2759: Linguistic Connections: ζεῦγος Jul 10, 2024
The concept of pairing or joining may not seem very complex, yet it is in these simplest instances that we find the greatest adaptation and variation. The Ancient Greek ζεῦγος (zeugos), meaning ‘yoke’—not in the burdensome sense but in the sense of things joined—gave rise to words like ‘zygote’ and numerous everyday terms. It was adopted into Aramaic as זוגא (zuga), meaning ‘pair’, which led to Hebrew זוג (zug), meaning ‘pair; couple’, and זיוג (zivug), meaning ‘soulmate’. Arabic also borrowed it from Aramaic, forming the root ز و ج (z w j), resulting in words like ‘marriage’ زَوْج (zawj) and ‘spouse’, as well as مزدوج (muzdawaj), meaning ‘bisexual’ in the sense of twos. Sanskrit योग (yóga), while not directly from Greek, shares the same root (also found in ‘yoke’ itself), relating to pairing, but in a religious Hindu context concerning the body and soul.
2758: The World’s Biggest Number Jul 9, 2024
Lots of cultures use what is referred to as an indefinitely large number to express something enormous and uncountable. In English this would be “a million” used in lots of phrases like “thanks a million” or “I did X a million times”, and while it may make sense to use this number in such a context, especially as it is relatively concise as a base unit, many other languages use different ones. For instance, Celtic languages like Welsh, Scots Gaelic and Irish use 100,000, French uses 36, Hungarian 26, and some languages make up numbers altogether such as Swedish’s femtioelva literally “fifty-eleven” (not actually 61).
One number used conspicuously often for this purpose is 10,000, but not simply as a construction. Many languages, especially ancient languages, had a separate word for ten-thousand; compare Hebrew’s
תשעת אלפים (tishat elfim) = 9,000
רבבה (rivava) = 10,000
עשרים אלף (esrim elef) 20,000
This has the sense of ‘many’ and doesn’t resemble the rest of the words for multiples of a thousand, though in the plural form it can also mean the somewhat uncounted “tens of thousands”. This exact same phenomenon around 10,000-words occurs in Greek μυριάδες (myriades), hence English’s ‘myriad’, Sanskrit’s अयुत (ayuta), and Chinese 萬 (wan) used in many East Asian cultures.
There are too many examples to count, not even including made up numbers like ‘umpteen’ or ‘bazillion’, so please write back any others you know.
2757: Sad, Sate, and Satisfy Jul 8, 2024
The word ‘sad’ comes from the Old English sæd, having the same pronunciation as it still has. Thanks for reading and sign up for the email list.
Of course, that isn’t very interesting, unless you consider that the Old English word meant almost the opposite of ‘sad’ as it is used in Modern English, having the sense of ‘sated’ / ‘satisfied’. This sense was born from the word’s other connotation of ‘weary’, as in after a meal one would feel sæd, which in this context is to say full and tired. Thus, the split was formed in the two doublets with one going on emphasize the qualities of being weary, eventually being taken to mean ‘depressed’, while the other kept the sense of ‘filled’ emphasizing the state of satisfaction.
As mentioned, ‘sate’ comes from this sense of ‘full’ but this is not related to ‘satiate’ or ‘satisfy’, despite their similar forms and meanings, that come from Latin instead.
2756: The Serbo-Croatian Languages Jul 7, 2024
A speaker of Serbian may be considered a polyglot speaking four languages, politically, as the languages of Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia, and Montenegro are all the same, but the respective governments insist that they are different languages. This leads to translations on signs of exactly the same words, such as one famous example of the warning label on cigarette packs reading:
Pušenje Ubija
Pušenje Ubija
Пушење убија
Granted the last example phonetically is the exact same but is written in the Cyrillic alphabet for Serbian while in Croatian and Bosnian it is based off the Latin alphabet. In a linguistic sense, these are considered dialects of one language, not separate languages, though this is not the position of the various governments.
Governmental bodies may be slow to change regarding language, especially in places where there are regulatory bodies for the development of a language, such as French’s Académie Française, but in the example above it is not even clear which would be Croatian or Bosnian. Of course, the opposite situation occurs in Arabic and Chinese, two languages about which the political entities concerning them insists the differences are mere dialects, but this results in unintelligibility for speakers from different so-called ‘dialects.’
