Language: quotes, facts and reflections - Page 2

Related subjects

Browse this subject and connected topics.

Keep reading below, or choose a related topic to explore something different.

DriveReading mode

StillnessReading mode

WonderReading mode

WonderLanguage

'Emoji' is a Japanese word: e means 'picture' and moji means 'written character'. Its likeness to the English 'emotion' is pure coincidence, even though emoji are now used above all to show feelings.

Emoji grew up on Japanese mobile phones in the 1990s. One of the best-known early sets was drawn in 1999 by Shigetaka Kurita for NTT DoCoMo's mobile internet service: 176 small symbols for things such as weather, sport and moods, now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Emoji went global after 2010, when Unicode, the standard that lets computers everywhere display the same characters, added 722 of them. The word that really does come from 'emotion' is 'emoticon', emotion plus icon, for faces typed with punctuation such as :-). The computer scientist Scott Fahlman proposed the smiley at Carnegie Mellon University in 1982. In 2015 Oxford Dictionaries chose the 'face with tears of joy' emoji as its word of the year.

EtymologyRead card

WonderLanguage

'Shampoo' comes from Hindi chāmpo, a form of the verb chāmpnā, 'to press or knead'. It entered English in 1762 meaning a massage, came to mean washing the hair around 1860, and only after that became the name of the soap itself.

British traders and officials met the word in India, where 'shampooing' meant a massage of the head and body, often with oils. It became fashionable in Britain thanks to Sake Dean Mahomed, a traveller and entrepreneur born in Patna around 1759. In the 1810s he opened a bathhouse in Brighton offering steam baths and 'shampooing' with Indian oils. It was a great success, and he was appointed shampooing surgeon to King George IV and later to William IV. Mahomed is also remembered as the first Indian to publish a book in English. Over the following decades the meaning slid from massaging the head to washing the hair, and then to the liquid used for it. Turkish borrowed şampuan from French shampooing.

EtymologyRead card

WonderLanguage

September, October, November and December are named from the Latin numbers septem, octo, novem and decem: seven, eight, nine and ten. They are now the ninth to twelfth months because the Roman year once began in March.

According to Roman tradition, the city's first calendar, credited to its legendary founder Romulus, had only ten months: the year began with March in spring and ended with December, and the winter weeks were left out of the count. A later king, Numa Pompilius, is said to have added January and February. From 153 BC the year of Rome's chief magistrates, the consuls, began on 1 January, but the old month names stayed. Two more months once had number names: Quintilis, 'fifth', was renamed July after Julius Caesar in 44 BC, and Sextilis, 'sixth', became August in honour of the emperor Augustus in 8 BC.

EtymologyRead card

WonderLanguage

In many unrelated languages, the words for mother and father are built from simple repeated syllables such as ma, pa, ba or da. These are among the first sounds babies make, and parents tend to hear them as names for themselves.

The sounds m, p and b are made with the lips, and 'a' simply by opening the mouth, so they are among the easiest a baby can produce. That is why Mandarin māma, Swahili mama and Quechua mama all mean mother, and Persian, Yoruba and Turkish baba all mean father, although these languages are not related. The linguist Roman Jakobson suggested why the m-sound tends to go to the mother: a baby feeding at the breast can only make a soft hum through the nose, which later becomes a call for food and for her. The pattern is strong but not universal. Georgian famously reverses it: there, mama means father and deda means mother.

LinguisticsRead card

WonderLanguage

Sign languages are complete languages with their own grammar, not gestures that spell out a spoken language word by word. British Sign Language and American Sign Language, for example, are so different that their users cannot understand each other, even though both countries speak English.

Sign languages build meaning from the shape, movement and position of the hands, and also from the face and body: raised eyebrows or a tilt of the head can turn a statement into a question. American Sign Language grew partly from French Sign Language, brought to the United States by the deaf teacher Laurent Clerc, who co-founded the American School for the Deaf in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1817. In 1960 the linguist William Stokoe showed that it has a structure as rich as any spoken language, and linguists have studied sign languages as full languages ever since. Ethnologue, a catalogue of the world's languages, lists about 150 of them. In Turkey, records show sign language in use at the Ottoman palace in the 16th and 17th centuries, although it is not known whether modern Turkish Sign Language descends from it.

LinguisticsRead card

WonderLanguage

In 1887 L. L. Zamenhof, an eye doctor from Białystok, published the first book of Esperanto. He designed it as a regular, easy-to-learn second language that speakers of different languages could share without giving up their own.

