2699: The Currency Symbol Bars are Not as Old as You Think | May 11, 2024

It’s hard to miss the fact that currency symbols on every inhabited continent have a convention to write a letter with a slash through it, but this is actually a new standard. In the case of the two older currency symbols still in use that employ this, $ and £, in the case of the dollar is is incidental, as the symbol derived from a P over an S for ‘peso’, but in the case of the pound symbol, even the Bank of England doesn’t known the exact reason. It was originally simply 𝕷 ℒ or written lower case only getting the bar at the earliest in the 17th century, but the other predecimal sterling symbols (e.g. s and d) never got the bar.

This eventually became seen as standard practice in $ and £, spreading to other currencies, and many older currencies like the Russian ruble ₽ only got the bar later, in this case in 2013 via online polling, and even pre-Euro Dutch guilder ƒ or German mark ℳ︁ did not have this extra bar. Meanwhile, many currencies introduced in the 20th or 21st century do include this bar. This is especially true of places associated with the Spanish and British Empires, or America, but not the French or Dutch Empires for instance where the bar was never used, even where new currencies were invented. 

While this bar is primarily seen on currencies in the Latin script even in areas with a different writing system like the Korean won ₩ or the Lao kip ₭, it also appears occasionally with other scripts, like the Ukrainian hryvnia ₴, Turkish lira ₺, Georgian lari ₾, or since 2010 the Indian rupee ₹. Most Arabic and native Southeast Asian scripts don’t add slashes to symbols, and just use abbreviations.

2698: Arabic’s 3 Words for Orange | May 10, 2024

The word for 'orange' used in many European languages is from a root word originating in a  Dravidian language —look at the Tamil நாரங்காய் (nāraṅkāy) literally “water fruit”— from Southeast Asia, like the fruit itself. This entered most European languages through Arabic نَارَنْج (nāranj),

Many words for the fruit found in the Middle East or Central Asia have another common root like the Persian ترنج (turunç), such as Turkish turuncu, Amharic ትርንጎ (tərəngo), Georgian თურინჯი (turinǯi), and in Spanish and Portuguese, while not referring to an orange, toronja means grapefruit, along with ‘pomelo’. Armenian used to use թուրինջ (tʻurinǰ), but now tends to use նարնջի (narinj). Note that all those examples above belong to completely different language families. 

Despite Arabic having its own, completely different term for it as mentioned yesterday, this does ultimately come from Arabic أُتْرُنْج (‘utrunj), meaning Arabic has had 3 distinct words for oranges in its history. Admittedly, أُتْرُنْج (ʔutrunj) has gone on to not only refer to an orange, but in its true sense of 'bitter orange' is why it led to words for grapefruits and pomelos.

2697: What's Your Favorite Fruit: Portugal? May 9, 2024

 In a number of languages, the fruit orange or for example the Spanish 'naranja' became the name of the color in between yellow and red, making it the last of the secondary colors to get a widely used distinct name beyond 'yellow-red' in many European languages. The name for the fruit itself though around the world is less ubiquitous. In Arabic the name for the fruit is البرتقالي (alburtuqaliu) meaning literally "(the) Portugals", which is also the name for the color. Note that Arabic has no <p> nor <g> sounds so they are substituted for <b> and <q> respectively. The reason for this is that the citrus fruits from Southeast Asia were first introduced by Portuguese traders, and even in parts of Italy like Turin there is a similarly derived name for the Turin orange. In Hebrew meanwhile, the fruit name is תפוז (tapuz) which is neither borrowed nor from a normal Hebrew root, but a contraction of תפוח זהב (tapuach zahav) meaning 'golden apple'. This is separate to the word for the color orange כתום (catom), one of many Biblical Hebrew terms for gold.

