2707: Singular Words People Thought Were Plural May 19, 2024

Plenty of singular words ends in -s (e.g. ‘lens’), and even more end in -se (e.g. ‘house’), but in a few cases, this was assured to be plural. For instance, the word ‘pea’ used to be written out as ‘pease’ the plural of which was ‘peasen’, from Old English ‘pisa’, ultimately from Ancient Greek πίσον (píson). This changed in Modern English, joined by ‘cherry’, the root of which is “cherise”, though this had changed earlier, already “cherry” in Middle English. Of course, the opposite happens too wherein a plural word is assumed to be singular. This is typical especially of foreign words with plural forms other than -s, like ‘cannoli’ (singular ‘cannolo’) or ‘bacteria’ (singular ‘bacterium’), or ‘caper’ losing its perceived plural ‘-S’ from the French ‘câpres’.

2706: Biblical Monsters Used for Crocodiles May 18, 2024

The Hebrew word for ‘crocodile’ is based off of a semitic root, but not from the one used in Arabic تمساح (timsaḥ) which is also what spread around many crocodile non-inhabiting areas that had Arabic influence, appearing in this form in several Turkic languages. Another Semitic word for a crocodile exists in the Amharic አዞ (azo). While Arabic’s form is from Coptic, originally from an Ancient Egyptian root m-z-ḥ, Modern Hebrew uses a completely different (for the most part) yet also ancient word: תנין (tanin). This is from Biblical Hebrew, frequently mentioned as early as Genesis 1:21, which clearly depicts the תנין as a sea monster, not as a regular animal. This was not a mixed-use word either; Modern Hebrew uses it, as it does for many monster-to-animal word decisions when the language was revitalized as a common, native language in the late 19th/ early 20th centuries. A Hebrew word תמסח (timsaḥ) is also used, but it is highly dated compared to תנין (tanin). One notable inclusion is the translation of the plague of צפרדע (tzfarda(im)) as ‘crocodiles’ instead of the far more common ‘frogs’, which is now also the Hebrew for ‘frogs’.

2705: Chinese Fractions May 17, 2024

While nowadays, the Chinese write fractions in the same Arabic numerals as everyone else, traditionally they had their own system for writing out fractions. While some of the writing of numbers in Chinese may look like numerals, such as 一 (1),  二 (2), and  三  (3), each having the corresponding number of lines, zero is 零 supposedly related to the character for rain. 

Since these aren’t numerals or words exactly, but pictographs. Decimals are fairly straightforward: 三点二 for 3.2, with the 点 (dian) acting as a decimal point, but fractions are written differently. ⅔ would be written as 三分之二  which might look like “three parts of two” but in Chinese the numerator is written after the denominator. The 分之 basically mean “divides”, but not divided by in the order normally used in the West, because 3÷2 is not the same as 2÷3 aka ⅔. This works the same in percentages, also written in the reverse order it would be in English, 百分之二十 is simply “‘hundred’ divides 20”.

2704: Ethiopia and Abyssinia May 16

There are a number of countries and regions that have historical names, like Persia for Iran, Mesopotamia for Iraq, or Dalmatia for Croatia. While some of these have been used relatively recently, usually it is a matter of one replacing the other, but in the case of ‘Abyssinia’ and ‘Ethiopia’, the difference is that the now old-fashioned word came to English later, partly because there was no native word exactly. In fact, both words come from Latin, replacing the Old English Siġelhearwena land or Sigelwaraland, meaning “land of the Sun Worshippers” or “Land of the Sunburnt”. The difference is that ‘Abyssinia’ comes to [admittedly New] Latin from Arabic, as opposed to ‘Ethiopia’ from Ancient Greek. Though now this is also the modern word for Ethiopia in native Amharic ኢትዮጵያ (ʾĪtyōṗṗyā), that itself is adopted from Greek where it meant ‘burnt face’ and denoted all of Sub-Saharan Africa, as opposed to ‘Libya’ which denoted North Africa.

2703: Gelatin and Gelato May 15, 2024

Words like gluten, gelatin, glutamate, and even gelato are all related, beyond just having a vague food relation, but it may not be obvious why. In the case of ‘gluten’ and ‘gelatin’, which do not look so alike, this from the Latin ‘gluten’ meaning ‘glue’, though ‘gelatin’ is older in English, passing through many other languages along the way, but both become very sticky and springy in water and then harden into a shape, likely coming from the same source as ‘clay’ etymologically. This quality of sticking did not only extend to things that are sticky to the touch, but that come to stick together in some other way when they harden. ‘Gelato’ is called such since ‘gelata’ in Latin means ‘frost’, when water begins to bind, or even ‘glass’, made from sand coming together.

2702: 'Bus' comes from ¾ of a Latin Ending May 14, 2024

When it comes to motor vehicles, lots of words have been abbreviated to form used today, but not in the same ways. The word 'auto' common in many languages is shorted from automobile, but the prefix 'auto-' is common enough and stands on its own as a morpheme at least. In the case of 'bus' however, this is from omnibus which is a Latin word meaning “for all”, as the dative plural form of omnis (“every; all”). In shortening it, not only was the word abbreviated, but it implies the root is made of “omni-” plus “-bus” but the suffix in Latin is “-ibus”, and unlike say “auto + mobile”, “omn(i)-” would anyway not stand on its own, at least not with the same meaning. 

Later, words like “autobus” emerged to refer to mechanical omnibusses (no sensible plural would exist using just Latin morphology), but by this point it had lost any originally intended meaning it might have had. 

2701: Gardens, Orchards, and Paradise May 13, 2024

It’s lovely to sit in an orchard, though far less lovely sounding to sit in a wort-yard, yet this is what it would have been called in Old English ortgeard. 'Wort' in this case simply means ‘plant’, still seen at the end of many plant names, like butterwort, woundwort, and spearwort. However, etymologically speaking, there is an even better sounding orchard-word: paradise. 

Paradise comes to English ultimately from the Avestan (Persian) word pairidaēza, meaning “enclosed garden” but in Ancient Greek παράδεισος (parádeisos) meant “palace gardens”. Because of this lofty definition, this word became associated with the Garden of Eden and by extension heaven (e.g. Dante’s Paradiso), displacing the enigmatic Old English word ‘neorxnawang’. These biblical connotations to ‘paradise’ do not exist in the doublet ‘parvis’ (i.e. “cathedral gardens”) but coincidentally came in the Hebrew פרדס (pardes) took on extra, spiritualism, while in Modern Hebrew still denotes an orchard.

2700: The Non-Roman Origins of Roman Numerals | May 12, 2024

Unlike other letter-based numerals that use the letters in ascending order of the alphabet, like Greek or Hebrew, Roman numerals are more abstracted, and somewhat systematic. For instance, X is 10, and take ½ of that for V (5), which is the top half of X. The X is probably derived from adding on an extra line at the end of a set in an early tally marks system. This works the same in M (1,000) and D (500), but not in the way that you might think. 

These letters are not tied to words, though M was reinforced by Latin ‘mille’ for ‘thousand’, and the original form of M in numerals was ↀ, half of which is D. This originated in pre-Roman Etruscan numerals, that used C (100), IↃ (500), and CIↃ (1,000) and these bracketed-I forms then were written as similar looking letters, and C reinforced by ‘centum’. In fact, though not as typically used, other forms ↁ (10,000) and ↂ (50,000) exist from this system of adding brackets. The shapes of the letters, and some Latin words may have slightly influenced the form of Roman numerals as in the case of ↀ→M, but in almost all other cases (I,V,X,L,D) these symbols only coincidentally looked like letters and have nothing to do with the words they represented.

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.