Today: my latest article for TheWeek.com, on other languages with weird spelling, and how they get that way.
Many languages use an alphabet borrowed from a different language. It’s like building a dining room set using an IKEA kit for a dresser.
One little correction, a typo I spotted too late: in the Irish Gaelic, shuiamhneas should be shuaimhneas. Of course.
I expected my latest article for TheWeek.com to generate some reaction in the comments, and I was not disappointed. Not that I wrote it just to troll people, but when you venture into certain territory…
The idea behind the article was to look at some famous quotes – sayings that are well known and often said – that break rules that are often learned in schools at about the same time as the quotes are. And then, of course, to look at whether those rules are really rules or not. But I didn’t explain that in an introduction. I just dove right in (or, if you’re a hoary prescriptivist, dived right in). Which may not have been the best idea, since – in combination with an eye-catching but slightly misleading headline (I don’t write the headlines, by the way, but I do get to see them in advance and could always suggest a change) – this approach provoked a variety of reactions in the comments section.
Here, for better or worse, is a link to the article:
And feel free to tell me what you think!
Posted in The Week
Tagged English grammar, grammar, prescriptivism, quotations, quotes, rules, The Week
My latest article for TheWeek.com is up, and it’s on the oft-maligned “sentence fragments”:
A few readers have pointed out, as I rather thought someone might, that Shakespeare isn’t really the best example. This is true, but I needed an example that I could be confident readers would be familiar with and would not dismiss as too modern, and I also had a length limit. So there it is. The compromises always get you in the end.
You can also see this article on Salon.com, and I don’t even know where else.
Posted in The Week
Tagged English grammar, English syntax, grammar, incomplete sentences, sentence fragments, syntax, The Week
In my latest article for TheWeek.com, on the changes that happen to English words when they are “borrowed” into other languages (“How foreign languages mutate English words”), I cite about three dozen words that other languages have borrowed from English and changed some way. But what I don’t mention is how those words got into English in the first place.
What, you didn’t think they just appeared fully formed in English from nowhere, did you?
Here’s the real truth: We did to other languages as other languages then did unto us. Many of our stolen nestlings are actually changelings. Here’s where we got each of the words from:
weekend: from week + end (obviously), which come from Old English wice and ende, which in turn come from Proto-Germanic, as Old English itself did
baseball: base from French bas, from Latin basis; ball from Old English ball
thrill: from Old English þyrlian, which meant ‘penetrate’ and came from a word for ‘hole’ that is the source of the tril in nostril
ballpoint pen: we’ve already covered ball; point from Old French point and pointe, both from Latin pungere ultimately; pen from Old French penne ‘feather’, from Latin penna
corner: from Old French corniere, from Latin cornua, ‘horn, point’
screwdriver: screw from Middle French escroue, which may have been borrowed from Germanic languages; driver from Old English drifan
bath: from Old English bæð
parlor: from Old French parleor, from parler ‘speak’
stadium: from Latin, which got it from Greek stadion; in both cases it referred to a race track and a unit of distance (like calling a track a “quarter-mile”)
medicine: from Latin medicina
brilliant: from French, which got it from Italian and ultimately from Latin beryllus ‘beryl, precious stone’
office: from Latin officium, ‘service, duty, ceremony’
blouse: the source of this one is actually uncertain; it may come from French or Provençal, perhaps from a word for ‘wool’
doctor: ultimately from Latin doctor, ‘teacher’
orange: by way of various languages, from Arabic naranj, which got it from Persian narang, which got it from Sanskrit naranga. It may well be that Tamil did not get it from English – this is what my research source indicated, but I am coming to have second thoughts about that, what with Tamil being so close to the home of Sanskrit and all.
chocolate: from Nahuatl (Aztec) xocolatl ‘bitter water’
microphone: an English invention from Greek parts: mikros ‘small’ and phoné ‘sound’
brandy: shortened from brandewine, from Dutch brandewijn ‘burnt wine’
cigarette: from French, a diminutive form of cigare, which French got from Spanish cigarro
calf: from Old English cealf
pig: presumably from Old English, though it doesn’t show up in any extant Old English texts (adult pigs were called swine)
nervous: from Latin nervosus, from nervus ‘nerve, sinew’
late: from Old English læt
anonymous: from Latin anonymus, from Greek anonymos
handy: formed in Middle English from hand, which comes from Old English, from Proto-Germanic, etc.
bodybag: body from Old English bodig ‘torso’; bag from Early Middle English bagge, probably from Old Norse baggi
salary man: salary ultimately from Latin salarium ‘salt money’; man from Old English, unchanged
one piece: one from Old English an; piece from Old French, probably from Gaulish (a Celtic language)
front glass: front from Old French front ‘forehead, brow’, from Latin frontem; glass from Old English glæs
open car: open from Old English, unchanged; car from Latin carrum, carrus referring to a Celtic two-wheeled war chariot, taken from the Gaulish word karros
gown: from Old French goune, from Late Latin gunna ‘leather garment, hide’
father: from Old English fæder
washing day: washing from wash (of course) from Old English wascan; day from Old English dæg
smoking: from Old English smoca
So out of 42 source words, 18 came from Old English (and Old English got them from Anglo-Saxon, which got them from Proto-Germanic, etc.), while 20 came from French and/or Latin, and the rest from elsewhere. But, with the exception of pure inventions, every word that came from some language came into that language from somewhere else – an older version of the language, perhaps, which got it from a language that evolved into that language, and so on back, or perhaps a different language again. Words mutate and evolve. As we can see.
