makeshift linguistics blog

gwen, 25, adhd anarchist, leftist linguist. i like phonology, morphology, and how languages change over time. also i have a conlang but it's not very good. my main blog is uiruu.

[gwenguistics]

woah that y-sound post got more notes than i expected haha

i’ll post more things when i think of them, but im not gonna keep a queue or anything on this blog. linguistics (and especially phonology, and especially especially historical phonology, like how that stuff changes over time) is a special interest or hyperfixation or whatever you wanna call it, so thinking about that stuff is my default state lol. i’ll have more things to speculate about and talk about at some point.

(my main blog is @uiruu btw. i might reblog some linguistics posts that i made there over the years here. i also might reblog some linguistics posts that i made on my kpop sideblog @wickymicky because... well... i’m the kind of person who made linguistics posts on a kpop sideblog. i think that about sums me up)

[seralu]

we got random hoes schizoposting about how we‘re all nazis now… can’t say i’m not entertained

[fandomsfuckoff-deactivated20260]

that's a new one, personally , i've been called a misogynist since when i got sexually abused for the first time :3c , but never a nazi.

[gwenguistics]

you are a nazi

[gwenguistics]

what motivated you to go into linguistics? I have a minor in linguistics myself

hmmm i've just always loved languages, it's hard to explain. also damn lol i havent posted on this account in forever, how did you find this

[sewi-li-suwi]

is it just me or are there barely any historical linguistics papers? so so many synchronic analysises but barely anything on how the shit actually comes to exist.

[ukfrislandembassy]

You are correct that in the general linguistic literature there is a massive problem for this, historical linguistics does kinda sit in this research bubble which it struggles to venture out of (but then so does e.g. morphology). There are journals that cater to historical linguistics, e.g. Historical Linguistics, Transactions of the Philological Society, Diachronica, but I unfortunately don't know of any open-access ones so you'll have to hope your institution has access to them (which it probably should but can't be guaranteed).

As for what they actually teach on a historical linguistics course, well yeah it could genuinely just be grammaticalisation and Grimm's law and that's it; that's pretty much what I got at Cambridge. You're probably going somewhere different so you might have better luck (I think Oxford at least does better on these things), but it's typically not something most universities have anyone even seriously specialising in it. This is not helped by how many historical linguists are administratively part of other faculties, e.g. James Clackson the Indo-Europeanist is part of the Classics faculty at Cambridge rather than the Linguistics department, which is in the Modern and Mediaeval Languages Faculty.

[siberian-khatru-72]

This one is open access.

[gwenguistics]

it’s interesting how the /w/ phoneme was so prominent in Proto-Indo-European and its descendant languages, but is actually pretty rare in modern Indo-European languages. or at least it’s rarer for /w/ to have remained /w/ (in other words, Spanish has a /w/ of sorts from sequences of u+vowel, like “huevo”, but the original Latin /w/ became /v/ and then /b/. like the v in huevo. lol).

English is like the only Germanic language that i can think of that kept it as-is. Dutch still distinguishes /w/ from the v that results from a voicing of /f/ in theory, but from what i understand, this isnt even true in every Dutch dialect lol. Romance languages only have /w/ when it comes from /ua/, /ue/, /uo/ etc, despite /w/ being so common in Latin. /v/ is a relatively uncommon sound cross-linguistically EXCEPT for languages that turned /w/ to /v/. /v/ almost always comes from /w/ or /f/ or /b/, and /f/ almost always comes from /p/, so like... idk, anyway i just think it’s interesting. /w/ is one of the most common sounds for a language to have, for a language to lose (by it either turning into v or disappearing completely like in Greek), AND for a language to gain (by lenition of other consonants, vowels in hiatus, etc). /j/ too, though that’s way more stable it seems. yes it does often change to other sounds, like how /j/ in Latin became three different sounds in French, Spanish, and Italian, but the entire Slavic branch kept /j/ pretty heavily. and both Slavic and Italic lost their original /w/s. Italic lost both the original /w/ and /j/ (for the most part, there are obviously exceptions, especially in smaller romance languages), but Slavic kept /j/, Germanic kept /j/ except for English (and probably some other smaller ones) who kept /j/ and /w/... etc. 

interesting.