2755: Piggyback Jul 6, 2024
It is typical that a familiar word will influence a less familiar word to more closely resemble it, sometimes to the detriment of the original. The word ‘piggyback’ has nothing to do with pigs in the way riding horseback obviously is related to horses. Instead, the phrase before it was ‘pickaback’ meaning “over one’s back”, though unlike ‘piggyback’ it was an adverb not a noun, i.e. “to be carried pickaback”. That, however, was also a corruption of an earlier term, “pick-pack”, and probably an example of emphatic reduplication, not adding semantic depth to ‘pack’—in the sense of something carried, not filling—that then morphed into the narrow, corrupted sense English has today.
2754: Island, Isle, and Aisle Jul 5, 2024
In French, an island is ‘île’, reflecting that it lost the ‘-s-’ in its pronunciation from the Latin ‘insula’, but it is present—though silent—in the English ‘isle’. This was a deliberate reintroduction to make the word more closely resemble Latin, never meant to reflect the pronunciation. This reintroduction of the 'S' has led to some curious misconceptions in the English language. Words like "aisle" and "island" never originally contained an 'S' in any stage of their history, originating from Germanic words. However, due to their phonetic and lexical similarities to ‘isle’, they were mistakenly given a silent 'S,' despite having no etymological basis for it.
2753: -R- Moves Around: Metathesis Jul 4, 2024
There are mainly two ways that pronunciations in a particular society change; a sound shift can affect the way that a particular consonant or vowel is produced in words, or words will change individually. There are a few gray-areas though, such as how -R- has historically had a tendency to move after a vowel it once preceded in a process known as metathesis (i.e. sounds swapping within a word), a trend affecting many individual words but not enough to be considered a sound shift. For example, historically, ‘bird’ was brid, ‘horse’ was hros, and this is starting to be seen in words like ‘prescription articulated more as perscription, among many other examples, old and modern. In one notable case, the word ‘curd’ was originally crud, but ‘crud’ remained its own word with a completely different meaning, gaining its additional slang senses in the mid-20th century.
2752: Nowata, Oklahoma Jul 3, 2024
In Oklahoma, there is a town called Nowata, transliterated from the tribal name given to the place by the then-displaced Lenape tribe, ‘Nuwita’, meaning ‘welcoming’. This sort of naming is used for thousands of towns and even states all across America, but what’s different here is that the Cherokee, forcibly moved there, use the name ᎠᎹᏗᎧᏂᎬᎬ (Amadicanigungun), meaning “water is gone”. This is because they misinterpreted the English transliterated name, Nowata, as “no water”. In a sense, while this was born of a misunderstanding, the arid plains of Oklahoma are much drier than anything the Cherokee would have been used to, so it is not an unreasonable assumption.
2751: Zero and Cipher Jul 2, 2024
The concept of zero was pretty revolutionary in math as a distinct place on the number scale, which is why its origins tend to be different to other numbers. The word ‘zero’ is from Arabic’s صِفْر (ṣifr), “nothing; empty”. The term was borrowed by Fibonacci to describe ‘zero’, but later the word was used for ‘cipher’, originally referring to any character, and was used to describe a variable in algebra before it gained the sense of disguised writing.
It is not related to Hebrew’s ספירה (sfira) ‘counting’ / מספר (mispar) ‘number’, but did lead to the French “chiffre” ‘number’. It comes from صَفَر (Safar) the name of a month meaning ‘void’, though the exact reasons are unclear: referring to the state of houses, it either was a month when houses are empty ahead of the harvest (before Islam removed the leap months and thus seasonality of the calendar) or it was a time when raids were particularly common.
2750: Why ‘First’ and ‘One’ Are So Different Across Languages Jul 1, 2024
When it comes to going from cardinal numbers to ordinal numbers, languages usually modify the name for the number with an affix and perhaps minor phonetic changes, such as in English four → fourth; twelve → twelfth. What is also usual is that the words for “first; second; third” are also commonly more different to their cardinal counterparts, and even more notable, ‘first’, and its cross-language equivalents are not merely irregular, but often have a completely different root for ‘one’. This is true of languages all over the world, completely unrelated to each other, though this is by no means a rule.
While the question of why can be frustrating in a social science like linguistics; it is easy to understand that the most frequently used terms are the most likely to become irregular, but not about different etymologies altogether. For instance:
One - First [English]
Unus - Primus [Latin]
Moja - Kwanza [Swahili]
Tʼááłáʼí - Áłtsé [Navajo]
אחד - ראשון (echad - rishon) [Hebrew]
واحد - أول (wahid - ‘awal) [Arabic]
하나 - 첫 번째 (Hana - Cheos beonjjae) [Korean]
ஒன்று - முதலில் (Oṉṟu - mutalil) [Tamil]
All of these languages, unrelated to each other and across continents, not only have irregular forms for this pairing—which they do—but completely different origins. For many of these other words, the sense is not only ordinal, but of leadership. The English ‘first’ is from a very old Germanic root related to the Dutch ‘vorste’ and German ‘Fürst’ meaning ‘chief; prince’. In Hebrew the word is from ראש (rosh) meaning ‘head’ which can be used in the sense of leadership just as English. This is true in a certain way in Latin ‘primus’ from prae (before) and the superlative suffix -issimus (i.e. “most eminent”). Arabic is perhaps the most peculiar case of this happening. This is from a pagan deity name who is the head of the pre-Islamic Arabian pantheon. The root also has some sense of ‘top’.
