2727: ‘Hebrew’ and Why ע is Difficult to Transcribe Jun 8, 2024

The letter ayin ע in Hebrew is one that has led to a multitude of difficult transliterations, into Greek, Latin, and English that don’t have this sound traditionally. Historically the ע represented the voiced pharyngeal fricative ([ʕ]), as it still does in some traditional dialects, but in Modern Hebrew has become silent. It is usually ignored in transliterations therefore, as in the Biblical city of Ai (עַי) but there are a few notable exceptions. The word ‘Hebrew’ (language) is עברית (ivrit) but since the word starts with an ע ayin, it was transliterated into Latin with an H. Meanwhile, in the Biblical cities of Gomorrah and Gaza, these also start with an ayin but due to the pharyngealization were transliterated with a G, or in truth a Greek letter Γ gamma. In Arabic, these are written with a separate letter gayin غ‎ representing the sounds /ɣ/ also written with a G when transliterating Bagdad or /ʁ/. This letter is is unique to Arabic among other Semitic writing systems, but it’s unlikely that ayin ע used to represent both pharyngeal fricative and velar fricatives, since this was accomplished with the letter gimmel ג (not גּ). 

For clearer pronunciations, watch this post in video-form.

2726: Housecats and Stoves Jun 7, 202

The normal word in German for an indoor cat is a ‘’Hauskatze”  (i.e. housecat) but a slightly cute way of saying it is “Stubentiger” or hyper-literally broken down as “stove tiger”. The tiger part of that is understandable enough if clearly tongue-in-cheek, but the stove is curious. Looking at the English word ‘stove’, it is first referred to a heated room, like a sauna or bathhouse, and then later denoted the source of the heat, but still more in the sense of a furnace. Only later with the technological innovations leading to the modern stovetop did it take its modern sense, and the word ‘stew’ derived from a similar path.

Meanwhile, in German, this same root also changed slightly, denoting a living room where presumably the main source of heating in the home was located. This has led to a more generic sense of hominess as seen in “Stubentiger”, though “Stube” for a living room is not typically used anymore outside of some regional dialects, and Wohnzimmer (literally “living + room”) is preferred. 

2725: Saying ‘Either’: Either Way is Acceptable Jun 6, 2024

‘Either’ has two pronunciations: /ˈiːðə(ɹ)/, i.e. EE-sound, or /ˈaɪ.ðə(ɹ)/, i.e. AY-sound. Of course, technically it has even more possible pronunciations than merely those two, but only in the normal way that different accents articulate one sound or another distinctly. Here, the fact that the initial vowel can be produced differently by the same person ad hoc, without raising eyebrows in basically any dialect, is remarkable.

It would seem now in both the US and the north of the UK prefer with /iː/, while in the South of the UK and some small pockets in America /ˈaɪ/ is preferred, which is also probably more traditional, though historically, a third option /eɪ/ (i.e. rhymes with ‘way’) was also used and would likely have been closer to the Old English origins. 

All of this above applies to the negative version, ‘neither’.

2724: No Toe? Jun 5, 2024

It might seem natural to have separate words for fingers and toes, but this is not so common everywhere. In fact, through Europe and Western Asia, it is pretty neatly divided that Uralic languages (i.e. Finnish, Estonian, & Hungarian) and Germanic languages have words for toes, except for Yiddish where the term is פינגער פונ פוס (finger fun fus) meaning “finger of the foot”. That means that other Indo-European languages like the Romance and Slavic branches, as well as Semitic and Turkic languages etc. basically use a word that would be better translated as ‘digit’. 

Looking around the globe as well, the trend roughly continues in Asia etc. where having a distinct word for ‘toe’ is not a given and does not appear in many of the languages of Southeast Asia like Thai and Indonesian, but is present in ones located further north.

2723: The Pronunciation of ‘Often’ Jun 4, 2024

‘Often’ is one word, with 3 forms, sort of. Plenty of words are pronounced different ways by different people, though usually it identifies a dialect or sociolect. Here it identifies an interesting pattern, not tied to any particular group of people. Originally, the word was just ‘oft’, and still appears this way sometimes, especially in combination (e.g. ‘an oft-cited source’). This then joined the ranks of other -ten verbs where the -T- is not pronounced, like ‘listen’, ‘soften’, ‘fasten’, ‘christen’ and ‘moisten’, of which all have the T pronounced without the ‘-en’ ending except ‘list’ which isn’t used anymore outside of the now-dated ‘listful’.  