[tanadrin]

my dream job–and i mean “job” loosely, i would do this for no pay–would be reconstructing protolanguages for families that are pretty well established, but who still need somebody to obsessively crawl through their lexicons and grammars to work out the exact sound correspondences

[siberian-khatru-72]

So, 95% of established language families

[tanadrin]

if this book i’m reading is to be believed, there are actually some serious taxonomic difficulties with basically all the major “established” language families in africa and australia (at least).

also my impression is that lots of indigenous languages in places like the americas and australia just aren’t that well attested, and doing the required work to integrate them into larger theoretical frameworks would involve a lot of field work! hard to get funding for that sort of thing.

[possessivesuffix]

Taxonomy is just hard in general, in some ways harder than the reconstruction of clear bottom nodes. Serious taxonomic difficulties are all over the place even just in Indo-European. Does Tocharian branch second? Is Italo-Celtic real? Is Greco-Armenian? Indo-Slavic? West Iranic? Insular Celtic?

though phonology also gets much harder, once you go beyond “this is a closely knit dialect continuum” or “we present a reconstruction based on 100 basic vocabulary items”; mainly because etymological validity starts being a major problem. Is it tenable to analyze this unaccounted-for syllable as a suffix? Is this a reasonable semantic shift? Is this a loanword from one branch into another? Whoops this etymon was a loanword from a major contact language, do I now need to also learn Arabic / Fula / Mandarin / Tok Pisin / etc. to be sure there aren’t a dozen more of these in my data?

I’d also love to see a review article or database or something of what exactly is the state of reconstruction in various language families. First-pass-done from all main varieties (e.g. Kartvelian), first-pass-done from some varieties (e.g. Dravidian), not done but underway with many partial results known (e.g. Kra-Dai), “done” but not published widely in any form (e.g. North Bougainville), “done” in someone’s largely inaccessible thesis from 1973; not done but readily doable from current data, not done and documentation situation unclear, not done and definitely needs more fieldwork, too fragmentedly attested to be ever well-doable…?

[max1461]

i live in a part of south africa where isiXhosa is the primary language spoken and its the worst because you cant whisper in class because the clicks are so loud the teacher WILL hear you

Oh shit I'd never thought about this. But yeah, it makes sense. Clicks are so sonorous.

[jabalinya-deactivated20230507]

Gonna add this here because relevancy.

(Lowkey this is a working theory towards the origin of the phonemes)

[jabalinya-deactivated20230507]

Here’s the source: Güldemann (2007)

Word of caution this guy has weird big picture ideas of languages in Africa, so you know, read critically.

[max1461]

Thanks!

Actually, I'm curious (if you have the time to answer etc.): what is preferred theory about the origin of clicks? Or maybe a better question is: what is your preferred theory about the restricted geographic distribution of clicks? I've never really read anything about the topic but it fascinates me from afar.

[max1461]

say what u will but i think kortlandt has a point with indo-uralic

I hear conflicting things about Indo-Uralic. My general impression is that it has promise, but I really know very little.

@possessivesuffix, do you have thoughts on Indo-Uralic?

[possessivesuffix]

Sure, maybe it's time I reiterate thoughts on this. Indo-Uralic definitely "has promise": it's got 100+ years of research and everyone on it agrees on a couple handfuls of basic data, the likes of PIE *wódr̥ ~ PU *wetə 'water'; no one has given coherent alternate explanations, "they're loans" doesn't work in several ways; and "they're just accidental" could be right for any individual comparandum, but versions of this generally fail to consider the entire base of data (already because it's scatterd in literature, see below).

If some individual has a point is much more variable. Most people who assert a more detailed theory seem to be able to find a bunch more data for it, but often this can be easily criticized by others pointing out that they're e.g. confused about some well-known loanwords, or have been over-applying one family's morphology or morphophonology to the other (usually Indo-European stuff for Uralic), or have been using unreliable data from one side or the other. For example no, we probably should not think that Uralic *uwa 'flow' segments as *u-wa and contains the zero grade of a root *we- from which 'water' has been derived (or was it that *uwa- is a full grade and *we- is some kind of a zero grade from it?), as long as we don't have reason to think that anything at all is "in zero grade" in Uralic; or that there exist nominal suffixes *-d-, *-tə or *-wa.

