2767: Rigor and Rigid Jul 18, 2024

Traditionally, nouns ending -or, as part of the word itself and not with an added suffix, took the ending -id as an adjective, like horror–horrid, splendor–splendid, and squalor–squalid; others, meanwhile, lost this and took the adjectival suffix -ity, like frigid-frigity, and morbid-morbidity. An even smaller set of these words have both forms, though usually this is because the nominal and adjectival forms have divergent meanings, like humor–humid–humidity, stupor–stupid–stupidity, or valor–valid–validity, all of whose nominal forms now take the -ous ending.

Perhaps the most interesting example of this is rigor–rigid–rigidity, because while this also completely diverged in terms of the meanings of the original noun and adjective pair, the original meaning of ‘rigor’ not meaning ‘thoroughness’ but rather ‘stiffness’ is maintained in general in the medical field, and in particular in the phrase ‘rigor mortis’ (literally ‘rigidity of death’). Of course, this phrase is from Latin and does not carry the modified meaning that ‘rigor’ has had in Modern English.

2766: Butter and Butane Jul 17, 2024

Butter and butane may seem worlds apart, yet they share an intriguing linguistic origin. Both words derive from the same root: the Greek word βούτυρο (boutyros), which means "butter." The connection to butter is more straightforward, as "butter" directly comes from this Greek word, via Latin into Old English as "butere." The term ‘butane’,however, has a more complex journey. It is derived from "butyric acid," a compound found in butter that produces its characteristic rancid smell when it spoils. "Butyric" itself traces back to the Greek "boutyros." The suffix "-ane" is a common ending in organic chemistry, used to denote hydrocarbons, thus giving us "butane."

2765: British Got vs American Gotten Jul 16, 2024

In British English, the verb conjugation of ‘get’ traditionally follows get→got→got, without distinguishing between the past tense and the past participle, whereas American English uses get→got→gotten. Interestingly, this American usage actually represents the older form, which now only exists standardly in some regional northern dialects of England, though it also appears in words like ‘begotten’ or phrases such as ‘ill-begotten’, which are less common anyway. In recent decades, more British English speakers have begun to use the participial form ‘gotten’, or at least would not flag it as an error, whereas older generations might. This is a relatively minor change but one of many small adjustments influenced by the dominance of American English in entertainment and other media, although in practice it represents a return to the original conjugational paradigm.

2764: The Impact of The Phoenician Script Jul 15, 2024

The Phoenician script, emerging around 1050 BCE, is widely acknowledged as the progenitor of nearly all modern alphabets. Its simplicity and adaptability set the foundation for its proliferation, fundamentally transforming global communication.

The Greeks were among the first to adapt the Phoenician script, around the 8th century BC, creating the Greek alphabet. This innovation introduced vowels, a significant departure from the purely consonantal Phoenician system. The Greek alphabet subsequently gave rise to two of the most influential writing systems in the Western world: the Latin and Cyrillic scripts. The Latin script, evolving in the Roman Empire, is now the foundation for most Western European languages. The Cyrillic script, developed in the First Bulgarian Empire in the 9th century AD, became the writing system for many Slavic languages, including Russian and Bulgarian.

The Phoenician script’s impact wasn't confined to the West, nor the South with writing systems like Arabic and its many offshoots; it also reached South Asia, where it influenced the creation of the Brahmi script. Brahmi, appearing around the 3rd century BC, is the ancestor of numerous scripts used across South and Southeast Asia today, including Devanagari (used for Hindi and Sanskrit), Tamil, and Burmese. These, notably, use lots more curling letters, reflecting a change of writing materials, here onto leaves instead of flat papyrus or parchment. 

However, not all scripts derive from Phoenician. The Chinese script, for instance, developed independently around 1200 BCE and is based on logograms rather than an alphabet, and Korean also developed independently, though it is not ancient. Similarly, the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, which predate Phoenician, used a combination of logographic and alphabetic elements. In fact, like Egyptian hieroglyphs, there were actually numerous other writing systems like Cuneiform, Cypriot, and Linear A that also emerged independently and the ceased to be used.