2696: Chads, Karens, and Sadism: a Brief Look at Eponyms May 8, 2024

Eponyms, which is to say words derived from personal names, are actually quite common, and impressively can occupy seemingly any part of speech (or any open lexical class, specifically). There’s adjectives like ‘sadistic’ (from a Marquis de Sade), ‘mesmerize’ (from Franz Anton Mesmer), and especially nouns like ‘nicotine’, ‘boycott’, and ‘diesel’ and ‘cardigan’ and ‘sandwich’ if we again include personal titles. Some other specific surnames, like Einstein are also used as eponyms, though in reference to one, known person. 

These are not only limited to specific, related verbs or nouns. While slang terms like “chad”, “karen” or to a lesser extent “becky” all take a given name for one who represents a certain personality trait or archetype—which is a novel use in some sense—this is not a solely modern practice. Other terms like “john” referring to a man who hires a prostitute, or ‘hick’ (a nickname of Richard) as an unintelligent country dweller, ‘nancy’ for a homosexual man, and so on all do the same thing. ‘Jack’ a nickname of John, may have the most of these terms having brought about the generic nouns from a “car jack” to a “naval jack”, and also the archetypal use when especially historically it denoted a poor person, a laborer and so on. It just speaks to how common of a name Jack and Jacque were that this led to dozens of connotations nowadays.

This is certainly not an exhaustive list, so leave a comment for other personal names that take on eponymous use, particularly any that do not carry negative connotations.

2695: See You Later, Allegarto May 7, 2024

If you're not used to non-rhotic dialects, like that of a Londoner who will hardly distinguish between 'fought' and 'fort', then don’t worry; they mess it up too. Some words have -R at the end of them that shouldn't, possibly also because ending a word with a vowel isn't so common in English. A conductor conducts but an alligator does not alligate. Rather, the word is from Spanish 'el lagarto' (the lizard) rendered as 'allegarto' in early Modern English, but the -R was added later. It could be influenced from the unrelated 'alligator' in Latin (‘he who binds’) but just as likely a group of people unfamiliar with the animal in the first place made a more naturally English-sounding change.

2694: Metric vs Imperial Use in Cultural Zeitgeists May 6, 2024

In the English speaking world, at least in the US, and to different extents the UK Canada etc. the units of measurement are sort of all over the place. On one end of the scale, the US uses US customary units, sometimes—though incorrectly—referred to as the imperial system, but we’ll also run a 5K or maybe measure a small amount of food in grams. In some Commonwealth countries the core is metric, but some vestigial things remain like in Canada and South Africa where they use metric, but will still refer to people’s height in feet, and Canadian recipes may use ounces and cups etc.. The UK perhaps has the strangest relationship mixing the two, where things like temperature are nearly exclusively in celsius, distance is most often measured with the imperial system, but weight and volume will depend on the context. Perhaps the oddest example of this famously is that gasoline (or rather petrol) is sold in liters, but fuel-use is typically still miles-per-gallon.

2693: Gee Whiz: The Two Forms of Lower-Case G May 5, 2024

There are two forms of the lower case letter ɡ /ℊ, which is not simply a matter of font or stylization. The open loop ɡ is sometimes referred to as the single-story G, and likewise the other is a double-story or looptail G. Both of these come as variants of the capital G, though the looptailℊis strange insofar as it counterintuitively loops back over to the left, unlike a cursive 𝓰, making it less efficient to write. In fact, almost nobody does write them, and studies have found just over 2% of participants could even reliably write this form when asked. The benefit of the looptailℊis that it doesn't descend as far down so that more lines can fit on a page, which is why it exists exclusively for typefaces, and increasingly only for serifed typefaces. Other letters, like j/y/q/p drop down as well, but they do not tend to curve much or necessarily as far as the curly tail of a ɡ. Like other print-based variants like this, most people do not even register which version of G is being used, and nearly ½ of those polled reported even knowing two forms existed¹. 

