to this, as in Persian or Avestan with a similar word for horses, or Sanskrit sthura- (thick; standing firm) related to the Old English 'steer'. It could be that those missing cases are simply lacking data, or that this is a wanderwort.
2422: orca, killer whale, and grampus Aug 8, 2021
Killer whales named because they are whale killers. This observation was made even in ancient times, and among their multiple, varied names, the Spanish 'ballena asesina' literally means 'whale murderess' (it is grammatically feminine), since sailors noted that they would hunt in packs to kill whales. Both English and Spanish also use the alternative 'orca' from Latin but this isn't much less fearsome. This name comes from mythology of the underworld, and the Roman deity 'Orcus', also the namesake of ogres and orcs. Thus, the scientific name 'Orcinus orca' would translate as "orca [evil deity], of the kingdom of the underworld". Perhaps the nicest names are now mostly out of fashion, including grampus (literally 'fat-fish') and 'blackfish'.
2421: Mesoclitics Aug 7, 2021
It is not difficult to imagine clitics—the shortened half of a contraction—at the beginning or end of a word, but they can also exist in the middle. While this is by no means the most common manner for a clitic to take, so-called mesoclitics are when the clitic is found between the stem (or 'host') and an affix. For instance, Portuguese and many other Western Romance languages will insert forms of object pronouns in between verbs and the verbal suffix, such as perhaps most prominently Portuguese:
"Escrever-te-ei uma carta" (I will write you a letter)
where the object pronoun 'te' ([to] you) is placed within 'escreverei' (I will write), which itself is made from the verb 'escrever' + the ending '-ei'. Here also, it affects the stress. It is also theoretically possible that having a clitic within a root itself exists, but reports of this are still novel. If confirmed, these would be known as 'endoclitics'.
2420: trifle Aug 6, 2021
The English cake 'trifle' comes from a French word meaning 'deception', but no one is entirely sure of where it came from. The French word ' truffe' (deception) can't be reliably traced back further, but after this point its meaning softened to merely that of 'mockery', and eventually just 'idle; unimportant'. This is likely where the cake's name comes in, as at that point the idea was only of something taken lightly. Eventually it came to mean something of insignificant value, or just small.
2419: Read: Unique Germanic Evolution Aug 5, 2021
English is thought of as being unusually different to its European relatives because of its borrowed (usually Romantic) words, but this is not always why. 'To read' for instance is a Germanic word meaning 'advise; counsel' that developed differently to any other. *rēdaną, also led to the German 'Rat' (council)—also borrowed in some Slavic areas for political divisions—and Dutch 'raden' (to advise; guess), and this root eventually came to mean 'to interpret' in English and then specifically 'to interpret a letter' hence 'reading'. This now exclusive meaning is unique, but it should be noted that the Scots word 'rede' can also mean both 'to advise' but also 'to decipher', also from Middle English.
2418: Hallstatt Aug 4, 2021
Hallstatt, Austria was the location of Johann Georg Ramsauer's discovery of multiple Bronze Age and Iron Age, Celtic settlements which helped to understand the vast pre-Roman civilizations. Coincidentally, both now and historically, the area was known for its important salt-mines, and even the modern German name for the town 'Hallstatt' is derived from the Gaulish word for 'salt', related to the Welsh 'halen', Cornish 'haloin' and Breton 'halen', all P Celtic (Bretonic) languages. In Q Celtic (Goidelic) languages an [s] is retained instead of an [h] such as Irish and Scots Gaelic 'salann'.
2417: Functionality of Ge- in German Aug 3, 2021
Like German, Old English frequently used the prefix 'ge-' for a variety of purposes. Indeed, while most Germanic language use this—a feature lost in Modern English—it wasn't used in all the same ways. While both Old English and Modern German use this for participles and to indicate association like the modern 'co(m)-' prefix derived from Latin, in Old English this was also used as an intensifier, especially indicating a completed action of a verb. The prefix could also be used to form nouns and verbs indicating a result.