As someone who has actually studied the English language there's a common phrase about English that kinda annoys me because while it makes for a funny haha line it's such a gross oversimplification that it actually ceases to be funny. It's the one that goes "The English language is just three languages stacked on top of each other wearing a trenchcoat" or something to that effect.

I'm not going to go into detail as to why that sentence is inaccurate, just take my word for it as a person with a master's in English. I suggest we withdraw this expression from usage and replace it with the much more accurate "The English language is a dirty little slut that loves it when other languages cum big loads in it"

You know what Tumblr, I don't think this one deserves to be found

[ID: youtube comment from Hal Sawyer:

My favorite relic English still used everywhere is the word “the” used in phrases like: “the more I look at this, the stranger it seems, or “the bigger they come, the harder they fall”. This “the” is not the article of any noun, it is a different word, a conjunction descended from the old English “þā”, pronounced “tha” which means either “when” or “then”. Back in early Middle English the structure “if - then” had not taken over and if you wanted to express an if - then relationship you said “þā whatever, þā whatever”, meaning “when such-and- such, then such-and-such”. “þā” sounds almost the same as “the” and the spelling of the two converged, but the meaning remained totally different. “the more, the merrier” literally means “when more, then merrier” or “if more, then merrier’; same as centuries ago.

end ID]

this is so cool

WHAT THE FUCK!?

in an interesting case of linguistic convergent evolution, the english words scale, scale, and scale are all false cognates of each other

scale as in „to climb“ comes from the latin scala, for ladder.

scale as in the measuring device comes from the old norse skal, for a drinking vessel sometimes used as a weighing device

scale as in the dermal plating on the skin of some fish and reptiles comes from the old french escale, for shell or husk.

Three languages enter, one language leaves.

me every time i take a sip of my cappuccino: do they know it's called cappuccino because the color is similar to the sackcloth worn by capuchin friars (cappuccini). do they know capuchin friars got their name from the hood (cappuccio) they wear. do they know cappuccino is a double diminutive as it comes from capo ('robe') + uccio = cappuccio ('hood' but literally 'little robe') + ino = cappuccino ('tiny hood' but literally 'tiny little robe'). do they know

at this point I think we’re all familiar with the etymologies, that the animals “chicken, cow, sheep, pig” are all Germanic, Anglosaxon, words, but the culinary equivalents “poultry, beef, mutton, pork” all derive from Norman French

but 〜fun fact〜 almost the exact same phenomenon exists in isiXhosa !!!

inkuku and inkomo are refer to the animals, chicken and cow, while the meats are usually called ichicken and ibeef. there’s still an awareness that they’re loans, which is why the spelling isn’t *itshigini for example, but it’s ubiquitous in the spoken language

apparently, mutton and pork are usually still called inyama yegusha and inyama yehagu (lit. sheep meat and pig meat) and I’ve definitely never heard *imutton before so that checks out (though *ipork sounds familiar ?)… and in formal, written contexts one uses those same constructions for beef and chicken : inyama yenkomo and inyama yenkuku

wait WHAT

Wait, so… does -copter come *from* helicopter? 

Yep! This is called rebracketing. Another famous example would be “-burger”: the original food item is named after the German city, [Hamburg]+[er], but got semantically reinterpreted as [ham]+[burger]. Now it’s used as a suffix indicating a type of sandwich.

I love etymology!!!!!

The word “blog” is another example. It’s a rebracket and subsequent shortening of “web log.”

Another good one is alcoholic (comes from “alcohol” and the suffic “ic” but has been rebracketed such that the suffix “holic” is used to indicate affinity for other things - chocoholic, etc).

Finally, Mexico comes from the simplified Spanish translation for the Aztec capital, Metztlixihtlico, which is said to mean “place at the center of the moon”. The word is a blend of mētztli for ‘moon’, xictli for ‘navel’ or ‘centre’, and the suffix -co for ‘place’.

why are bats called bats?

because they look like flying mice [Danish: flagermus, German: Fledermaus, Luxembourgish: Fliedermaus, Swedish: fladdermus]

because they look like half mice and half owl [French: chauve-souris]

because they look like half mice and it’s not 100% clear what the other half is [Ladin: utschè-mezmieur, Catalan: rat-penat, Lombard: mezzarat]

because apparently they make a flap flap noise [English: bat]

because they’ve got badass leather wings [Gaelic: sciathàn leathair, Old Norse: leðrblaka]

because they look like cute nocturnal butterflies [Maltese: farflett il-lejl]

because they’re probably, like, blind mice [Serbo-croatian: sismis, Portugese: morcego, Spanish: murcíelago, Arabic: khaffash]

because they fly at night [Italian: pipistrello, Slovenian: netopir, Polish: nietoperz, Greek: nykterides, Farsi: shab parreh]

So bat literally means flapper. You’re welcome.

This, my friends, this is true etymology. Explaining why something is named the way it is, finding patterns and principles of meaning, not just tracing a word’s form back through time (which, admittedly, is oftentimes a prerequisite for exploring the former).

This exact conversation is how I became friends with @pipcomix

SKY FLAP FLAPS

Some goon : This word is made up.