1) Wong, K., Wadee, F., Ellenblum, G., & McCloskey, M. (2018). The devil’s in the g-tails: Deficient letter-shape knowledge and awareness despite massive visual experience. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 44(9), 1324–1335. https://doi.org/10.1037/xhp0000532

2692: Why Historical Animal-Names are So Imprecise | May 4, 2024

Carrying on the question of how Old English had its own for hyena, an animal that lives in central, Sub-Saharan Africa, that was by no means a rare example of a word for animals and plants in particular that got recycled from something else. Indeed, historically animals and plants are often very difficult to define, and whatever existed beyond one’s local area was basically as good as myth. Take the Old English 'olfend' meaning 'camel', an animal also unfamiliar to the Anglo-Saxons, but this word comes indirectly from the Latin 'elephantus' (elephant), though Old English did also have the word 'elpend' or 'ylpend' for an elephant. Again, it is likely these people would not have a clear idea what these animals looked like, but knew from Biblical stories or other tales of these beasts from the east.

2691: Old English Has a Word for ‘Hyena’, Sort of. May 3, 2024

The modern word 'hyena' comes from an Ancient Greek root ὗς (hûs) meaning 'pig' with a feminine ending -αινα (-aina) so called because it has a similar hide to a warthog. This replaced an earlier Old English word nihtgenġe (“night walker”) which is not only cooler, but begs the question of how much contact there was between these parts of the world to have a distinct and known word for the animal. You might think the answer is because of the Roman Empire, but Old English began after the Roman Empire fell, and the Germanic tribes that invaded then-Celtic Britain wouldn't have had much Roman contact. However, hyenas are used in the Bible as a metaphor for Satan, and the term nihtgenġe (“night walker”) would otherwise refer to a demon. So, in way this was the word for them, but it is also likely those living in Britain in the Dark Ages would not have had a clear idea how they looked.

There will be more on this tomorrow.

2690: Roman Numeral Fractions May 2, 2024

People tend to be familiar with the notation of Roman numerals like I, V, X and so on. S was used to represent ½ as in XIIS (12½). Other than this, a system of dots (····· or ⁙ for 5/12, and S⁙ for 11/12) was used representing fractions of twelfths, as is attested in coins. Why an S though? While the Roman numeral system is not actually based upon the names of the words for the numbers and only coincidentally resembles numbers usually—a lesson for another day—S is short for ‘semis’, meaning ‘a half’. The half in question was specifically 6⁄12 since there were 12 ounces to an as, a Roman coin. Mentioning that these fractions are named for being parts of 12 is not only relevant to know about a now-obscure coin, but that the names sometimes are derived from this, like 8⁄12 being called ‘bes’ as in ‘twice [a third]’. For most of history the primary setting of Roman numerals was in commerce, not math, so that’s what this system related to mostly, despite the obvious limitations for numbers beyond. Outside of this and a handful of other specific abbreviations, the only way to express other fractions would be in whole words, or in commerce would simply be performed with an abacus, but it could be argued that S is still in the Roman numeral family.

2689: Venom and Venus May 1, 2024

The Roman love and fertility deity, Venus, may have been thought of as having harsh words for people, but that’s not why that word is related to the word ‘venom’. Like much of the Roman pantheon, the name ‘Venus’ comes from a normal Latin word, or in some cases Etruscan, meaning basically what they covered, like ‘Minerva’ deity of wisdom coming from an Etruscan root like ‘mens’ meaning ‘mind’.

In the case of ‘Venus’, this is a Latin word for ‘loveliness; desire’, and is very possibly related to the Norse pantheon classification ‘vanir’ for the deities overseeing love, fertility, and chaos. That said, one thing that distinguishes ‘venus’ from just being a regular word is that it is not grammatically feminine in form but it is treated as feminine when referring to Venus. The fact that ‘venom’ (from Latin ‘venenum’) shares the same root is that while it eventually referred to all potions and thereby poisons, the idea of poison is now more general too, once having the meaning ‘drug’, ‘venenum’ more specifically referred to love charms and love potions. 

The primary meaning of this Indo-European root word is love, as in Sanskrit वनोति vanati (to love), and Hittite ṷen- (intercourse). It just so happens to be the case that in a few different languages this also led to words for poison and in Albanian ‘vuaj’ (earlier *vonja) meaning “I suffer”, from the sense of ‘to strive (for)’.