Zamenhof grew up in Białystok, then part of the Russian Empire and now in Poland, a city where Polish, Russian, German and Yiddish were all spoken. He published the book on 26 July 1887 under the pen name Doktoro Esperanto, 'Doctor One-Who-Hopes', and readers soon used that name for the language itself. It listed 917 word roots that could be turned into thousands of words with prefixes and suffixes, and every noun ends in -o. The first World Esperanto Congress met in Boulogne-sur-Mer, France, in 1905. Esperanto never became a universal language, but it is the most successful invented international language. Estimates of its speakers range from tens of thousands to about two million, and an estimated 1,000 to 2,000 people have spoken it since birth.

Language historyRead card

WonderLanguage

Much of the earliest known writing is bookkeeping. Between about 3350 and 3000 BC, scribes in southern Mesopotamia, mostly in the city of Uruk in today's Iraq, pressed signs into clay tablets to record grain, sheep, beer and land; about 85 per cent of these tablets are accounts.

Scholars call this early script proto-cuneiform. It grew out of an older system of small clay tokens that stood for goods, and its signs were drawn or pressed with a stylus. Around 5,000 such tablets survive, and those that are not accounts are mostly sign lists used to train scribes. Many quantities were counted in base 60, a system later handed down by Babylonian astronomers that survives in our 60 minutes. Over the following centuries the signs became wedge-shaped marks, which gave cuneiform its name, from Latin cuneus, 'wedge'. Cuneiform was used for about 3,000 years to write Sumerian, Akkadian, Hittite and other languages; more than 23,000 tablets left by Assyrian merchants have been found at Kültepe near Kayseri. Egyptian hieroglyphs appeared at roughly the same time.

Language historyRead card

WonderLanguage

'The' is the most common word in written English. In the Brown Corpus, a million-word sample of American writing published in 1961, it made up nearly 7 per cent of all words, appearing almost twice as often as the runner-up, 'of'.

'The' is a function word: it carries almost no meaning of its own but does grammatical work, marking a noun as something already known, as in 'the book' rather than 'a book'. The Brown Corpus figures fit Zipf's law, named after the American linguist George Kingsley Zipf: in large samples of a language, the second most common word usually appears about half as often as the first, the third about a third as often, and so on. The result is a very uneven spread: by one widely used count, the 100 most common words make up about half of all written English. Turkish has no word for 'the' at all. It marks a known object with a case ending instead: kitabı okudum means 'I read the book', while kitap okudum simply means 'I read a book'.

LinguisticsRead card

WonderLanguage

'Gymnasium' comes from Greek gymnasion, from gymnazein, 'to train naked', and gymnos, 'naked'. Athletes in ancient Greece exercised and competed without clothes, their bodies rubbed with olive oil.

The Greek gymnasium was much more than a sports ground. Young men trained there, but it also had baths and open spaces where people met to talk, and philosophers came there to teach. Athens had three great public gymnasia, and two of them gave their names to education: Plato's school met at the Academy from around 387 BC, and Aristotle taught at the Lyceum from 335 BC. That is why German still calls an academic secondary school a Gymnasium, why French has lycée and Turkish lise, and why we speak of academies. In Greek, a gymnastēs was the trainer rather than the athlete; English 'gymnast' has been used for the athlete since the 1590s.

EtymologyRead card

WonderLanguage

The word hippopotamus comes from ancient Greek hippos, “horse”, and potamos, “river”: a “river horse”. The name is only a comparison. The hippo is not closely related to the horse; its closest living relatives are whales and dolphins.

The Greeks knew the hippo from the Nile; in ancient times it lived along the Egyptian river all the way from Sudan to the Delta. The historian Herodotus described it in his Histories in the 5th century BC, and the Greek name reached English through Latin in the 16th century. Other peoples chose similar pictures: the Turkish name su aygırı means “water stallion”, and the Yoruba of West Africa call the animal erinmi, “elephant of the water”. Naturalists long grouped hippos with pigs, but blood proteins and later DNA showed that their closest living relatives are whales, dolphins and porpoises, from which they split about 55 million years ago. The two Greek roots live on elsewhere: hippos in hippodrome, a course for horse races, and potamos in Mesopotamia, “the land between the rivers”.

EtymologyRead card

WonderLanguage

The English word jovial, meaning cheerful and good-humoured, comes from Jove, another name for the Roman god Jupiter. Astrologers believed that people born under the planet Jupiter were happy by nature, and the word kept the idea long after the belief faded.