2760: Bird Sparrow Camels Jul 11, 2024

It is a frequent occurrence, especially among natural features, that compound words that cross linguistic boundaries will pick up redundant elements, such as the famous River Avon in Wales (afon is ‘river’ in Welsh). While this is not uncommon among physical features wherein people groups move around them, occasionally it is also seen in other words, such as ‘ostrich’. It comes from the Greek στρουθίων (strouthíōn), itself shortened from στρουθιοκάμηλος (strouthiokámēlos) literally “sparrow-camel” but the O- at the beginning of ‘ostrich’ comes from an addition in Latin. When Latin adopted it as strūthiō, the word ‘avis’ (‘bird’, hence ‘avian’) was added resulting in ‘a(u)strithio’ for a sort of “bird sparrow” translation, though obviously not literally. This is true for the Spanish/Portuguese ‘avestruz’ of the same meaning, where more of Latin’s ‘avis’ is preserved.

2763: Holy (?) Roman (?) Empire (?) Jul 14, 2024

The name of the Holy Roman Empire, especially in its later forms, is often scrutinized for certainly not being Roman (or even including Rome much of its history), without the political structure of a traditional empire, and not being notably holy—however that might be measured in this case. While on the surface, these points might be addressed by the fact that its founder, Charlemagne, was crowned by the Pope, Leo III, when he controlled Rome along with most of the rest of Europe, but really the first use of the term Holy Roman Empire (Sacrum Romanum Imperium) was only in the mid-13th century, 4½ centuries after this coronation.  

Rather, this was an evolution, first with Charlemagne declared as Imperator Augustus (venerable emperor), then, with Rome secured, Conrad II was called the Roman Emperor officially, though it had been used earlier. While they were not the only ones to view themselves as the successors of the Roman Empire, along with the Byzantines, say, but the ‘Holy’ element of the name was not to distinguish between those, say, but rather against the notion of the papacy’s total religious authority. Thus, it was more of a progression over several centuries, and the criticisms may look only at the end or the beginning of this nearly 1000-year history when the terms were, in fairness, less germane. 

2762: Pomp to Psychopomp Jul 13, 2024

‘Pomp’ and ‘pompous’ don’t mean exactly the same thing as another –ous suffix pair like ‘fury’ and ‘furious,’ but one can still understand the connection. ‘Psychopomp,’ on the other hand, referring to any mythical figure whose job it is to guide a soul through the afterlife, on its surface has nothing to do with either ‘pomp’ or ‘pompous.’

‘Pomp’ ultimately originates from the Ancient Greek πομπή (pompē), meaning a solemn procession or display. It historically transferred to signify grandeur and ceremonial splendor. ‘Pompous’ derives directly from ‘pomp,’ initially describing something characterized by grandeur or splendor. However, over centuries, ‘pompous’ shifted in connotation, now used to describe individuals who exhibit self-importance and excessive dignity, without any necessary splendor.

‘Psychopomp,’ then, is the only one of these terms that still refers to a procession, with the compound literally meaning ‘soul-conductor’ as the one who leads a procession. It is typical that the newer a word is, the more it retains its older source’s meaning. This word is relatively modern, originating around 1860 and gaining popularity since the mid-20th century, mostly still in academic circles.

2761: Español is not Normal Jul 12, 2024

‘Spanish’, in Spanish, is ‘Español’ but by people-group or language standards, this is a pretty new word. In Old Spanish it was ‘espanyol’ or  ‘espanno’, but this really only took place at the time of the reconquista and eventually the Spanish Inquisition. Up until this time, under Moorish, Muslim rule it was called Al-Andalus, and there was not a uniquely Iberian identity per se. Before the total success of the reconquista, one might identify with a local kingdom or more likely as a ‘cristiano’ (christian), after which point, the Latin ‘Hispania’ was revived, itself taken from a Semitic word from the days of the Carthaginian empire, from the Canaanite/Phoenician ‘yšpn, related to the Hebrew שָׁפָן (shafan), probably in reference to hyraxes along the coast in ancient times.

All of this is to say that the word ‘Español’ is rather strange looking, because normally one would expect to see *españuelo according to what one would expect to see in the transition from the expected Vulgar Latin *Hispaniolus into Old Spanish through to Modern Spanish. Since this is not a normal Latin word, nor was this in common use while the transition from Latin → Vulgar Latin → Old Spanish was underway, it has its modern form.

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.