Since this has not been a topic particularly in the mainstream since uhh the 1920s, the research is also fairly scattered and most people since then don't seem to know each other's work in good detail (and note that this includes a requirement to trawl thru work on Nostratic for relevant stuff). If I was working on this, I'd start from the side of bibliography to see what "already is" known. Kortlandt has put together some decent arguments that focus on the long-known material, but I'm unsure if this either achieves much further accumulation or later results yet, or how many of the promising-looking bits are his own contribution. And then there's the issue where most work seems to have been from Indo-Europeanists who don't know comparative Uralic very well (K is definitely in this camp) or occasionally also, from Uralicists who don't know comparative Indo-European very well.

There remain in any case also many open questions because (P)IE and (P)U have a large bunch of typological divergences despite being neighboring families. Though it seems to me that this is shrinking the more we learn about Anatolian, which e.g. has basically no prefixes and does have possessive suffixes; or for another intriguing point, Anatolian was recently argued to have evidence for *mel- 'to think', which now compares better with Uralic *mälə 'mind' than classical PIE *men- does. I wouldn't know if there's a connection between these two PIE roots (is *men- maybe from pre-PIE *menl- which is by n-infixation from *mel-?)

I will refrain from starting a mini-bibliography of recent things happening around the hypothesis, but the JIES 43 special issue from 2015 is a good place to start reading for anyone who wants some handle on details.

[ululem]

There is a lot to reply to. I see lots of questionable assumptions.

"Anatolian, which e.g. has basically no prefixes " But the Indo-Anatolian proto-language it derived from did have adpositions as prefixes. Like we see e.g. in Hittite pa-izzi 'to pass', pe-ḫar(k)zi 'to hold ready', pe-iezzi 'to send', pe-dai 'to take somewhere', u-ššiezi 'to draw open', ú-dai 'to bring' etc.

"Anatolian was recently argued to have evidence for *mel- 'to think', which now compares better with Uralic *mälə 'mind'" With 'recently', do you mean 2008 in Kloekhorst's Etymological Dictionary (page 545-546)? There is also Greek mélō 'to care about'.

"over-applying one family's morphology or morphophonology to the other (usually Indo-European stuff for Uralic)" Why would the parent language of Indo-European and Uralic have none of IE's weird morphophonology? Indo-European has a very early attestation, millennia earlier than Uralic. All things being equal it should better reflect the older state of affairs. And leveling out this morphophonology is the natural development. There is no modern IE language where ablaut, nasal presents, s-mobile or IE style reduplication is still productive. And with examples like PU *lämpi 'warmth' ~ PIE leh₂p 'to glow', PU *wäntV 'to look' ~ PIE *weid 'to see', PU *jäŋɣi 'ice' ~ PIE *h₁i̯eg 'to freeze'. PU *śaŋka 'to sting, to stick' ~ PIE *stegʰ 'to stick' it is clear to me that assumption is probably invalid.

"confused about some well-known loanwords" The problem with loan etymologies is that they have been overused by Uralicists and there is a lot of junk out there. Some even say that the likes of nimi 'name', weti 'water, etc. are Indo-European loans. And then fault anyone calling it Indo-Uralic inheritance for 'being confused about well-known loanwords'. While we are at it, let's call the pronouns loans too, like Vovin tried to do for Altaic. The only way to go about it is to establish solid sound correspondences between Indo-European and Uralic. And then anything that behaves according to those sound correspondences and is reasonably regular in both IE and Uralic is potential Indo-Uralic inheritance. Even if someone once called it a loanword.

[siberian-khatru-72]

There is no modern IE language where ablaut, nasal presents, s-mobile or IE style reduplication is still productive.

Ablaut and nasal presents are very much alive in Lithuanian, even if not “productive” in the sense “applied to recent loans”.

On the other hand, I doubt that there is a modern IE language which has no fossilized trace of ablaut. E.g., Modern Irish has nom. sg. bean ‘woman’, gen. sg. mná, gen. pl. ban - and this in a language which has gone through several periods of severe phonological and morphological change.