Back to ‘often’, which may be the only one where pronouncing with or without the /t/ would be acceptable. This is because the more historically common way to say it was with the /t/, and it is only more recently that it is articulated like ‘soften’ which is now favored in formal settings, but given how recent that is, the version without a /t/ sound is still prevalent. 

There will be more on this—and why those T’s became silent—tomorrow.

2722: Salads and Salt Jun 3, 2024

Looking for a low-sodium food item? Try a salad, derived from the Latin for ‘salt’, ‘saltum’. This is because the Roman (herba) salata would be in a salt brine, more like kimchi than a typical garden salad, or for that matter Caesar salad. 

Of course, even now, the default ‘salad’ in the modern mind may involve some kind of base with a leafy green, the word extends to plenty of completely unrelated salads, like ‘bulgur salad’ or pasta salad, which are mostly wheat, and tuna-, chicken-, and potato salads are majority comprised of what their names suggest. This begs the question then why ‘salad’, unmodified, is thought of as green? 

Salad, as a distinct dish, really seems to have solidified in 16th century Western Europe into the modern definitions and connotations. The notion of salad being green and fresh can be seen in the phrase “salad days” i.e. one’s youth, first recorded in Shakespeare’s 1606 "Antony and Cleopatra", reflecting the practice of using fresh vegetables as opposed to the salted, pickled ones, which ironically the real Mark Antony and Cleopatra would not have called a salad.  

2721: How Spanish Created Its Own Pronoun Jun 2, 2024

There are parts of speech, known in linguistics as open lexical classes, where new words emerge constantly, like verbs and nouns, while closed lexical classes, like articles, prepositions, and pronouns, hardly ever change and are rarely if ever expanded. Spanish however invented a new pronoun [by pronoun standards] in the 17th century, ‘usted, ustedes’, from the phrase “vuestra merced” literally “your mercy” but functionally “your grace”, and like English’s “your grace” or “your majesty” etc. this is practically a second person pronoun, but grammatically acts like a third person pronoun. There are not direct parallels in other romance languages given the novelty of ‘usted’, but Portugese does have ‘você’ on the same basis, ‘vossemecê’ (your mercy), but this is rarely used, replaced in most situations by ‘o senhor’.

2720: UK / US Doublet Herb Names Jun 1, 2024

In the UK, ‘coriander’ refers to the ground up seeds (as it does in the US) as well as the leaves of the herb, while in the US, the relatively contentious spice ‘cilantro’ may be thought of as a flavor prominent in Latin cuisine, it is also simply latin. Both of these words come from the same origin, the Latin ‘coriandrum’ which was borrowed into English and then effectively borrowed again from Spanish with ‘cilantro’. This is not to be confused with ‘culantro’ which also comes from the same etymological root but it is a plant native to Central America. 

The same process occurs with British ‘rocket’, ultimately from the Latin ‘eruca’ is known in the US as ‘arugula’, also from ‘eruca’, though in this case introduced by Italian immigrants to America and widely adopted by the 1970’s to the point that ‘rocket’ for the name of the leaf is virtually unrecognized. The difference here compared with ‘coriander’ is that ‘rocket’ was heavily influenced by French, making it look more different to the original Latin.

2719: Why You “Do Laundry” and Don’t “Make” It May 31, 2024

Inherently, there is no reason why English’s phrase is “to do laundry” when German’s is „Wäsche machen“ literally “making laundry”. In general, languages don’t have a distinct word like “do”, or at least they’re not used as productively, and will double up on “make” to mean both “create” and ‘perform’, as happens when French uses «faire son marché» for “to [do] shopping”, leading to some long-established Louisianans, in that former French colony, to say “[I’ll] make shopping”. 

This is nothing rare, and around the world not only will one language adopt a word from another, but grammar and lexicon etc. influence one another as well. This happens from both second language speakers incorrectly transferring the grammar from their native language, but even native speakers adopt foreign grammar and lexical use in border regions all the time.

2718: Hebrew’s Vowels: The "Mater Lectionis" in Semitic Languages May 30, 2024

There is a term, mater lectionis, which is a Latin calque of a Hebrew term אם קריאה (em kria) meaning “mother of reading”, used to describe consonants being used to represent vowels. This is not something that really happens outside of Semitic languages, due to their use of abjads, instead of alphabets, that never represent vowels in the letters. This is different to using those letters to transliterate from other languages.