The Navajo áłtsé also means ‘before’, and likewise ‘kwanza’ is a participle meaning ‘beginning’, and unlike the other words in the list above, is not used in larger number, e.g. “twenty-first” is “ishirini na moja”, using the cardinal number 1.
Of course, there are plenty of languages like Mandarin and Kyrgyz where the word for ‘first’ fits into the same template as every other ordinal number, but the high number of disparate terms may be simply from the fact that a word like ‘third’ that it is preceded by two, the first in a set is apropos of nothing and doesn’t need to fit into a pattern.
2749: Egg’s Rival Term Jun 30, 2024
The more basic a word is, the older it tends to be in a language. ‘Eggs’ is an interesting case because while it does belong to an old Germanic root, it was not the only word for them in English for a long time,. Another term, ‘ey’, plural eyren (spelt various ways) was used into early Modern English—some people would have used this exclusively and never heard ‘egg’—until it was displaced by the 16th century, though it’s related to the German Ei (plural Eier). Ultimately, ‘egg’ and ‘ey’ are from the same root, and this process of the sounds [g] → [j] is pretty common in English history. There are of course many cases where the [j] won out instead, but here it also shows the process of switching from the older ‘-(r)en’ plural suffix, now only seen in a small set of words like ‘children’, was replaced with the now nearly ubiquitous plural ‘-s’.
2748: A Norwegian Goodbye Jun 29, 2024
A typical Norwegian farewell is the phrase “ha det” which literally translates as “have it”. This may sound fairly weird, but it is formed in a similar way to the English ‘bye’ and for that matter ‘goodbye’. At one point, the phrase in Norwegian was “ha det bra” literally “have it good” (i.e. “be well” or “have a good [day]”) from the French “brave”, wherein the word has more of a sense of ‘strong’, than ‘brave’ does in English. Just as “God be with you / ye” is shortened to ‘goodbye’ and lost its original meaning, “ha det” has also become genericized, no longer really part of the full phrase.
2747: Layered Idioms Jun 28, 2024
The word phrase is pretty generic, but an idiom is a type of phrase where the literal meaning of the words together could not indicate the meaning of the phrase. Because of the inherently indiscernible nature of idioms, they commonly pop up as euphemisms, obscuring a darker or more taboo topic. In the case of “bucket list” (i.e. things to do before one dies), this is a euphemistic idiom built upon another, namely “kick the bucket” [to die]. “Bucket list” is a fairly modern term staying true to its origins, but as with many old idioms “kicking the bucket” has obscured the original meaning of the component words, here that it was not ‘bucket’, but rather the French ‘buquet’, a device used to hold pigs in place to slaughter them.
2746: Brave and Barbarous Jun 27, 2024
English has lots of pairs of words that are doublets (i.e. have the same etymology) but are also antonyms. One example would be host-guest, but another comes from the words ‘brave’ and ‘barbarian’. While these words aren’t opposites per se, the former denotes righteousness and courage while the latter connotes incivility. ‘Barbarian’ originates from a Greek onomatopoeia, but this eventually morphed, along with influence from the Latin ‘prāvus’ (crooked), the source of the English ‘depraved’ to form ‘bravus’, thence ‘bravo’ meaning ‘bold’ or ‘showing off’, and also ‘skilled’ which did not carry over into English. This can help to understand the sense of ‘bravo’ at a time of applause, or even its historic meaning of ‘swordsman’.
It was only later into the 15th century that the sense in Italian ‘bravo’ was changed in French ‘brave’ to go from ‘wild’ to ‘courageous’ and eventually ‘valiant’ which English adopted thereafter.
2745: Stop Sign Politics Jun 26, 2024
Language is obviously a tool for communication, but it can indicate a lot more about a culture too. In France, the stop-signs read STOP inside an octagon exactly as it is in the US and UK and is one of the view traffic signs with words the Vienna Convention on Road Signs and Signals instructs. In Quebec, the stop signs are sometimes bilingual English-French, or elsewhere also with an indigenous language of Cree of Inuktitut, but they typically appear solely with the French word ARRÊT, which is not used in France itself. Plenty of countries have bilingual versions even when the second language is not official, like Armenia or many Arab nations that also uses English, but naturally in bilingual regions, the will to assert the language as dominant, as in Quebec, is evidently greater than in largely monolingual areas where the language is more secure.
