The Linguistics Bunker

Weekly posts on words and where they come from.

[staff]

The internet could change next week, and not in a good way

You may have heard about the efforts in Europe to reform copyright law. The debate has been ongoing in the European Parliament for months. If approved next week, these new regulations would require us to automatically filter and block content that you upload without meaningful consideration of your right to free expression. 

We respect the copyrights and trademarks of others, and we take all reports seriously to ensure that your creative expression is protected. We make this clear in our Community Guidelines. There’s already a legal framework that works and is fair: Today we take down posts and media that contain allegedly infringing content when we receive a valid DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) takedown request. We also provide clear-cut ways for people to fight back if they believe their removed content was not a true violation. These instances are monitored and reported and live in our biannual transparency report. 

The suggestion to use automated filters for issues of copyright is short-sighted at best and harmful at worst. Automated filters are unable to determine whether a use should be considered “fair use” under the law and are unable to determine whether a use is authorized by a license agreement. They are unable to distinguish legitimate parody, satire, or even your own personal pictures that could be matched with similar photographs that have been protected by someone else. We don’t believe that technology should replace human judgment. Tumblr is and always has been a place for creative expression, and these new regulations would only make it harder for you to express yourself with the freedom and clarity you do so now. 

If you access Tumblr from Europe and want to act, you can find more information on saveyourinternet.eu. 

[vaor]

seriously, go to this website. it lets you send a pre-written e-mail to MEPs. non-europeans can do this. 

literally all you have to do is type in your e-mail address and click ‘submit’. 

this is where countries of the EU currently stand. yes, this is real. no, it will not just go away. we need to make every vote count. 

[linguisticsbunker]

Hiatus Annoucement

So, as some of you might have guessed from the lack of posts in the last two months, The Linguistics Bunker is officially on hiatus. I don’t have the time or resources to post every week or even every two weeks if the posts are going to be of decent quality. Therefore, in addition to the hiatus annoucement, I’d like to ask:

Would people be okay with only one post a month if this post were longer and better-researched?

Regardless of the answer, I will be doing my best to get the blog running again in September, when I have access to all my university resources.

Until then, best wishes to everyone!

[linguisticsbunker]

Reblogging for the people who might have missed it

[linguisticsbunker]

Hiatus Annoucement

So, as some of you might have guessed from the lack of posts in the last two months, The Linguistics Bunker is officially on hiatus. I don't have the time or resources to post every week or even every two weeks if the posts are going to be of decent quality. Therefore, in addition to the hiatus annoucement, I'd like to ask:

Would people be okay with only one post a month if this post were longer and better-researched?

Regardless of the answer, I will be doing my best to get the blog running again in September, when I have access to all my university resources.

Until then, best wishes to everyone!

[linguisticsbunker]

Mystery Languages

Not every historical language even made it into the written record. There are plenty of languages that have been dead for centuries, with little or no record of their having ever existed. Often, linguists are left with a few words and a scattering of place names to try and decipher some of a language’s characteristics from. Today, I’m going to go over some of extinct and little-known languages from the Indo-European family tree. 

Our first stop is the Ligurian language, which was spoken in northwest Italy and southeast France roughly between 300 BC and 100 CE. It was probably spoken before that, but these are the rough dates we have records of it from. Most of what we know about Ligurian is from Roman sources and a few reconstructed place names. From this, Xavier Delamarre concludes that the Ligurians spoke a language similar to, but different from the Gaulish and Italic languages spoken by the people around them. He believes the language was Celtic in origin, although this entire argument is based off of two places names and one word, so take it with a grain of salt. However, ancient sources state that the Ligurians, while similar to the Celtic peoples around them, were distinct in some ways, namely their appearance (they were said to be smaller than their neighbors, and apparently many of them had auburn hair. Despite their smaller stature they were also said to be very physically strong and were prized mercenaries.) There is also a modern Ligurian language that is not related to the ancient one, but is spoken in the same area. 

Our next dead friend is the Phrygian language, which was spoken by people who initially lived in the Balkans and later migrated to Anatolia (modern-day Turkey). Several classical sources describe it as being similar to Greek, and the surviving inscriptions in the language use Phoenician and Greek alphabets. Because there are some written records of this language, linguists have been able to determine that it had several noun cases and conjugated verbs for voice and mood in addition to tense, person, and number. We know a fair amount about the Phrygians, especially their music, which influenced early Greek music and led to the development of the Phrygian mode, a type of scale used in quite a lot of the extant ancient music. It was also revamped and used in Medieval European music and is still used today. I can’t really explain it without getting very into theory, but it sounded sort of minor. (Google it if you really want to know.) 

