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Category: English
Why do we need to capitalize “I” and the days of the weeks in English?
No disagreement with the answers here. I’ll philosophise a bit more generally: Each language authority or community ends up with a particular set of conventions about punctuation and capitalisation—or borrows them from a more prestigious language. You only become aware of alternate ways of doing things if you’re exposed to other communities. And it only […]
Why is the word “all” spelled this way instead of “aal”?
Billy Kerr’s answer to Why is the word “all” spelled this way instead of “aal”? is right, but lemme add a bit to it. While English spelling looks pretty random, there is a predictability to it if you assume that it used to make sense in Middle English. So through a particular vowel change in […]
If the compound words, “insofar,” and “inasmuch” require that they be followed by “as”, why haven’t we made the leap to “insofaras,” and “inasmuchas”?
Constituency. If people are going to run words together, they don’t so randomly. They run words together when the words form a syntactic grouping. And the stop running words together when they run into a syntactic break. A clause like “in so far as I am able” is analysed syntactically as: [in [so far]] [as […]
Which countries keep their native languages pure and uninfluenced from foreign languages?
What Tomasz Dec’s answer to Which countries keep their native languages pure and uninfluenced from foreign languages? said. Icelandic is likely the most successful, as the poster-child of conservative intervention in language change in general. Lots of European languages have had bouts of this. German fought the good fight for a fair while, and their […]
Who coined the term ‘polity’?
the definition of polity 1530-40; < Latin polītīa < Greek polīteía citizenship, government, form of government, commonwealth, equivalent to polī́te-, variant stem of polī́tēs citizen Online Etymology Dictionary 1530s, from Middle French politie (early 15c.) or directly from Late Latin polita “organized government” (see policy (n.1)). Policy and Police ultimately derive from the same Greek […]
How do words like “mouse” get their plural form?
Vowel change was a strategy for forming plurals in Old English. The process is shared among Germanic languages, and is Germanic umlaut. Ultimately it comes from –iz being a plural suffix in Proto-Germanic: the plural of *mūs was *mūsiz, and the plural of *fōts was *fōtiz. In time, *mūsiz went to mȳs in Old English […]
What is a feminine diminutive?
A diminutive is “a word which has been modified to convey a slighter degree of its root meaning, to convey the smallness of the object or quality named, or to convey a sense of intimacy or endearment”: Diminutive . Well done there, Wikipedia. So not so much an element of speech, but a modification of […]
Why does the Old Testament (in the English versions) use Greek names instead of Hebrew names?
Well, this won’t sound pleasant, but: The normative version(s) of English, as with most European languages, are culturally influenced by Christianity more than other religions. (Jewish Englishes will in fact use Hebrew names, just as Yiddish does. But standard English unsurprisingly uses Christian forms.) Christian knowledge of the Hebrew Scriptures was mediated through the Septuagint, […]
Why is ‘selfie’ use suffix -ie instead of -y?
Selfie is an Australian coinage: No, a Drunken Australian Man Did Not Coin the Word Selfie. (The article disputes only that the particular guy came up with it, not that it was coined in Australia.) The Australian suffix used to coin cutesy abbreviations of words (hypocoristics) is conventionally spelled as –ie, not –y—even when it […]
What is the scientific name of Greek origin for the pathology where the patient has a phobia of assorted socks and wears unassorted socks?
The world is full of joke phobias, and bad Greek renderings of joke phobias at that. There is a special place in hell for the mangling of Greek that is Coulrophobia. If there’s a real phobia associated, it’d be symmetriphobia, fear of matching things in general (though I’m not clear from googling as to whether […]