Jovial reached English in the 1580s from French, which took it from Italian gioviale, “born under the influence of Jupiter”, and ultimately from Late Latin Iovialis, “of Jupiter”. The same Latin root gives English Jove, as in the old exclamation “By Jove!”. Jupiter itself means “sky father”, from an ancient root meaning “sky” or “day” that is also behind the Greek Zeus. In medieval and Renaissance astrology each planet was thought to shape temperament, and English kept several of these labels: saturnine for gloomy people, supposedly ruled by slow, distant Saturn; mercurial for quick, changeable ones, after Mercury; and martial for warlike ones, after Mars. Lunatic comes from luna, the Moon, once blamed for bouts of madness.

EtymologyRead card

WonderLanguage

The word pyjamas comes from Persian pā, “leg”, and jāma, “garment”, through Hindustani (Hindi-Urdu). In India the pāy-jāma was a pair of loose trousers tied at the waist. British colonists adopted them, and in Victorian Britain they became men's nightwear.

Hobson-Jobson, an 1886 dictionary of Anglo-Indian words, says the garment was worn in India by women of various classes, by Sikh men and above all by Muslim men and women. Europeans living there took to it as comfortable clothing for the home and for sleeping. Loose trousers of this kind, then called “mogul's breeches”, had already reached England in the 17th century as lounging wear, but the fashion soon faded. English records the word pyjamas from the early 1800s, and from about 1870 pyjamas became standard nightwear for British men. A close relative, the shalwar, is still everyday wear across South Asia. The Persian root pā is a distant cousin of English foot and Latin pes, all from the same ancient Indo-European word. British English spells it pyjamas; American English writes pajamas.

EtymologyRead card

WonderLanguage

English grew from Old English, a Germanic language, yet most of its dictionary is borrowed. A count of 75,000 entries found about 28 per cent from French, 28 per cent from Latin and 25 per cent Germanic, while the words used most often are still largely native.

Three waves did most of the borrowing. From the 9th century Viking settlers brought Old Norse words that now feel entirely English: sky, egg, knife, window (literally “wind eye”) and even they, them and their. After the Norman Conquest of 1066, French was the language of the court, the law and the nobility for roughly three centuries, and thousands of its words entered English. Renaissance scholars then borrowed directly from Latin and Greek. The layers often sit side by side: ask is Old English and enquire came through French; kingly, royal and regal come from English, French and Latin. Animals in the field kept English names (cow, pig, sheep), while their meat on the table took French ones (beef, pork, mutton). The figures come from a survey of the Shorter Oxford Dictionary by Finkenstaedt and Wolff, published in 1973.

LinguisticsRead card

WonderLanguage

Whisky comes from Scottish Gaelic uisge beatha (in Irish, uisce beatha), “water of life”. English speakers first borrowed it as usquebaugh and later shortened it to whisky. The Gaelic phrase was itself a translation of the Latin aqua vitae, the name medieval Europe gave to distilled spirits.

Distilling spread across Europe in the Middle Ages, and spirits were first valued as medicine, hence the hopeful name. The earliest records from Ireland and Scotland are brief. The Irish Annals of Clonmacnoise note a chieftain who died in 1405 after drinking too much aqua vitae at Christmas, and Scotland's Exchequer Rolls for 1495 record malt sent to Friar John Cor, by order of the king, to make aqua vitae. English borrowed the Gaelic word as uskebeaghe in 1581 and usquebaugh by 1610; the short form whisky settled in during the 18th century. Other languages kept the same idea: French eau-de-vie and Scandinavian akvavit also mean “water of life”. Spelling now follows geography: Scotland, Canada and Japan write whisky, while Ireland and the United States mostly write whiskey.

EtymologyRead card

WonderLanguage

Algebra takes its name from al-jabr, a word in the title of a textbook written in Baghdad around 820 by the Persian mathematician Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi. His own name, turned into Latin as Algoritmi, gave us the word algorithm.

Al-Khwarizmi worked in Baghdad under the caliph al-Ma'mun, at the centre of learning known as the House of Wisdom. His book, The Concise Book of Calculation by Restoration and Balancing, showed step by step how to solve equations. Al-jabr, “restoration”, meant moving a subtracted quantity to the other side of an equation; al-muqabala, “balancing”, meant cancelling equal terms on both sides. Robert of Chester translated the book into Latin in 1145, and it remained a main mathematics textbook in European universities until the 16th century. Another of his works explained the Hindu-Arabic numerals we use today. Its 12th-century Latin translation opened with the words “Dixit Algorizmi”, “so said al-Khwarizmi”, and from his Latinised name, algorism, later algorithm, came to mean a step-by-step method of calculation. His name itself means “the man from Khwarazm”, a region in today's Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan.