My latest article for TheWeek.com is on the changes that happen to English words when they are “borrowed” into other languages:
It comes complete with about three dozen examples – though of course there are many, many more out there…
Posted in The Week
Tagged borrowing, English words, lexical change, loanwords, semantic change, sound change, The Week, words
My latest article for TheWeek.com has been posted today:
8 bizarre sounds you’ve probably made without knowing it
And their prevalence in several foreign languages
theweek.com/article/index/241811/8-bizarre-sounds-youve-probably-made-without-knowing-it
(Please note that I don’t make up the captions for the photos. Where it says an uvular trill I would recommend reading a uvular trill.)
Watch a video of me reading it and making the sounds:
Posted in The Week
Tagged 8 odd sounds from other languages you could never make except you probably already have, alveolar click, bilabial trill, implosive velar stop, lateral click, palatal click, pharyngeal fricative, phonemics, phonetics, pulmonic ingressive voiceless lateral fricative, sounds, speech sounds, The Week, uvular trill
My latest article for TheWeek.com is up. My editor has given it a funny title – as one commenter points out, it’s more like “The strange English pronunciations of common Nordic words,” but the title on the article is
I hope you enjoy it!
Posted in The Week
Tagged English words, Finnish, Icelandic, loan words, Norwegian, Sami, Scandinavian words, Scandinavian words we say differently, Swedish, The Week
Regular readers of my word tasting notes and blog entries have probably heard about the old letter thorn, þ. As it happens, there are several other letters that are – or have been – used with the Latin alphabet in English and other languages. Come meet nine of them in my latest article at TheWeek.com:
Posted in The Week
Tagged eng, English letters, ezh, gha, glottal stop, hwair, Latin alphabet, letters, open o, The Week, thorn, wynn, yogh
Today I would like to direct your attention to my latest article on TheWeek.com:
Wherein I talk about how and why q and x are pronounced in many different ways in different languages.
Posted in The Week
Tagged foreign words, letters, phonetics, phonology, pronunciation, q, x
The monetary unit of Swaziland is the lilangeni. English speakers are helpfully reminded that the plural is emalangeni: one lilangeni, two emalangeni.
But why?
I don’t mean “Why does SiSwati, the language of the Swaziland, pluralize that way?” That’s easy: as with other Bantu languages, its nouns are in different classes, identified by prefixes, and plurals are a different class from singulars. No, I mean “Why do we feel obliged to use the SiSwati plural when we’re speaking English?”
It’s not normal, you know. It’s not normal for languages, when they borrow words from other languages, to borrow the morphology: the different forms for plurals, possessives, etc., and the different conjugations for verbs.
It’s not even normal for English to do that. We don’t borrow conjugations when we borrow verbs: we don’t say “They massacreront them!” instead of “They will massacre them!” We don’t borrow possessives when we borrow nouns: we don’t say “The radiorum length” instead of “The radiuses’ length” – oh, sorry, that should be “The radii’s length.” Right?
Because sometimes – just sometimes – when we borrow a noun we also borrow the plural form. This is especially true with newer borrowings and with borrowings in specialized areas (science, food, the arts). We’re not very consistent about it, so it can sneak up on you, like so many other ambush rules we have in English.
And there are so many borrowed plural forms – because there are so many plural forms to borrow. Read 9 confusing ways to pluralize words (by me) on TheWeek.com for details on ways and reasons.
But if we’re going to talk about pluralizing things the way we always have in English, there’s one other issue: we haven’t always pluralized using –s in English
Nope. In fact, a thousand years ago, when English nouns had three genders, only the masculine ones got –s (actually –as), and not all of those did either. Other ways of showing the plural were to add –u, –a, –e, or –n, or change the vowel, or do nothing. English has changed a whole lot since then. Noun and verb forms have gotten much, much simpler – thanks to interaction with speakers of other languages, especially Norse and French. You can really thank the French for the fact that we use –s/–es on most words now for the plural.
But since that’s what we do now, should we do it with all new words we steal, I mean borrow? Well, it’ll sure make life easier if we can settle on octopuses. But it might just sound kind of wrong and blah if we order paninos and look at graffitos on the wall. And it would be less fun if we couldn’t jokingly say to a bartender, “I’ll have a martinus. No, not martini – I only want one.” It’s the eternal struggle of English: do you want it easy, or do you want it fun?
Posted in The Week
Tagged English, English grammar, English words, morphology, pluralization, plurals, The Week
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