Given that a mere handful of countries use anything other than the red octagon as the basis of the stop sign, the words themselves may be basically irrelevant—some countries forgo any altogether—but the cultural assertion is also a significant factor on its own.
2744: An Abysmal, Bottomless Pit Jun 25, 2024
The word ‘abyss’ is related to ‘abysmal’, perhaps unsurprisingly, though in practice they are not so closely connected. ‘Abyss’ refers to a bottomless pit of mythological significance, from the Ancient Greek ἄβυσσος (ábussos) for ‘bottomless’, confusingly derived from, from ἀ- (a-) “not” + βυσσός (bussós) for “deep place” but here it is not negated entirely but rather intensified, i.e. a “not merely deep place”. Lots of cultures have a similar type word, like Old English’s neowolnes comparable to ‘nether’ for something like “depth; lowness”.
The -M- in ‘abysmal’, which was the typical adjectival form of ‘abyss’ historically, uses another version of the word from Latin, which actually led to another, no longer used English word ‘abysm’ from the Latin superlative ending -imus, like the difference from “bravo → bravissimo” borrowed from Italian. Here, though literally meaningless (i.e. “most bottomless place” isn’t semantically sensible), it acts as an intensifier leading to the figurative use ‘abysmal’ has today of just meaning “very bad”. As such, the current adjectival form of ‘abyss’ is ‘abyssal’ that does not carry the figurative meaning.
2743: Semantic Loan Words Jun 24, 2024
Calques are a type of loan, where a foreign word (or usually phrase) is translated word-for-word using native terms. A famously ironic example is that ‘loanword’ is a calque from the German „Lehnwort“, while ‘calque’ is a loanword from French.
The more general term though, semantic borrowing (or loaning), applies not just to phrases or compounds translated word-for-word, but when any native term gains additional connotations from use in another language. For instance, the English ‘star’ is both astronomical & used to describe celebrity, & this latter use is seen now in other languages like Hebrew, e.g. Israel’s version of Dancing with the Stars, רוקדים עם כוכבים (rokdim im cokhavim). Another example is the French extension of the word «souris» meaning ‘mouse’ to apply also to the computer mouse.
Semantic loans in general, as opposed to the more specific calques, are often hard to prove, because the sentence structure and vocabulary can be entirely normal, native language. The number of semantic loans will certainly increase due to the spread of culture on TV & the Internet, etc., but language’s inherently memetic quality can make it difficult to discern a specific connotation’s origin.
2742: Wish on a Star Jun 23, 2024
People may wish on stars or have high hopes now, but this sort of thing was certainly more pronounced in the past. The word ‘desire’ for instance comes from the Latin phrase ‘de- + sidus’ (from the star), and while it certainly had an astrological connotation, the meaning was slightly different than in English; the verb dēsīderō could mean ‘I desire’ but also ‘I miss/regret’. Indeed, this meaning is carried over into the word ‘desiderate’ that unsurprisingly comes from this root, also leading to ‘consider’ though it is less clear how this relates to stars. It could be that cōnsīderō, meaning ‘I examine’ related to observing constellations, but does not carry the same emotional significance as ‘desire’.
2741: Regression Below the Mean Jun 21, 2024
Getting 3 out of every 4 questions correct on a test still only earns one a C grade, and getting merely average isn’t viewed so highly. This might lend an insight into how words like ‘mediocre’ come to gain explicitly negative connotations, here of not meeting expectations, when the word in Latin mediocris meant “of middle height or degree”, literally “somewhat mountainous” from ‘medias’ (middle). The same would be true of describing something as ‘fine’, ‘run of the mill’, ‘middle of the road’, ‘average’ or even saying ‘above average’ in common conversation are not practically compliments, and while not explicitly negative either, they convey some disappointment. This is seen across history and language.
2740: Taser: An Acronym with a Surprising Story Jun 21, 2024
The word ‘taser’ is from a children’s story published in 1911, sort of. The word ‘taser’ is an acronym, and clearly designed on the pattern of ‘maser’ and ‘laser’ (light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation), but for a very different reason. It is not named for its function nor for its inventor, Jack Cover), but rather a book he enjoyed Tom Swift and His Electric Rifle, by Victor Appleton (a publishing house’s pseudonym), which involved some science fiction type inventions including the electric rifle. Originally rendered TSER, the -A- was added for ease of pronunciation.