2779: Old English Sound Shift A to O Jul 30, 2024

Before the Great Vowel Shift in the early days of Modern English, there were many smaller sound shifts. The transition from [ɑ] / [æ] to [o] in Old English is one such example, that is less linear than it would at first glance appear. 

One of the key processes that led to the change from [ɑ] to [o] was breaking and diphthongization. In other words, a single vowel sound, here [ɑ], into a complex vowel sound. Eventually however, the reverse occurred and the breaking (diphthongs) merged into one vowel, but it was then realized as [o]. For instance, how this looked:

Haldan (to hold) became healdan, and later holdan. Other -old words, including gold, bold, fold, cold, and indeed old developed the exact same way from Old English.

The Old English word ‘cælf’ (calf) also underwent breaking to become "cealf," and eventually "calf" in Modern English. The way it reverted back is not relevant to this process, and was affected by a later shift. 

As was hinted at, the sound shift was not total—or else there would be no words with [ɑ] / [æ]—but occurred within particular linguistic environments, i.e. the surrounding consonants would influence [ɑ] / [æ] to break or not, such as before /ld/. 

2778: Sweat Like a Pig Jul 29, 2024

Pigs, famously, do not sweat, which is why they have to roll in mud in order to cool themselves down; water is a far better conductor of heat than air. So out of all animals, how did the phrase “to sweat like a pig” develop? Some phrases are hard to pin down, because some of the phrase was lost, and now it sounds strange out of context, such as, “happy as a clam [at high tide]”, or sometimes the connotations of those words change, as in, “kick the bucket”. In this case, it is closer to the latter reason.

This name comes not from pigs the animals, but from pig-iron, a name for an intermediate stage of iron in the iron smelting process. Pig-iron, which is crude iron cast into ingots, got its name from the fact that lots of ingots would be poured at once from a central channel, respectively referred to the piglets and sows. 

Once the iron is cooling, as with any cast iron, water droplets form around the metal like sweat. In lots of cases, metal is referred to as sweating, not just with iron but also steel and copper etc., even though much like real pigs, pig-irons don’t sweat either.

2777: Tsar and Czar (or Tzar) Jul 28, 2024

Some languages have official systems for transliteration, like Chinese to English, though these systems have been updated multiple times in history. However, for many common languages written in other writing systems, transliteration is often inconsistent. While Russian transliterations are usually pretty standard, Russian contains many sounds not found in English, and some letters do not correspond directly between the Cyrillic and Latin alphabets. This is reflected in the choice of Tsar or Czar (or the much rarer Tzar), since the letter Ц (tse) is pronounced somewhere between /ts/ and /tz/, though historically, and in some other Cyrillic-written languages it closer to /ṣ/. Since the word ‘czar’ is derived from ‘Caesar’, some choose to maintain that in the spelling.

This also seems to be contextual, which, as we’ll see, has ramifications today. For instance, “Czar Nicholas” was the most popular form in the 18th and 19th centuries until a few years after the Romanovs were deposed. At that point, “Tsar Nicholas” became the preferred spelling by a wide margin, starting in 1923. A similar trend occurred with Czar Boris / Tsar Boris, where the former was more popular until 1904, after which the latter became dominant. This change predates the reign of Boris III of Bulgaria, who assumed the throne in 1919 where a change might have been expected.

You might think modern uses would follow this trend, but recently in the news, the phrase "Border Czar" referring to Vice President Kamala Harris has predominantly followed the traditional spelling with a 'C'. This is not an isolated case; modern political taskmasters or policy leaders are often spelled with ‘czar’, including the Drug Czar appointed by the US Senate in 1982, and titles like "terrorism czar" or "cybersecurity czar" consistently use CZ-. While these forms have historically been interchangeable, we may eventually see ‘Tsar’ distinguished as the Eastern European leader and ‘czar’ as a political appointee for specific tasks.

2776: Bruxelles: Why an X? Jul 27, 2024

The spelling of "Bruxelles," the French name for the capital of Belgium, with an 'x' instead of a 'ss' as used in Dutch, and as result, English, stands out, especially since French typically doesn't use 'x' in this context. The name ‘Bruxelles’ originates from the Old Dutch ‘Broekzele’ meaning "settlement in the marsh." Over time, as the region became more influenced by French, the name adapted to fit French phonetics and orthographic norms, except in this case it was not per se to fit French as we know it now, where it is usually pronounced like /s/ in the city’s name.

During the Middle Ages, Latin was the lingua franca of educated and administrative classes in Europe. Latin texts often used 'x' to denote the sound /ks/, a practice that influenced many Romance languages. This influence is visible in the spelling of place names as Latin transitioned into Old French. The '-zele' part of the word Old Dutch name likely shifted to '-xelles' under the influence of Latin orthography, where the 'x' was used to represent a combination of sounds that was easier for Latin speakers to write and recognize without assuming a glottal stop. It used to be pronounced [bʁyksɛl] in French more commonly, but now it is not so common.