Indo-European has a very early attestation, millennia earlier than Uralic.

Proto-Uralic reconstruction is not perfect (neither is PIE) but it is sufficiently reliable to tell that it did not have traces of IE-like morphophonology. Proto-Uralic is not much younger than PIE, and certainly older that earliest attested IE languages.

[ululem]

"Proto-Uralic reconstruction is not perfect (neither is PIE) but it is sufficiently reliable to tell that it did not have traces of IE-like morphophonology."

That is just not true. The reconstruction does not tell that. A more truthful way of stating it is that there is no need to assume IE like morphophonology. For example, there are a lot of unexplained vowel alternations in Uralic. If you a priori exclude ablaut as a possible explanation, that is a choice, an assumption you make beforehand. But it certainly is not a result.

[siberian-khatru-72]

No, even if by “a lot of unexplained vowel alternations in Uralic” you mean genuine alternations (within one language), and not just unexplained sound correspondences (between several languages). There is indeed a lot of such alternations, e.g., in Udmurt, and in some other Uralic languages. But what we need to advance Proto-Uralic ablaut as a possible explanation are alternations reconstructable for Proto-Uralic. The best example I know is *pala- ‘to burn (intr.)’ ~ *poltta- ‘to burn (tr.)’, but the causative here is limited to West Uralic and the basic verb did not even mean ‘burn’ in Proto-Uralic, it meant ‘to devour’ and was transitive.

[possessivesuffix]

As a general historiographical note, after the work of Setälä thru Steinitz, we're kind of instinctively wary in Uralic studies about reconstructing proto-alternations from not very substantial evidence… not because it's impossible for evidence to be worn thin, but because it's by now clear that this approach allows too many different possibilities, no way to constrain choices between them, and sidelines attempts to find conditional factors for alternations.

From this angle, I even think the notion of Indo-European "ablaut" is itself probably underspecified. If a language only has two proper vowels *e *o, asserting "*e ~ *o ~ zero" will refer to literally any possible vowel alternation that may happen for any reason in any environment. This is not a definition that can be consistently applied to any other language variety, and indeed everyone recognizes that secondarily arising umlaut or metaphony processes in IE languages are not ablaut. Within IE, we can continue to posit some lexical instances of vowel alternation as "ablaut" if and only if we can etymologize them as continuing PIE ablaut. This holds even if they're not synchronically distinguishable from other vowel alternations. English /ɪ/ ~ /oʊ/ "is ablaut" in ridden ~ rode (was ablaut already in PG *ridanaz ~ *raid), but "is umlaut" in gild ~ gold (is secondary from PG *guldijan- ~ gulθan).

Looking outside IE, I think we'd also need a similar level of evidence to claim something as "being ablaut" historically and not just descriptively. If we had distinct Uralic cognates for both nom.sg. *wod-r̥ and gen.sg. *wed-n̥-s, then sure, that would seem to be ablaut; but if you we find some vowel alternation, for some unknown reason, in entirely different lexemes — or even in partly same lexemes but in completely different parts of the paradigm or derivation tree — that's not going to be sound grounds to infer a connection.

And then "ablaut", which has no clear conditioning and applies in all sorts of places, seems to be itself most likely similarly heterogeneous and to represent multiple processes. Especially since it's three grades and not two, so at minimum it has to have two origins: one process that yilded *e ~ *o and another that yilded *e ~ zero (and maybe, though not by absolute requirement, *o ~ zero)

Beyond ablaut, it's then of course impossible for Uralic to have a cognate process or even any kind of an especially convincing trace of s-mobile or root zero-grades, when Proto-Uralic (or even most branch protolanguages) does not even have any stem-initial consonant clusters. A similar argument goes I think for morphological mismatches: PU only seems to have had agglutinative TAM marking, so finding any cognate for PIE perfect reduplication or present tense nasal infixation looks very unlikely on those grounds. (There is clearly room to reconstruct PU verb inflection in more detail though.)

On a very broad level I'd suggest that familiarity especially with IE does not prepare people to understand well the evolutionary trends of morphophonology in languages with more agglutinative morphology. There are relicts of old processes all around for sure, but they're by and far relicts of minor juncture effects, where the originating sound changes will likely remain broadly identifiable; mostly not relicts of fully morphologized mutation systems that completely disappeared.