EtymologyRead card

WonderLanguage

Checkmate comes from the Persian shāh māt. Shāh means king, and māt is usually explained as “helpless” or “at a loss”, so the phrase says the king is trapped with no escape. The popular reading “the king is dead” comes from a similar Arabic word, but in chess the king is never actually captured.

Chess began in India around the 6th century as chaturanga and passed to Persia as chatrang, which the Arabs called shatranj. After the Arab conquest of Persia in the 7th century it spread across the Islamic world and reached Europe through Spain and Italy, and its words travelled with it. Shāh became Old French eschec, which gave English both check and chess; shāh māt became eschec mat and then checkmate. The rook, too, comes from the Persian rukh, a chariot. Turkish kept the Persian words almost unchanged: players still say “şah” when they attack the king and finish the game with “mat”, and the Turkish name of the game, satranç, comes from shatranj. Scholars still debate the exact sense of māt: besides “helpless” and the Arabic “died”, some link it to a Persian verb meaning to remain, in the sense of being left stranded in an ambush.

EtymologyRead card

WonderLanguage

Vaccine comes from vacca, Latin for cow. In 1796 the English doctor Edward Jenner showed that material from cowpox, a mild disease caught from cows, could protect people against deadly smallpox. His Latin name for cowpox, variolae vaccinae, gave the word.

Country people had long noticed that milkmaids who caught cowpox seemed to escape smallpox. On 14 May 1796 Jenner tested the idea: he took fluid from a cowpox sore on the hand of a milkmaid, Sarah Nelmes, and scratched it into the arm of James Phipps, the eight-year-old son of his gardener. When Jenner later exposed the boy to smallpox, he did not fall ill. Jenner published his results in 1798. An older method, variolation, gave people a mild dose of smallpox itself; Lady Mary Wortley Montagu had seen it practised in the Ottoman Empire and helped bring it to Britain in 1721. In 1881 Louis Pasteur proposed using vaccine for all such protective inoculations, in Jenner's honour. Smallpox was declared eradicated in 1980.

EtymologyRead card

WonderLanguage

The English word 'decimate', now used to mean 'destroy most of', comes from a rare Roman army punishment: a unit found guilty of cowardice or mutiny drew lots, and one soldier in every ten was put to death by his comrades. The Latin decimus means 'tenth'.

The Greek historian Polybius described the procedure in the second century BC: the survivors were also given barley instead of wheat and made to camp outside the walls of the fort. Only about eleven cases are recorded. The first recorded case came in 72 BC, when Marcus Licinius Crassus used it during the war against Spartacus's slave revolt; the emperor Galba used it again during the civil wars of AD 68–69. When 'decimation' first entered English, it meant a tax of one tenth, a tithe. The sense of heavy destruction grew from the 17th century, and usage writers such as H. W. Fowler objected to it, but it is now the usual meaning. The same Latin root gives English 'decimal'.

EtymologyRead card

WonderLanguage

'Sarcasm' comes from the ancient Greek verb sarkazein, 'to tear flesh', from sarx, 'flesh'. The verb came to mean biting one's lip in anger and sneering, which is how a cutting remark got its name.

The Greek noun sarkasmos passed through Latin into English, where it is first recorded in 1579, in the Latin form sarcasmus, in a note to Edmund Spenser's poem The Shepheardes Calender. The adjective 'sarcastic' took more than a century longer, first appearing in 1695. The root sarx also lives on in 'sarcophagus', a stone coffin, from a Greek phrase meaning 'flesh-eating stone', after a limestone believed to break down bodies quickly. English describes sharp words with physical images too, as in a cutting remark or biting wit. Linguists usually separate sarcasm from irony: a situation can be ironic, but only a person can be sarcastic, and sarcasm is aimed at someone, often by saying the opposite of what is meant.

EtymologyRead card

WonderLanguage

'Hello' existed before the telephone, mostly as a shout to get attention. In 1877 Thomas Edison proposed it as the word to use on the new phones, while Alexander Graham Bell preferred 'ahoy'. Edison's choice won, and it helped make 'hello' the everyday English greeting.