In Hebrew, this happens with the letters aleph א‎, hei ה‎, vav ו‎ and yod י‎, where already ו and י more often represent a vowel than a consonant. This will most commonly happen at the end of a word, though there are exceptions in both ways. For instance, a yod י at the beginning of a word sounds like [j] as in ירושלים (yerushalayim) meaning ‘Jerusalem’, where both yods י still keep their consonantal properties, but in the word ירושלמי (yerushalmi) i.e. “Jerusalemite” the yod י at the end only acts like a vowel [i], not [ji] (i.e. “ee”, not “yee”). In fact, these letters are not randomly associated with vowels; when they lose their consonant-ness, vav ו‎ goes from [v] to either [o] or [u], yod י‎ becomes [i], and hei ה‎ becomes [a] or [e] usually, though in some names of people or places it remains as [o], like ‘Shiloh’ שלה. In the case of aleph א it is these days treated as a mater lectionis, but as a consonant it represents a glottal stop, like in שאל (sha’al), and is not actually silent as many people claim.

2717: Mercury’s Symbol is Hg: Less Obvious Than You’d Think May 29

There are occasionally discrepancies between the English names for the elements, and the symbols for the periodic table. Usually, this is because the common name is Germanic and the periodic symbol is from Latin, as with Tungsten (W), Iron (Fe), and Lead (Pb), but looking at Mercury, with its symbol Hg, it's hard to understand here. After all, you can’t get much more Latinate than the name of a member of the Roman pantheon. 

The discrepancy starts with the fact that the name for the element is named via Latin 'hydrargyrum’ from the Ancient Greek ὑδράργυρος (hydrargyros) meaning ‘water silver’, or liquid silver, related to ‘argentum’ (silver), hence why silver’s symbol too is Ag. This is related to the English expression ‘quicksilver’, the earlier name for the term, but due to alchemical and astrological associations between the metals of quicksilver, gold, silver, copper, iron, lead, and tin respectively associated with the seven (known) celestial bodies, the planet Mercury was linked to the metal and replaced the earlier name.

2716: Ferrari May 29, 2024

The name Ferrari connotes luxury and status named after the founder of the Ferrari brand, Enzo Ferrari. The brand and this surname may be eternally linked in the English speaking world, but the surname Ferrari is actually the 3rd most common in Italy, where the brand is from, and this amount increases when including Ferraro. The level of commonality is shared with the related Smith, insofar as Ferrari comes from ‘ferraio’ (smith), from the Italian ‘ferro’ meaning ‘iron’. It is from this Latin root, too, that the symbol for iron on the periodic table is Fe.

2715: freelance May 27, 2024

Anyone who has worked freelance before knows that it entails a lot of spearing people while riding on horseback. Of course, while “free lance” does actually refer to a hired mercenary, it is not a medieval term nor from a time in history where lances or mercenaries were such a dominant military component. Rather, it is coined from a play by Sir Walter Scott in Ivanhoe to denote a soldier not beholden to any lord (i.e. free).

While this began as a noun and was in common use by the mid-19th century, by the start of the 20th century it had changed meanings as a verb and modifier, and the new noun “freelancer” took the spot of being “a freelance” thus removing the word’s original meaning.

2714: Comparing Asleep and On Fleek May 26

There is a prefix a-, found in many verbs, that carries meanings related to away, up, on, or out, as in ‘arise’, ‘awake’ or not as a verb in ‘afoot’ or ‘aside’, but is probably more typically used for conditions of something ongoing, like ‘aglow’, ‘asleep’, and ‘asunder’. This originates from the word ‘on’ and functions similarly as verbs with the on-prefix. It can be used in some other ways too, but the prefix is generally considered non-productive, which is to say that it is not applied onto words aside from a set list now. 

On still does carry the meaning of condition as seen in phrases like ‘on fire’ (compare ablaze) but while it is rare, the prefix a- might still be understood as generative if usually humorous and informal, like “I’m busy a-working”. In the perhaps now outdated slang term of the last decade “on fleek”, or more common “on point” or to have something “on lock”, on has taken on some renewed vigor again in the sense of condition (of). This is not enough to make it productive, it does show that there is some mileage in a conditional-on.

2713: Mythical Whale Names in Hebrew and Arabic May 25, 2024

Like several other modern words, the word for ‘whale’ in Modern Hebrew is from a mythical beast, here לויתן (Levitan) which in English is rendered “Leviathan”, a sea-monster. While there is a history of turning biblical monsters into normal animals has happened elsewhere, this case is distinct in that there are some translations in the Book of Jonah that feature a whale, but this is from the Hebrew דג גדול (dag gadol) literally “big fish”, and whether or not that refers to a whale, it would not make for a suitable term.