[jabalinya-deactivated20230507]

I’d bet money that Cushitic is probably the branch most relevant to Proto-Afroasiatic and it’s just being slept on because too many people have boners over Classical Arabic and Biblical Hebrew.

[jabalinya-deactivated20230507]

Let me add some meat to the bones here:

Cushitic is old. And by old I mean, old. There’s reason to believe Cushitic was already diversified similar to what we see now as far back as the early 2nd millennium BC, which is wild. That’s just as far as Beja is concerned—which is distant enough from the other languages that Robert Hetzron arguably went to the grave arguing it was it’s own branch of Afroasiatic. There’s also indirect evidence of language spread as well, Omo-Tana within Lowland East was spread far and early enough that it was its speakers who likely adopted pastoralism from peoples journeying over from Southern Arabia; it’s hard to tell. And then you have the Savannah Pastoral Neolithic culture which is present in Tanzania around 1,300 BC, and seems to be undoubtedly related to speakers of South Cushitic—again another rather distant branch of Cushitic. I’ve had a person who works with the Highland East branch tell me that she has a hard time seeing how South Cushitic is related to the rest of Cushitic because of its divergence.

You don’t have any other branch of Afroasiatic where across the board people are like “this is old”.

[ichigo-kuriimu]

the japanese “-ne?” particle and the british slang term “innit” serve the same function

[ichigo-kuriimu]

Standard English: It’s cold, isn’t it?

Japanese: Samui desu ne?

British: It’s fuckin’ freezin’, innit?

[ichigo-kuriimu]

i have to do everything around here

[notahorseindisguise]

i hate this cause i did japanese for like a year and this explains the use of the -ne particle WAYYYY better than my teachers ever did. it took me ages to comprehend what this post makes abundantly clear.

my teachers: its like a, a little rise at the end of a sentence, to show that you are seeking a response, while not warranting the -ka particle which would make it a proper question.

me: ok. i guess i get that??

this post: its like saying “innit?” 

me: oh. oh no.

[wind-on-the-panes-deactivated20]

fun fact: afaik, "-ne" was inherited from the Portuguese settlers/priests that stayed in Japan in the 16th century. It comes from "né?", which the contraction of "não é?", "isn't it?".

It's LITERALLY "innit".

[twofingerswhiskey]

oh so like "eh" in canadian

[the-last-teabender]

*un-Babels your Tower*

[eldritch-bisexual]

IT CAME FROM PORTUGUESE??? Né is such a... necessary noise xD

[uiruu]

it did not, no. that person was 100% wrong. every time i see this post, it is without correction. but no, obviously, Japanese did not borrow a fundamental grammatical particle from Portuguese

[protoindoeuropean]

What's your position on *a?

pretty agnostic

when it's required in the roots of content words (nominals, verbs), that's not really that problematic, even if it is unusual – late PIE did have an *[a] in any case as a consequence of laryngeal colouring, which then became phonemic (that's how *tau̯ros 'bull' was borrowed into PIE with an *a). i don't think forcing a laryngeal explanation is the best way to go about solving the presence of a "primary" *a, not least because it often opens up new problems (e. g. *sh₂el- instead of *sal- 'salt' is viable, but *nh₂es- instead of *nas- 'nose' is not, because the syllabification would be *n̥h₂es- with a syllabic nasal), though as shown it can work in some cases. even less economical is positing a whole nother laryngeal (*h₄)

it's more problematic when it seems to be required in morphology, particles, pronouns, as in the thematic ablative *-o-ad > *-ād (perhaps *-oh₁-ad from the instrumental + particle *ad, but almost certainly not *-o-h₂ed or *oh₁-h₂ed, because that would be visible in Hittite; required by Lith. -o from PBSl. *-ā and not *-ō which would've given Lith. -uo) because borrowing doesn't work as well there. late creation after laryngeal-coloured *a became phonemic is still possible imo (the issue here is whether "primary" *a and laryngeal-coloured allophonic *[a] are the same – mostly based on the fact that there's indication that *o and laryngeal-coloured *[o] were not the same. but i don't think that's that relevant because a primary, non-laryngeal *o clearly exists throughout the proto-language which canmot be said for "primary" *a)