2775: The Pirate(d) Accent Jul 26, 2024

The classic pirate accent is not only characterized by its distinctive Arrr!. While there are some other lexical additions, like the use of ‘ye’ rather than ‘you [all]’ even sometimes in the singular, the word ‘matey’ (e.g. “avast, ye matey” [sic]) or ‘hearties’, it also features a number of other regular phonetic and syntactic rules typical of a normal dialect. In actual fact, it basically is a normal dialect, as a somewhat cheap or at least unknowing interpretation of the West Country accent. 

The pirate accent came to be after the 1950 Disney film "Treasure Island", featuring the actor Robert Newton in the role of Long John Silver. Robert Newton hailed from Dorset, part of England's West Country. This region's accent has certain features that lend themselves to the exaggerated, rugged, and not high-society sound that lent itself well for use in the film, and he used his normal accent.

The West Country accent includes rolled R's, ‘me’ instead of ‘my’, as well as the word ‘be’ in place of ‘am’ / ‘is’, and historically ‘bist’ instead of ‘are’ (2nd p.s.) but this is not a feature of the pirate accent. Other similarities include /aɪ/ (vowel in ‘time’) as [ɑɪ], or [əɪ], rhoticity (i.e. pronouncing all R’s), and t-glottalization. Other typical West Country phonetic features did not become pirated, as it were, like h-dropping and fricative voicing (e.g. f →v; s→z). This is only scratching the surface.

It is not right to call the pirate accent exactly the same we West Country, certainly not in the way that many people have taken and simplified such features as it increased in popular use, but it would not exist were it not for the West Country origins.

2774: Dear and Teuer Jul 25, 2024

The words ‘dear’ in English and ‘teuer’ (expensive) in German both originate from the same Proto-Germanic root, but over time they have diverged in meaning and usage. Both ‘dear’ and ‘teuer’ trace their origins back to the Proto-Germanic word *diurijaz, which means ‘precious’ or ‘valuable.’ While the sense of money being valuable (in the sentimental sense) might be clear by itself as a gradual progression in German, the English usage was also reinforced by Old Norse ‘dyr,’ meaning ‘precious.’ Likewise, ‘expensive’ (i.e., teuer) is divergent from the original sense in that it is the reaction to something being valued, but this would be the same sort of relationship as another doublet pair with ‘wet’ being the experience of ‘water,’ each word coming from the same root. ‘Dear’ and ‘teuer’ are yet another of countless examples of cognates with understandably similar but by no means identical meanings.

2773: Wisdom Teeth: Across Languages Jul 24, 2024

When it comes to our third molars, the term "wisdom teeth" might sound a bit funny in English, but it is an example of a larger phenomenon in linguistics of connecting the tooth to wisdom.

In English, we call them "wisdom teeth" because they usually appear between the ages of 17 and 25, when one becomes an adult, and while one’s late teens and early twenties are not thought of as years of wisdom now per se, it would seem they are in this case. Compare

Latin: dentes sapientiae literally "teeth of wisdom."

French: Dents de sagesse with ‘sagesse’ meaning ‘wisdom’.

Spanish: Muelas del juicio for "teeth of judgment," again linking these molars to discernment 

German: Weisheitszähne also "wisdom teeth."

Hebrew: שיני בינה (shenei bina) “teeth of wisdom”

Chinese (Mandarin): 智齿 (zhìchǐ), with 智 meaning wisdom.

All that said, there are some exceptions. Even there, it usually denotes one’s age, or other signs of arriving at adulthood. 

Japanese: 親知らず (oyashirazu) translates to "unknown to the parents," implying that these teeth appear after one has grown up and possibly left the parental home, an indirect nod to maturity but not specifically to wisdom.

Korean: 사랑니 (sarangni) translates to "love teeth," possibly referring to the age at which people start experiencing romantic love, again a marker of coming-of-age but not wisdom per se.

Turkish: The term "20 yaş dişi" translates to "20-year-old tooth," which simply refers to the typical age of emergence without any connotation of wisdom.

The reasons behind these linguistic differences can be attributed to cultural perspectives on aging and maturity. In many Western and Asian cultures, the age at which wisdom teeth appear is seen as a time of gaining knowledge, but rather than going in the direction more like Turkish did and calling them something like “adult teeth” or “matured teeth”, many languages have given a somewhat euphemistic title.

2772: Translating Names: People and Places Jul 23, 2024

In country names, there are endonyms, the same name as a country uses for itself such as France, and exonyms, which are those applied totally foreign such as Germany (native: Deutschland) and Japan (native: Nihon). The trouble is, the concept of endonyms exactly is somewhat tricky to nail down: Italy is the English version, or equivalent, of ‘Italia’ from normal language change, but is still considered an exonym because it does not totally resemble it. Either way, in recent history, the trend has been sharply moving towards endonyms. 