Many of Modern Hebrew’s words were also created to draw upon Arabic, whose word for a whale is حوت (ḥout) which is not related to any in Hebrew, but also almost certain was from an earlier word for some kind of sea-monster, either from a variation of حَيَّة (ḥaya) meaning ’snake’ with an ending more meaning “sea-snake” or from a typical Semitic root ح ي و (ḥ-y-w) meaning ‘live’ having once referred to some kind of ancient beast. This is different to the Islamic Whale, a whale believed to be holding up the Earth in a supposed cosmic ocean.

2712: Does Persian Have a Native Script? May 24, 2024

Farsi, also commonly referred to as Persian, is written in a variation of the Arabic script, and has been for centuries. Of course, writing systems change, and other languages related to Persian like Kurdish and Tajik are written in the Roman alphabet and Cyrillic respectively, but before all of this, another writing system was used. Pahlavi writing was used in the region for early Persian writing, such as for the once dominant Zoroastrian religion's text, the Avesta. While there were 3 main variants, the system is not really native for Persian either, coming as a modification from Aramaic writing of the Babylonian Empire that the Persians eventually conquered. Regarding the Avesta though, written in what is known as Avestan (script), this has more than double the amount of letters as Pahlava, where each of Aramaic's 22 letters had to each represent multiple sounds, so it is possible that Avestan emerged as the only independently derived Persian writing system, and one of few globally that were not ultimately based off of Phoenician letters anywhere outside of East Asia.

2711: (More) Hebrew Words That Have Shifted Meaning May 23, 2024

Modern Hebrew has lots of names for plants and animals taken from either Biblical- or Mishnaic Hebrew that no longer map onto the animals they once did. In some tamer cases, this would include the modern word for ‘watermelon’ אבטיח (evtiach) which in Biblical Hebrew just meant ‘melon’, or the word ‘cucumber’ קישוא (kishua) now used for zucchini/courgette.  

In more surprising cases, the word for a ‘hippopotamus’ is, at least formally בהמות (behemot) which people may note from the English word ‘behemoth’ colloquially used to refer to a big thing, but which is a Biblical river-dwelling monster, and literally means “animals”: plural in form but singular in nature. That said, many people now say “ סוס היאור” a translation of ‘hippopotamus’ from Greek meaning “river/water horse”, with היאור meaning “river” but more typically “the Nile”. This occurs in other other animal names like קרנף (karnaf), a calque of the Greek “rhinoceros” for “horn-nose”.

2710: What Tannins Have to Do with Oak May 22, 2024

We don’t get many scientific words from Celtic, and in a particular way ‘tannin’ exists as a modern word because of Latin, but the origin goes much further. The English word ‘tan’, as in the color, comes from a Celtic root meaning ‘oak’, and since acorns and oak bark are used in the production of leather, the verb ‘to tan’ also comes from this. Likewise, the bitter quality of acorns comes from their tannic acid, named for the same reason. So the word ‘tannin’ is used in science now because it is derived from Latin according to the guidelines of scientific nomenclature, but Latin ‘tannum’ got it from a Celtic source.

2709: Why HW- flipped to WH- May 21, 2024

While it is still found in a few dialects of English, the pronunciation of “wh-” [ʍ] as separate from “w-” [w], in most cases “whale” and “wail” have merged to be indistinguishable. Like many other modern features of English and even Middle English, the source of the change was at least heavily influenced by the Norman conquerors. Beyond simply the pronunciation, however, is the fact that the spelling used to be HW-, as in hwæl (“whale”), as seen in the very first line of Beowulf:

Hwæt. We Gardena in geardagum, þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon, hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon.

(So! We, in the glory of days past of the Spear-Danes, kingly men, how these warriors performed acts of courage.)

Yet now, there is no H+consonant combination in English anymore. This is due to the Norman scribes, who chose to write it WH-, likely in keeping with other spelling norms wherein H signifies a separate sound, like TH, SH, CH, PH or historically GH. While it may be more intuitive to have the H first in some ways to represent this sound, keep in mind the means to aspirate the air to pronounce[ʍ] is not actually two separate consonants, but one unique one, just as with TH or SH and the rest really.

2708: Lesson from Ramen and Lo Mein May 19, 2024

While there are some differences, the Chinese lo mein and Japanese ramen are based off the same thing, originating in China, but the words reflect this as well, along with other dishes like lamian and Korean ramyeon all meaning ‘pulled noodles’. In both Chinese and Japanese, the  /r/ sound varies widely depending on the linguistic environment, and dialect, generally leaning towards a tap [ɾ] (as in Standard American pronunciation of butter) or [l], or one of many other liquid consonants. This poses an obvious problem in transliterating into English, with more R’s from Japanese and more L’s from Chinese as seen in food- and place names etc..