[gwenguistics]

is there a difference between "someone" and "somebody"? there isn't, right? you might use them in different set phrases and maybe different contexts, or just to alternate between the two so you aren't saying "someone" too many times in a row, but like... there's no fundamental difference in meaning right? i wonder why there's only one "something" though. "somewhat" exists but it's an adverb lol

[supplimental]

british podcasts be like "rate and review us on iChunes"

[supplimental]

every british person on this post trying to roast me is just going "american podcasts be like [pronounces it correctly]"

[uiruu]

okay so here’s the explanation of why this happens

tune is a loanword from french, related to the word “tone”. idk how the o became a u, but that’s not important really. it’s the same deal as tube and tumor, it starts with the sound ty- in british english (and others), and the sound t- in american english. so, in american english, that y-sound was lost after alveolar consonants (t, d, n, l, r, s, z, and also probably th?). that’s why british people pronounce “new” like “nyoo” while americans say “noo”, that’s why british people pronounce “duty” like “dyooti” while americans say “dooti”, etc. so in that sense, “tyoon” is actually the original pronunciation of that word as far as english goes, anyway. pronouncing “u” as “yoo” comes from an approximation of the french “u” sound, which is made by saying the sound “ee” but with your lips rounded. english didnt have that sound, so it unpacked it into having an ee-like semivowel (y) glide into a rounded vowel (oo). 

pronouncing words like “tube” as “toob” is closer to their original pronunciation in latin, but that’s not why americans pronounce it that way. we know that this is a case of a y-sound being lost instead of the original latin pronunciation being retained because of words like “cube”, “pure”, “mute”, “unity”, etc. those all still have the y-sound that comes from how they were borrowed into english, instead of the plain u-sound that would come directly from latin. 

so, yeah, in a sense, “tune” was originally tyoon (and modern dialects have merged the t and the y into a ch sound since that’s an easier pronunciation and a very natural progression for those sounds that happens in countless, countless languages). but does that make it more correct? no lol, just like how “toon” isnt more correct. they’re both correct for their respective dialects.

correcting one and not the other doesnt make sense, because neither have any more authority than the other. there is no “correct” way to speak. imagine if a french person said “pur”, with that rounded “ee” sound in the vowel, with that odd french r-sound, and a spanish person came and said “um actually it’s pronounced ‘puro’”, with a plain oo-sound and an o at the end. which of them is right? “puro” is certainly not as far from latin “purus” as the french “pur” is, but does that make it more correct? no, lol, they’re two different languages that merely share a common ancestor (latin). likewise, which is correct between “toon” and “tyoon/choon”? neither, they’re two different dialects that merely share a common ancestor (english before general americal split off from it)

and as for people in the notes saying “um america made itunes, they get to name it” lol who cares what apple says

[learnoutlive]

http://bit.ly/305Y3X8

[thatswhywelovegermany]

verschlimmern = to make worse

verbessern = to improve

verschlimmbessern = to disimprove

[blabla2024-1-deactivated2024011]

ok wait… what about “kaputtreparieren” ?

[thatswhywelovegermany]

kaputt = broken

reparieren = to repair

kaputtreparieren = to completely destroy something that was only slightly damaged in a failed attempt to fix it

[mytholo9y-deactivated20230715]

Dutch is madness

[gwenguistics]

this is not dutch

[radicarian]

it is past time we jettisoned the useless false dichotomy of introversion vs. extroversion and just accepted that everybody has a minimum amount of social interaction, failing which, they get really weird. and everybody has a maximum amount of social interaction, exceeding which, they get really weird. these levels are different for everyone, for a variety of reasons, and have no moral dimension. and that is all.

[mjalti]

why would you come to this club and just shoot Myers & Briggs like this

[caffeinewitchcraft]

IMO, it’s healthier to conceptualize it this way. So instead of being like “why am I being so weird? I’m an introvert, I like being alone!” you say, “Ah, I must be supergluing googly eyes to my bathroom faucet because I haven’t met my minimum threshold of social interaction and I’m trying to fill that void with these tiny pieces of plastic. Maybe I should invite someone over for dinner. They sure will be surprised by all these eyes watching them while they poop.”

