2454: Neutral Position of Articulators Aug 30, 2021

The neutral position of an articulator—which is to say where one rests one's tongue, lips, etc. when not speaking—will actually vary notably between speakers of different languages. For instance, Russia speakers tend to leave their tongues flat on the floor of their mouths, while English speakers keep them towards the middle, pointed to the alveolar ridge (sometimes called 'teeth-ridge'). More remarkable even, bilinguals can be seen making adjustments relative to the language in question such as when presented with linguistic stimuli that switches languages in an MRI machine. Again, this happens even when the person is not speaking or even necessarily planning to speak.

2453: Secunda Aug 29, 2021

One of the best ways that Biblical Hebrew phonology is understood is from the Secunda, of the Hexapla. This is part of a 6-level interlinear translation into Greek of which the Secunda is a Greek-alphabet transliteration of the Hebrew text, written in about AD 3rd century. Obviously this has its own issues for basing one's understanding of the sounds of Biblical Hebrew, but it does lend some insight. Certain sounds represented in the Greek lettering are significantly different to the modern or modern liturgical varieties of Hebrew, each having their own differences anyway. This is especially useful to glean from local place names, but again, is limited insofar as any writing system will be when used by foreigners for a language with no major similarity.

2452: New Latin Spellings: Things of the Past Aug 28, 2021

The words 'dinosaur' and 'deinonychus' both come from the same root, with the first element. The first part of 'dinosaur', coined in 1842, is from Ancient Greek δεινός (deinós) meaning 'terrible'. That said, it came to English through New Latin which has a standardized way of transliterating Greek into Latin letters, including going from Greek < ει > to Latin < ī >, and < ός > into < us >. Later, scientists stopped using (New) Latin as much—even though here it may technically be listed as being of New Latin—and even if they would, it was not with any real consistency: 'Utahraptor'. As a result, the word over 120 years later, 'deinonychus', uses <ei>.

2451: Re-Latinization of (Vulgar) Romance Languages Aug 27, 2021

The modern standard Romance languages associated most as descendants of Latin would include French, Spanish, and Italian. Of those, each has varied over time to different degrees, but one of the reasons that Italian has diverged less than French for instance is that there were simply more, usually educated people who over time re-latinized the language. For instance, usually in French the 'al-' becomes [o] and this happens too in Spanish, such as 'alter' (Latin for 'other') becoming 'autre' in French, 'otro' in Spanish, but 'altro' in Italian. Even medieval Spanish is less like Latin in certain phonological ways than today due to similar efforts to transform Castilian in particular which is why some medieval text will use the form 'oto' for the Modern Spanish 'alto', from Latin 'altus' (high) but in French it is still 'haut(e)'.

2450: Hebrew סלמון: Overproduced [l] Sound Aug 26, 2021

The Hebrew סלמון [salmon] is directly taken from the English, including the now-not-silent [l]. What makes this even more remarkable is that there was never a point in English the L was pronounced in 'salmon' and in Middle English the word was 'samoun'; before this the Old English 'leax' (related to ‘lox‘) was used. The L was added in association with the original Latin root, but it's unclear where this comes from. This process of adding traditional but unproductive letters from Latin was pretty common, as in 'indict' or 'island'.

2449: Peppercorn Rent Aug 25, 2021

Peppercorn rent refers to rent that is given as a token. Plenty of examples of this ceremonial, notional rent can be found where it is legally or contractually necessary to pay a certain amount of money that is effectively irrelevant, like buying an entire business for a dollar so some sale can be recorded. While this term is now usually just suggestive of something nominally worthless, in the past this was not totally unheard of, and certain places like the University of Bath pays the city rent in the form of a peppercorn, though now this is just symbolic of tradition.

2448: bankrupt Aug 24, 2021

'Bankrupt' is a compound word, and yet its latter element, '-rupt' holds no meaning. This on its own isn't rare, but it comes from an Italian figure of speech which itself is not a compound. Admittedly, were it a word '-rupt' could be just be thought of as related to 'rupture' and that would stand, coming from the same root ultimately, but the Italian 'banca rotta' (broken bench) figuratively refers to a bank that has gone out of business, that the bench was smashed. The terms 'bank' and 'bench' are related also in English with the common meaning as a place where things are deposited (including sand of a riverbank) and the benches of a bank were not actually smashed, at least not regularly to indicate business failure.

2447: Dagger Mark † Aug 23, 2021

The dagger mark (†), also known as a obelus, or as an obelisk has been used for a variety of purposes since antiquity. Now, this symbol indicates death, especially in German language contexts, but it also acts as a secondary footnote marker when an asterisk (*) has already been used. It originated as a line (–) or with two dots (÷) as a way to indicate language that was dubious and may need to be cut, with the specific imagery representing a spit or a spitroast. Later, it was used for the end of a marked passage, and then gaining its use in footnotes, to be followed by a tertiary (‡). Between all these uses, especially in religious literature and symbols for cantillation it was used extensively in medieval Christians, but it never has had explicit reference to Christianity or crucifixes. Still, today many falsely intuit a religious connection.

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.