Me, an intellectual : As all words are.

It baffles and infuriates me that Hogwarts students don’t take Latin or Greek. Accio? Literally “I summon.” Lumos? Fucking “light.” Expelliarmus? Expel weapon!! Ooooh I wonder what Levicorpus does– you Dumb Ass Bastard. You ILLITERATE. It’s called Levicorpus, it lifts someone’s body, it LEVIES your goddamn CORPUS-

Hermione ghost wrote this

settle this for me once and for all

is “chai” a TYPE of tea??! bc in Hindi/Urdu, the word chai just means tea

its like spicy cinnamon tea instead of bland gross black tea

I think the chai that me and all other Muslims that I know drink is just black tea

i mean i always thought chai was just another word for tea?? in russian chai is tea

why don’t white people just say tea

do they mean it’s that spicy cinnamon tea

why don’t they just call it “spicy cinnamon tea”

the spicy cinnamon one is actually masala chai specifically so like

there’s literally no reason to just say chai or chai 

They don’t know better. To them “chai tea” IS that specific kind of like, creamy cinnamony tea. They think “chai” is an adjective describing “tea”.

What English sometimes does when it encounters words in other languages that it already has a word for is to use that word to refer to a specific type of that thing. It’s like distinguishing between what English speakers consider the prototype of the word in English from what we consider non-prototypical.

(Sidenote: prototype theory means that people think of the most prototypical instances of a thing before they think of weirder types. For example: list four kinds of birds to yourself right now. You probably started with local songbirds, which for me is robins, blue birds, cardinals, starlings. If I had you list three more, you might say pigeons or eagles or falcons. It would probably take you a while to get to penguins and emus and ducks, even though those are all birds too. A duck or a penguin, however, is not a prototypical bird.)

“Chai” means tea in Hindi-Urdu, but “chai tea” in English means “tea prepared like masala chai” because it’s useful to have a word to distinguish “the kind of tea we make here” from “the kind of tea they make somewhere else”.

“Naan” may mean bread, but “naan bread” means specifically “bread prepared like this” because it’s useful to have a word to distinguish between “bread made how we make it” and “bread how other people make it”.

We also sometimes say “liege lord” when talking about feudal homage, even though “liege” is just “lord” in French, or “flower blossom” to describe the part of the flower that opens, even though when “flower” was borrowed from French it meant the same thing as blossom. 

We also do this with place names: “brea” means tar in Spanish, but when we came across a place where Spanish-speakers were like “there’s tar here”, we took that and said “Okay, here’s the La Brea tar pits”.

 Or “Sahara”. Sahara already meant “giant desert,” but we call it the Sahara desert to distinguish it from other giant deserts, like the Gobi desert (Gobi also means desert btw).

English doesn’t seem to be the only language that does this for places: this page has Spanish, Icelandic, Indonesian, and other languages doing it too.

Languages tend to use a lot of repetition to make sure that things are clear. English says “John walks”, and the -s on walks means “one person is doing this” even though we know “John” is one person. Spanish puts tense markers on every instance of a verb in a sentence, even when it’s abundantly clear that they all have the same tense (”ayer [yo] caminé por el parque y jugué tenis” even though “ayer” means yesterday and “yo” means I and the -é means “I in the past”). English apparently also likes to use semantic repetition, so that people know that “chai” is a type of tea and “naan” is a type of bread and “Sahara” is a desert. (I could also totally see someone labeling something, for instance, pan dulce sweetbread, even though “pan dulce” means “sweet bread”.)

Also, specifically with the chai/tea thing, many languages either use the Malay root and end up with a word that sounds like “tea” (like té in Spanish), or they use the Mandarin root and end up with a word that sounds like “chai” (like cha in Portuguese).

So, can we all stop making fun of this now?

Okay and I’m totally going to jump in here about tea because it’s cool. Ever wonder why some languages call tea “chai” or “cha” and others call it “tea” or “the”? 

It literally all depends on which parts of China (or, more specifically, what Chinese) those cultures got their tea from, and who in turn they sold their tea to. 

The Portuguese imported tea from the Southern provinces through Macau, so they called tea “cha” because in Cantonese it’s “cha”. The Dutch got tea from Fujian, where Min Chinese was more heavily spoken so it’s “thee” coming from “te”. And because the Dutch sold tea to so much of Europe, that proliferated the “te” pronunciation to France (”the”), English (”tea”) etc, even though the vast majority of Chinese people speak dialects that pronounce it “cha” (by which I mean Mandarin and Cantonese which accounts for a lot of the people who speak Chinese even though they aren’t the only dialects).

And “chai”/”chay” comes from the Persian pronunciation who got it from the Northern Chinese who then brought it all over Central Asia and became chai.

(Source) 

This is the post that would make Uncle Iroh join tumblr

Tea and linguistics. My two faves.

Okay, this is all kinds of fascinating!

Quality linguistic research

Tea - the drink so important that it has its own article in the World Atlas of Language Structures.

“Tea” is in WALS for exactly two reasons: 

This is such an interesting history and concept!

How might your conlang be affected when encountering words in other languages that native speakers already have a word for? How would your culture integrate the other language’s word, if at all?