[uiruu]

yeah thats fair i suppose, but cant we just use introversion and extroversion as shorthands for people on opposite edges of that spectrum? not every word has to have a specific scientific definition with defined limits, some things can be vague and general and only exist as helpful references that we understand the gist of. not everything has to be exact. like, 14 degrees is warmer than 2 degrees… but wayyy colder than 70 degrees. hot and cold are relative not specific. intro- and extroverted can be the same way 

[uiruu]

i love when words change meaning over time because they become associated with stuff thats kinda related, but not originally covered by the word. 

like, for example, “manure” didn’t originally mean cow shit, it comes from same old french word that “maneuver” does, which comes from the latin roots “manu-” and “operare”, so it literally just means “to work with your hands”. “manure” didnt mean the cow shit itself, it meant the act of doing farm labor, including spreading fertilizer and tending to crops and stuff like that by hand. in english, it originally came in as a verb. you would go manure the fields or whatever lmao. so like naturally it came to mean the fertilizer itself eventually. 

similarly, “chaos” didn’t mean like wild, unpredictable randomness, it referred to the big empty void of nothingness that existed before the gods created the world in greek mythology. it literally comes from the greek for “yawning”, cause its a big void. but “chaos” eventually started to mean like the absense of form and rules and stuff like that, and then eventually the meaning it has today. but yeah, it didnt originally mean “too much stuff happening”, it originally meant “nothing at all”

[gwenguistics]

it makes a bit of sense why Greek has a separate letter for “ks”, because in Greek you can actually start words with that consonant cluster (and pronounce it as such. xylophone does start with ks- in Greek), but why did Latin have a letter for that? Latin had a lot of clusters of /ks/ (or cs in a Latin alphabet that doesnt include x), but never at the start of a word unless it was borrowed from Greek. the only reason really is that the use of “x” in Latin is because the alphabet was borrowed from/derived from Greek, and so “ks” was spelled with “x”. but... they borrowed it wrong, lol. Latin “x” is derived from the shape of Greek chi, χ, not Greek xi/ksi, ξ. x should have been used for “ch” in borrowings from Greek, in words like “character” and “chimera” and such. the Latin x should have been more like a squiggly ξ if they wanted to have a letter to represent ks lol. Latin x even comes at the place in the alphabet that Greek chi does, at the end, not where Greek xi does, between n and o. though that may just reflect a relatively late addition to the Latin alphabet, as obviously y and z (two more letters derived from Greek directly) come after x in Latin, and not where their corresponding Greek letters do (y would be before x, and z would be all the way at the beginning, after e)

and what’s weird is that Latin has plenty of clusters of “ps” too, like in words like “princeps” and “ipso facto” or whatever, and yet Latin doesnt borrow the Greek psi ψ, which would make just as much sense for Latin to have as x/ks does... 

neither of them have a letter for ts to complete a trio with letters for ks and ps, but then again neither of those two languages had ts clusters in their classical periods anyway. though both developed or borrowed words with ts in them much later. 

but also, why have a separate letter for ks and ps at all? they werent treated as single phonemes, even in Greek, they were treated as clusters that they just simply wrote with one letter. and the letters arent ligatures of the letters for the two sounds theyre composed of either, theyre unique letters that, apparently we’re not sure of the origin of. I actually didnt know that until i was researching things while writing this post, because i know most Greek letters are derived from Phoenician and are tied to other Semitic language letters, but apparently Greek ξ and ψ’s origins are unclear? That just makes it even weirder that they have letters for those sets of sounds. clusters like “st” or “nt” or “pr” occur way more often than “ks” and “ps”, yet those dont have dedicated letters.... Latin did have a dedicated letter for /kw/, Q, but that actually does make sense, as that was treated as a single phoneme, not a consonant cluster. it doesnt make much sense for English, which treats Q as a combination of K+W, but Latin treated it as one sound, /kʷ/. so they get a pass for that one, haha.

anyway, i’m just thinking out loud here, sorry lol