2688: Semantic Narrowing of Venom and Poison Apr 30, 2024

English has a lot of words. By many metrics, it has more words than any other language. That means that many terms that would have had lots of meanings have picked up highly niche connotations. For instance, there is a habit some people have of correcting the notion that snakes aren’t poisonous, but rather venomous, with the former denoting something that is toxic when ingested, and the latter referring to poison that is injected via bite or sting.

First of all, even in that definition, some snakes are poisonous, like the rhabdophis keelback snakes, though the snake’s poisonous quality is developed from its diet. More to the point, this distinction is really very new, and doesn’t really exist in other languages. ‘Venom’ comes from the Latin ‘venenum’ meaning ‘poison’. The original meaning of this word was also something like ‘charm’ and possibly ‘potion’, which would make sense especially given that ‘poison’, ‘potion’, and ‘potable’ all come from the same root meaning ‘to drink’. There will be more about the wide range of meanings related to ‘venenum’ tomorrow.

2687: God-Bye & Other Religious Farewells Apr 29, 2024

Like the word ‘goodbye’, which is a contraction of “God be with you [/ye]”, the French ‘adiue’ is from the full line “a Dieu vos comant” (“I commend you to God”). This is why historically this  was used as a greeting, as well as a farewell, which in both cases is now the primary usage. Many other Romance languages have such a line from the Latin equivalent ‘ad Deum’, like the Spanish ‘adios’, but so does German with the common farewell ‘tschüß’ (also spelt ‘tscheuss’) from the French ‘adieu’ making the most common farewell term in several languages religious in nature, however unrecognizably.

2686: Letters vs. Digraphs: Which is More Authentic Apr 28, 2024

 English speakers should be pretty used to digraphs and trigraphs: using two or more letters to represent one sound. Think of <SH>, <TH>, <PH> and so on, which is not the same as silent letters, like ‘science’ having a silent C (or S, kind of). One interesting historical trend is that <S> usually represents the sound [s] as opposed [ʃ] (as in <SH>), written in English and French as a digraph (French: <CH>) or in German as a trigraph (i.e. <SCH>).This is not always the case though, as in Hungarian where the letter <S> represents [ʃ] and if you wanted to write [s] that would be spelt <SZ>. This just goes to show that the letters English considers to represent as the default of sorts is not universal, seen again in the difference between <C> and <CH>; the sounds those are generally thought of as representing in English are reversed in many contexts in Italian, e.g. ‘ciao’ (ˈt͡ʃa.o) vs. ‘chiodo’ (ˈkjɔ.do). In fact, in Old English the letter <C> also was [t͡ʃ] (as in <CH>), so really employing a digraph as opposed to one letter is more of a historical coincidence than anything else.

2685: Skeptic or Sceptic? Apr 27, 2024

If you’re skeptical about what’s in your septic tank, you wouldn’t be the only one. In fact, it is primarily for this reason of not associating the word ‘sceptic’ with ‘septic’ that the American spelling is with a K (i.e. ‘skeptic’) while in Britain etc. it is with a C. There is another problem, however, looking at the British spelling, which is that normally a word beginning SC- before I or E is not pronounced this way, as in ‘science’ or ‘scene’. Of course, in Latin it was pronounced, but that is certainly not what people expect looking at a word like that.

So why then do Commonwealth countries spell it with the C at the beginning? Because in French ‘sceptique’, where the word comes from, it was not pronounced, and would have joined the ranks of ‘science’ and ‘scene’, were it not for a change in pronunciation with the C pronounced /k/, through a basically random process. As a result, American English adopted a new spelling to reflect this change while elsewhere the pronunciation changed but that was not reflected in the spelling. 

