The Browns have one child; the Smiths have two children. Ah, that one is weird. This is an example of an irregular plural form. These nouns are still called variable nouns, they are just irregular. There are only a few hundred nouns like this, but they are the most interesting.

There are some nouns that are more ambiguous. Take wheat versus oats, for example. Wheat seems singular, but you could talk about a wheat field – many wheat plants – and that seems to be plural, no? Or what about oats? Oats is a plural, but it seems to be used interchangeably with the word wheat.

Here are some irregular patterns (oxymoron!):

• Adding -en to the end of a noun to make it plural. Child, children; ox, oxen; brother, brethren (this can also be brothers). This is a remnant from Old English; <-n> used to be a case marker for plural. Chaucer used daughtren for daughters.
• Changing the vowel in the middle of the word. Man, men; woman, women; foot, feet; goose, geese; tooth, teeth; louse, lice; mouse, mice. This is called mutation or umlaut. More on this in a later post.
• Changing <f> to <v> and adding an -es or -s. Calf, calves; elf, elves; half, halves; hoof, hooves; knife, knives; leaf, leaves; life, lives; loaf, loaves; scarf, scarves; self, selves; shelf, shelves; wharf, wharves; wife, wives; wolf, wolves. Some of these are starting to become regular, though: scarfs, leafs, wharfs, etc… are becoming more and more popular. I’m not sure why this happens.
• Just plain weird.  Cow, kine (more commonly cows); die, dice.

And here is a fun spelling poem I found. I’m not sure who it’s by, but I wish I had written it!

I take it you already know
Of tough and bough and cough and dough?
Others may stumble, but not you,
On hiccough, thorough, lough and through?
Well done! And now you wish, perhaps,
To learn of less familiar traps?
Beware of heard, a dreadful word
That looks like beard and sounds like bird,
And dead: it’s said like bed, not bead -
For goodness sake don’t call it deed!
Watch out for meat and great and threat
(They rhyme with suite and straight and debt).

A moth is not a moth in mother,
Nor both in bother, broth in brother,
And here is not a match for there
Nor dear and fear for bear and pear,
And then there’s dose and rose and lose -
Just look them up – and goose and choose,
And cork and work and card and ward,
And font and front and word and sword,
And do and go and thwart and cart -
Come, come, I’ve hardly made a start!
A dreadful language? Man alive!
I’d mastered it when I was five!

I thought it was enjoyable.

Check out all my Words of the Day posts HERE.

Etymologies:

• Avocado: (noun. A pear-shaped fruit with a rough leathery skin, smooth oily flesh, and a large stone.) The Aztecs first called this fruit the ahucatl (testicle). It was called this either because of a physical resemblance, or because they thought it was an aphrodisiac. The Spanish misheard the word as avocado, and brought the fruit along with the incorrect name back to Europe.
• Big: (noun. Of considerable size.) This one is weird… it’s such a common word, but the origin is actually still unknown!
• Dog: (noun. The pet.) Like big, dog also has no clear origin. It appeared in Old English (OE) as docga, replacing OE hund. Most other Indo-European languages have words similar to hund (=> hound) or chien (French), but one can find how dog arrived. The Spanish word for dog (perro) also appeared without a clear origin.

Vocabulary:

• Anachronism: noun. Something located in a time when it couldn’t have existed or occurred. “Everything looked just as it would have in 1776… except for one anachronism, the bright red fire truck.”
• Diaphanous: adjective. Light, delicate, or translucent. “The girl drew the diaphanous veil over her face.”
• Polemical: adjective. Of or involving dispute or controversy. “The polemical essay caused quite a stir in the academic community.”

Have a great weekend!

This is a tricky topic. There are pundits who criticize speech as being riddled with “errors” and “incorrect grammar”. I’m often one of them. We say people are lazy or uneducated if they cannot speak “properly”. But who are we to decide what “proper” is? It used to be “proper” to have sentences with scads of commas, like so:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way…

I cringe. Comma splicing is just one of the many reasons that I cannot stand Dickens. This is just a personal defect – many people love this crazy comma-man; I am not one of them.

So we know that language changes (a lot) over time. Slang terms change, come into popularity, and drift away. Examples: airhead (80s), as if! (90s), far out (70s), groovy (60s), Nowheresville (50s), niftic (40s), the bee’s knees (20s). We might be familiar with these words, but we don’t really use them much anymore.

Let’s get more drastic. Try comparing Old English and Modern English (Beowolf, opening lines):

Hwaet! They are like two different languages. Some words are similar, but it’s kind of like comparing German and English:

• Der alte Mann hat mir heute das Buch gegeben. (The old man has given me the book today.)

Actually, sometimes German and English seem closer than Old English and Modern English do.

I think the most important thing to remember is this (in the words of one of my favorite linguists, John McWhorter):

Language change is not decay.

I had a lot more to say on this, but now I’m beginning to ramble, so I will stop now and continue later. I believe that language change is not always decay, but I do appreciate a good grasp of grammar and proper writing. There’s a difference between beautiful new language conventions and laziness. It’s a hard distinction to make, though. I love ending sentences with prepositions, and I love the Oxford comma (red, white, and blue instead of red, white and blue). (Confession: sometimes I add Oxford commas to books… even library books.)

What language quirks (new or old) do you love or hate?

The Indo-European languages are a family of languages spoken in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. The languages can be broken down into branches, such as: Anatolian, Indo-Iranian (like Iranian), Greek, Italic (Italian, French, etc…), Germanic (German, English, etc…), Armenian, Celtic, Albanian, the extinct Tocharian languages, Baltic, and Slavic.

All of these language groups share a common ancestor: Proto-Indo-European (PIE). PIE was spoken before 2000BC; by 2000BC PIE had broken up into its different branches (though of course, change would still occur – this was just the beginning of diversification and these branches would divide even further).

English is a Germanic language. But we can trace it back all the way to PIE and find links from English to other Indo-European languages around the globe. We don’t technically have records of written “Germanic” or “PIE”, but linguists have made educated guesses at what it might have sounded like. These education guesses are denoted by *.

I researched basic color terms over time – from PIE, to Germanic, to Old English, to English (today’s).

PIE originally had only four color terms: white, black, red, yellow-and-green. The word for yellow (*ghel-) used to be used for both yellow and green.

Germanic expanded its color lexicon to six colors: white, black, red, yellow, green, grey. Some people say this was because of cultural progress and material advances… but a quick comparison to Greek and Latin (both more advanced societies) shows that they stuck with the 4-color scheme – so it probably wasn’t due to this kind of development. Some people say that the distinction between yellow and green was made because of the growing importance of agriculture. This, I could be persuaded of.

Old English stuck with the same 6-color scheme: black, white, red, green, yellow, grey.

This chart comes from Anderson’s book, Folk Taxonomies in Early English. It shows the color terms in each of the 3 languages I mentioned (plus today’s terms).

I do have some more cool facts about color terms, but that’s for part 2! What’s your favorite color word? Here’s a good list if you want some ideas.

My favorite color is purple. As for my favorite color word – I don’t know… Emerald? Azure? Chartreuse? Crimson? Vermillion?