While that is an ongoing debate, this is matter is basically settled when it comes to personal names, i.e. we don’t anymore. This used to be commonplace to translate names, like the Roman, Mark Anthony (Marcus Antonius), Genoese-born Christopher Columbus (Cristoffa Corombo), and a very exceptional case wherein English name of Guy Fawkes was actually adopted in the reverse as Guido Fawkes even in his lifetime because he fought for Spain in the 8 Years War. This practice was common across Europe and indeed the whole world, and everyone from merchants up to heads of state were addressed by different names when they traveled.

Perhaps one of the last major examples of this was with Joseph Stalin, born Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili, but certainly for most of history through to the early 20th century, this was the norm. This practice died out both for leaders, and around the same time, for people moving into new countries like the USA where previously people’s names were anglicized not by any official pressure, but social expectations, which lessened over the years.

2771: Names Ending -eigh and Feminizing Masculine Names Jul 22, 2024

In recent decades, there has been a trend to give children distinctive names, balancing the perceived need for uniqueness with the desire to avoid raising too many eyebrows. This balance is increasingly achieved through creative spelling. As the trend for distinctiveness grows, it often results in variations around a limited set of tools.

Common names like Ashley and Riley have begun to be spelled with an -eigh ending, resulting in names like Ashleigh and Rileigh. The latter has other variations, with Ryleigh being the most common -eigh ending name of 2017 among a couple hundred now. This trend first emerged in earnest in the 1960s with a handful of names, predominantly Irish and British surnames that were long ago turned into male names and then feminized, such as the two examples above. The spelling could in part be a visual cue of their femininity.

The trend now not only includes classic names with the [i] or [eɪ] sounds at the end, altering their spelling, but also invents new ones. This spelling evolution overlaps with the feminizing of many traditionally masculine names—like how Charlie (and indeed Charleigh) is now more common for girls than boys—especially those ending in [i] or [eɪ] like Kelsey, Lesley, Sydney and Lindsey, seen as is, though Syndeigh and Lindseigh etc. are exclusively for girls. While this trend of giving girls traditionally boys' names, or as a result, neutral names, has seen explosive popularity in recent decades, there is not even one serious contender in the reverse.

2770: Guadalajara, Guadalupe, and Whisky Jul 21, 2024

Spanish does not have [w] as the first sound of a word, and in spelling Spanish only uses W in foreign words, predominantly from English, but there are older loanwords that look differently. In the middle of a word, the sound exists, such as in ‘agua’ [ˈa.ɣ̞wa] (water) but occurs with U after a consonant, so around Iberia, namely around former Andalusia, there are places:

Guadalajara, Guadalupe, Guadix, Guadalcanal, Guadalquivir, Guadalperal Dolmen, some referring to cities, some waterways, but all come from the Arabic وَادِي (wadi) or … وَادِي الْ (wadi al…) which in Arabic standardly refers to a seasonal river that dries up each year, but in Muslim Spain just denoted a river. Since Spanish words don’t naturally begin with [w] the [g] was added for phonetic ease. Of course, unlike with English loan words, Arabic’s are in another writing system which makes wholesale borrowing like Modern Spanish ‘whisky’ (from ‘whiskey’) overall a harder feat too.

In a few even rarer cases the spelling is UA- like in ‘ualabí’ (wallaby), but this very foreign looking and is really used for when enunciating each vowel, like transliterating the city name, Ouagadougou (Uagadugú).

2769: Castor Jul 20, 2024

Many children of recent history may have shuddered at the thought of castor oil, which comes from castor beans, but if they knew where castor, per se, came from, they might not mind the beans (or really, seed) oil. 

Castoreum is a secretion of beavers in multiple glands around their rear ends. It’s potent smell is used in perfumes and historically foods, but on paper has nothing to do with the beans for which it gave its name. Indeed, ‘castor’ just means ‘beaver’ in Greek and this root was then applied to one of their notable features. It seems that there was a misappropriation of the Latin name of another plant, castus, onto the ricin plant that produces the castor beans, but it may be that castor-oil can be used as a cheaper substitute for castoreum in certain contexts, namely for perfumes.

2768: Humus, Homo and Humans Jul 19, 2024

Ancient societies understood that man was made out of the soil of the earth, seen with slight differences in various accounts of creation, and in a modern, scientific age, the word for the species, ‘human,’ has roots in this where ‘man’ does not. The word ‘humus’, taken in the 18th century from Latin, means ‘soil’, but it is from the exact same root as the Latin ‘homo’ meaning ‘human’, and where the English ‘human’ comes from (note that ‘man’ and ‘human’ aren’t related). The word "homo" is etymologically connected to "humus" through the shared Indo-European root *dhghem-, which means "earth" or "ground."

As languages evolved, the meanings of these words became more specialized. "Humus" retained its focus on soil and organic matter, while "homo" became the term for humans, emphasizing human distinctiveness and consciousness. This linguistic divergence reflects the growing complexity of human society and thought.

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.