2465: piano Sep 11,
'Piano' means 'soft' in Italian, and this might seem strange on its own considering the power of the instrument, but it is shortened from 'pianoforte', literally 'soft-loud', named for the fact it could alternate volume more than its predecessors, harpsichords and clavichords. The word for 'piano' was borrowed, but words of that same root had been around for some time before. Both 'plane' and 'plain' are related to each other come from the sense of level, smooth, broad, even etc..
2464: C-K-Q were Redundant, Even in Ancient Times Sep 10, 2021
In English C, K, and Q may seem redundant together, but this is not actually new. Etruscan used C before front vowels, K before the vowel [a], and Q before back vowels. Effectively, this would be as if English used two different letters for the T in 'tail' as compared to 'trail', which also changes due to the linguistic environment. These Etruscan letters were therefore not phonemic—the sounds, if theoretically used in each other's places would not have changed the meaning of any word—and were in that sense basically redundant even back then. In Etruscan this may have been phonologically redundant, but there is a very minor, allophonic change that happens going from [ki] to [ka] to [ku] in where the consonant is pronounced in one's mouth. You can try this out yourself.
In Latin, which inherited these letters but did not distinguish between back and front vowels in its spelling, this redundancy was present, and some writers commented on it at the time even. Eventually C morphed into a fricative before E and I, like how it is found in Spanish or Italian today. This therefore made the letter K relevant to distinguish when one wanted to indicate the [k] sound in any context, but still it was not terribly useful.
2465: lamb & yean Sep 9, 2021
Old English had the word 'ēanian' (now 'yean') for 'to lamb' as a verb, but 'lamb' is an Old English word anyway too. This disparity comes from two different roots, but the verbal form is related to many Romantic or Slavic nouns like the Latin 'agnus' (lamb) or Serbo-Croatian ја̏гње (jȁgnje). 'Lamb' on the other hand is mostly related to modern Germanic cognates, and even the English 'elk'. These both come from different Proto-Indo-European roots that converged into the same meaning, and in some languages one became dominant. By the Middle Ages, 'lamb' won out in English.
2462: The Cotton Fire and the Dissolution of the Monasteries Sep 8, 2021
The Cotton Fire (named for the library's founder, not the material) was significant in its devastation because the library housed many antiques and particularly rare books. This time, AD 1731, was particularly significant as well because its founder who died 1631 had gotten many documents that were being privatized after the Dissolution of the Monasteries, a series of legal decrees that broke up monasteries, convents, abbeys, etc., selling off land and liquidating many assets including priceless documents and manuscripts. During the English Reformation as well, many books were destroyed outright, for their materials, or purchased with no understanding of value and stored in any sort of condition. Therefore, when Sir Robert Bruce Cotton had in the late 16th and early 17th century made a point of collecting some of these, often his library housed sole copies. The fire, which caused some 1/4 of the library to be lost meant that many documents were completely lost forever, and many others, like the only copy of Beowulf, took significant damage.
2461: Old English Rune Poem Sep 7, 2021
The Old English rune poem is a significant document in runology wherein each line contains a riddle to which the name of the rune is the answer. It uses 29 Anglo-Saxon runes as opposed to Young Futhark's runes. Unfortunately, the original was lost in the Cotton Fire at Ashburn House in 1731, though it had been copied in 1705 onto copper plates. On these copies however, some of the formatting was changed and possibly more than two lines were added.
2460: How D-Day was almost Stopped by a Crossword Sep 6, 2021
D-Day was one of the most significant days of the 20th century, and yet it was all almost stopped due to a crossword puzzle. In the days leading up to the originally chosen date, the The Daily Telegraph had answers across multiple crosswords that included on one 'Utah', 'Omaha', then 'Mulberry', 'Overlord', and finally 'Neptune': all names of landing sites chosen in the beaches of Normandy, or names for operations (e.g. Operation Overlord). After an investigation by MI5, this was determined to be a coincidence.
2459: Semitic Definite Article Sep 5, 2021
Two Semitic languages, Hebrew and Arabic, have on the surface two differently sourced definite articles, ה־ (ha-) in Hebrew and ٱلْـ (al-) in Arabic, but some linguistics think otherwise. They surmise that originally there was a form هل۔/הל־ (hal-) used in a proto-Semitic language and as they two diverged, this form did as well, splitting in two separate ways. Not everyone agrees with this, and even those who would agree to the idea principle, they propose different forms. Some of these include in Arabic لا (lā) either through metathesis or as a different particle that eventually took on the meaning of a determiner.
2458: German Cake: Not Named for Germany Sep 4, 2021
The sort of chocolate cake known as 'German cake' is not only invented in America, but wasn't even supposed to be named after the country of Germany. Plenty of foods are named for their supposed region of origin like 'French fries' but in this case it was just named after a man Samuel German who started the Baker's Chocolate Company who named it "Baker's German's Sweet Chocolate".
2457: Solomon Sep 3, 2021
The Hebrew given name שלמה (Shlomo) is Solomon in English, and features this extra terminal -N in most other languages except Jewish ones like Yiddish. Even in the fellow Semitic language of Arabic it is →سُلَيْمَان (Suleimān) this is present. This is because of the Greek influence over the other major sources of the name's wider adoption like Latin and Syriac Aramaic, with Greek adding a '-on' suffix which was just retained elsewhere. Between Latin in the Christian world and Arabic in the Muslim world, many languages of totally variant language families have this terminal -N, with a notable exception of Spanish which got its version (Zulema) from Arabic.
2456: Fraternities Using Greek Sep 2, 2021
Fraternities and Sororities in North America usually use 2 or 3 Greek letters in their names. Some of these don't stand for anything, but originally these secret societies, now public, used Greek mottos, such as the oldest, ΦΒΚ, standing for Φιλοσοφία Βίου Κυβερνήτης (Philosophia Biou Kybernētēs) literally translating as "love of wisdom [philosophy] is the helmsman of life", or ΔΥ standing for Δικαια Υποθηκη (Dikaia Upotheke) for 'justice, our foundation'. Some fraternal societies have kept these mottos secret, or have just picked Greek letters for nothing in particular.
2455: H-Hour & D-Day Sep 1, 2021
H-Hour refers to the time of day which a battle was set to commence, with this phrase entering the military parlance of the First World War. The 'H-' stands for 'hour' in effect, but the Norwegian calque 'klokken H' only took the letter and not the pattern. This pattern was also used for D-Day, which now refers to a specific moment in history—June 6, 1944—but just referred to the planned, secretive date of the Normandy landings.
2455: syphilis Aug 31, 2021
'Syphilis', since its arrival to Europe from the Americas took on a number of euphemisms including 'purple flower', 'great imitator', 'black lion', and so on. It might sound therefore that 'syphilis' is the scientific name is more straightforward, but this too is a sort of euphemism, coming from the name of a character in Girolamo Fracastoro's poem about a boy who insults a Greek deity and is cursed with a harsh disease. The poem actually used the spelling 'Syphilus' but this was changed in common spelling for the disease.
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.