Hello is first found in print in 1826, in a Connecticut newspaper. It grew out of older calls such as hallo and hollo, used to hail a ferryman or attract notice, and has been spelt in many ways, from hullo to hallo. In August 1877 Edison wrote to the head of a Pittsburgh telegraph company that no call bell would be needed, because a shouted 'Hello!' could be heard 3 to 6 metres (10 to 20 feet) away. Bell answered with 'ahoy', a sailors' call, but it never caught on. By 1889, telephone exchange operators were nicknamed 'hello girls'. The word also travelled abroad: French borrowed it as allô, and from French it passed into other languages, including Turkish, where it became alo.

EtymologyRead card

WonderLanguage

The word avocado comes from āhuacatl, the fruit's name in Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs, which is still spoken in Mexico today. Spanish turned it into aguacate, and English took the word from Spanish in the late 1600s.

Nahuatl is spoken by about 1.7 million people in Mexico, and it has given the world many food words: tomato comes from tomatl, chilli from chīlli, and chocolate is usually traced to Nahuatl as well. Guacamole is āhuacamōlli, 'avocado sauce'. Spanish settlers wrote the fruit's name as aguacate, and English speakers bent it through forms such as 'avogato pear' before settling on avocado; the naturalist Hans Sloane recorded the word in a 1696 catalogue of Jamaican plants. 'Avocado pear' was in turn corrupted to 'alligator pear', a name that stayed common in Florida until the California Avocado Association popularised 'avocado' from 1915. Linguists trace āhuacatl itself back to an even older form, pa:wa, in the ancestor of the Aztec languages.

Ikigai DailyRead card

WonderLanguage

OK most likely began in Boston newspapers in 1839 as a jokey abbreviation of 'oll korrect', a deliberate misspelling of 'all correct'. A presidential campaign the following year spread it across the United States.

The first known example appeared in the Boston Morning Post on 23 March 1839, in a humorous piece by its editor, Charles Gordon Greene. Since 1838 Boston papers had enjoyed a fad for abbreviating slang and comic misspellings: NG for 'no go', GT for 'gone to Texas', OW for 'oll wright'. Almost all of them vanished. OK survived thanks to the 1840 election, when supporters of President Martin Van Buren, nicknamed Old Kinderhook after his home town in New York State, made 'OK' a campaign slogan. Van Buren lost to William Henry Harrison, but the word stayed. The story was pieced together by the Columbia University linguist Allen Walker Read in articles published in 1963 and 1964. Until then, several major American dictionaries had favoured another explanation, a word from the Choctaw language of the American South.

Ikigai DailyRead card

WonderLanguage

The small dot over a lowercase i or j is called a tittle, from the Latin titulus, a word medieval scribes used for small marks written above letters. In Turkish the dot does real work: it separates two different letters, i and ı.

Medieval scribes wrote i, m, n and u with the same short vertical strokes, called minims, so in dense handwriting a word could look like a row of identical lines. A small stroke above the i helped readers pick it out, and over time that stroke shrank into the round dot of printed type. The word tittle has been used in English since the 14th century. The King James Bible of 1611 promises that not 'one jot or one tittle' shall pass from the law, so 'jot and tittle' came to mean the smallest detail. The phrase 'to a T', meaning exactly, may come from an older 'to a tittle'. In Turkish the tittle has a real job. Since the alphabet reform of 1928, dotted İ i and dotless I ı have been separate letters for separate vowel sounds, as in kır (countryside) and kir (dirt).

Ikigai DailyRead card

WonderLanguage

The longest word in major English dictionaries is 'pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis', 45 letters long. It is said to name a lung disease caused by breathing in very fine volcanic dust.

The word was coined in 1935 by Everett M. Smith, president of the National Puzzlers' League, an American club for word-game enthusiasts. It was first printed in the New York Herald Tribune on 23 February 1935, in a report on the league's meeting, and entered a supplement to Merriam-Webster's dictionary in 1939. It is built from Greek and Latin parts: pneumono (lungs), ultramicroscopic (extremely small), silico (silica, the mineral in sand), volcano and coniosis (a disease caused by dust). Doctors simply say silicosis for lung damage from breathing in silica dust. Other famous long words are much shorter: floccinaucinihilipilification, 'the act of judging something worthless', has 29 letters, and antidisestablishmentarianism has 28. Languages that build words by adding suffixes can go further: a famous made-up Turkish word has 70 letters.

Ikigai DailyRead card