2684: Feeling Lousy? Apr 26, 2024

 Feeling lousy? You ought to ask someone to comb through your hair. These days the dominant use of the word ‘lousy’ is “in poor condition”, often relating to ill-health or to something that is disappointing. The original sense of this word is “lice-infested”, but since the the singular form ‘louse’ is not as common, people will not as readily make that association as perhaps they might about describing someone as ‘mousy’, though also that word is more phonetically similar, with ‘louse’ being pronounced with an [s], and ‘lousy’ usually with a [z].

2683: Penguins Aren’t Who They Say They Are Apr 25, 2024

The word ‘penguin’ is most likely a word of Welsh origin, but given that penguins don’t live in the northern hemisphere, and Welsh presence did not tend to spread very far—though they were eventually in Patagonia—and that this term dates from the 16th century, it does raise an obvious question of why. Strengthening this question is that the Welsh “pen gwyn” means “white head” which penguins famously don’t have. This is because the term originally referred to another bird that was ecologically, but not taxonomically similar: the now-extinct great auk. The great auk also didn’t have a white head but a distinctive white patch on the forehead, and otherwise resembled penguins in appearance and ecological niche fairly closely, but in the northern hemisphere. With their nests on the ground and far more predators and habitat loss in the arctic region compared to the antarctic region, they became extinct in the mid-19th century, but there were a few centuries when the Welsh “pen gwyn” and “pengwin” were known about simultaneously.

2682: The Symbol for Penny was d Apr 24, 2024

For over 50 years in Britain, the symbol for a penny is simply ‘p’, written at the end of a price like 99p, but before decimalisation in 1971, Brits would write out pence as ‘d’, also at the end. This pre-decimal system, which saw 20 shillings to the pound and 12 pence to the shilling, is often referred to as £sd or Lsd as an abbreviation of these units of sterling. For instance, something costing 7 shillings, and 9 pence might be written 7/9d. This raises the question of why ‘d’? Even the ‘s’ for shillings, not as commonly seen as the other two letters, only coincidentally had the same initial letter. 

Rather, these abbreviations come from Latin, where ‘pounds’ is ‘librae’ (hence the L-based £ symbol), ‘shillings’ is ‘solidi’, and ‘pence’ is ‘denarii’ (all written in their plural form). These words are no longer used, but the word ‘denarius’ led to many other words for modern currencies, ranging from Serbia to Bahrain, or just money as in the Spanish ‘dinero’. 

2681: Dour’s Pronunciation Change was Inevitable Apr 23, 2024

While English is not written phonologically for a variety of factors including frequent borrowing from other languages and multiple significant sound shifts after spelling standardization, spelling how something is pronounced isn’t always a one-way street. Take the word ‘dour’, which traditionally rhymes with ‘moor’ i.e. [dʊɹ] in Standard American, but is increasingly being articulated as [daʊɹ] which would keep it in line with other similarly spelt words like ‘our’, ‘hour’ and ‘sour’. While there are certainly other ‘-ou-’ combinations that represent the vowel [ʊ] like in ‘would’, it is clear that ‘dour’ was influenced from the spelling, and other words spelt similarly. Notably however, all of these were originally pronounced with the single syllable [ʊɹ] ending since the time of Old English, with ‘hour’ being the latest to change, from [hʊɹ] still being used into the 17th century and onwards in some regional pockets to [haʊɹ] now being universal.

2680: The Mysterious Origins of Rice Apr 22, 2024

The word “rice” is a wanderwort meaning that is shared across many languages that aren’t related to each other, in this case many Semitic, Indo-European, Caucasian, and Turkic languages. Like a lot of old wanderworts, including ‘wine’ (LINK), it is not entirely clear where ‘rice’ comes from. Most likely, it is from a South Indian, non-Indo-European language, but words clearly from this root are seen from India to Persia, and the Middle East to Western Europe. One theory holds that it entered Sanskrit through some Dravidian source before entering languages to the west. Another holds that the word first entered Semitic languages like the Hebrew ⁧אורז⁩ (órez) ultimately from Old Tamil arici; Tamil is also a Dravidian language.