Finally, we’re going to look at the Cimmerian language, from the Caucuses, attested from around the 8th century BC. This language is a good bit older than the other two, and the only evidence of the language has come from two Assyrian inscriptions (that’s right, Assyrian. This is old school.) The language appears to be similar both to early Iranian languages and early Greek languages. The Cimmerians themselves seem to have gotten around the ancient world; they conquered the kingdom of Lydia around the year 650 BC, and sacked the capital, Sardis. (This was apparently a pretty big deal, ancient Greek historians note that it caused concern in the Greek colonies near Lydia. Lydia, in case anyone was wondering, was in Anatolia, which is Turkey.) The Cimmerians may have also conquered the Phrygians at some point, which would make some sense, since Phrygia was also in Anatolia. (Though to be quite honest, everything was in Anatolia to the Greeks, so who knows.) The name Cimmerian is thought by some to have developed into the modern place-name Crimea, which would make some sense, since the Cimmerians were said to come from somewhere near the Black Sea, but no one has quite been able to figure out where. (The number of groups of people said to come from “somewhere around the Black Sea” is pretty staggering. It is one of the least helpful place descriptions possible.) 

[linguisticsbunker]

Eggheads and Edgelords

A few days ago, I was wondering about the origin of a strange word, which led me down a rabbit hole into a strange and wonderful world of etymologies, which I will lay out for you. 

Our journey begins with “yolk”. I was curious as to how this became the word for the yellow part of an egg, and it turns out that yellow is the key. “Yolk” comes from Old English geolca, which is related to the Old English word for “yellow,” geolu. 

This led me to “egg,” which is also a strange-sounding word, and which actually comes from Old Norse. The Old English word was eag, but it became eye in Middle English, only to regain its “g” after influence from Old Norse. Egg has a fair number of idioms associated with it, including the oft-insulting “egghead”, used either to refer to a bald person or to an out-of-touch intellectual. It came into use as early as 1907 in Chicago, but became nationally known in 1952, after a New York Times columnist used it in reference into Adlai Stevens, an American politician running for president. 

Of course, “egg” is also a verb, meaning “to encourage” or “to goad,” which also came from Old Norse. In this case, it came from the word meaning “edge,” which was spelled (and possibly pronounced) the same as the word for “egg”, leading to some confusion. The nouns diverged in English, but the verbs stayed the same. 

Edge is also used in several idioms and compounds, including every middle schooler’s life goal: edgelord. An “edgelord”, if you don’t hang out with fourteen-year-olds, is someone who purposefully posts shocking things online to seem cool. And the word does have a nice ring to it. But just think, all those teenage memesters could have been called “egglords” instead. 

[linguisticsbunker]

Ahoy the blog!

Hello and welcome to a post on the etymologies of greetings.

Hello: While it’s ubiquitous now, “hello” didn’t become the greeting of choice until the late 1800′s. The word itself has no inherent meaning: it’s just a standardized form of general shouting, usually used to get someone’s attention. The idea that “hello” (or alternately “hallo” or “hullo”) was the generic shouting noise might have come from the Middle English verb halouen, which meant “to shout while hunting with hounds.” There is a similar verb in Old High German related to flagging down ferrymen, so this idea might be fairly universal across Germanic languages. 

Hey and Hi: Both “hey” and “hi” seem to be natural expressions of human surprise that have been used throughout the centuries as interjections. Their use as greetings is more recent, developing only in the 20th century. 

Salutations: One almost never hears of a single salutation. Like pants, they seem to exist only in plural. While outdated and amusing these days, it has been recorded as a greeting since the 1530′s, from the Latin verb for “to greet”, salutare.

Ahoy: First recorded in 1751, although it is most likely much older than that, “ahoy” is another standardized form of general shouting used when docking or boarding ships, as in “ahoy the ship!”. Fun Fact: Alexander Graham Bell thought that “ahoy” should be the standard greeting for answering the phone instead of “hello.” 

Welcome: From Old English greeting wilcuma, which was originally a noun meaning “welcome guest.” A wilcuma was literally someone whose coming fulfilled another’s will. 

[linguisticsbunker]

Quick Lesson: Dialect

There has been some confusion in my last post about the use of the word “dialect” to describe Quebecois French. In hindsight, I should have explained that the linguistic definition of dialect is slightly different from the one we use in normal speech. 

Normally, we use dialect to mean anything from different regional accents within the same language, to separate but closely related languages, to varying members of language families. However, in linguistics, a dialect is defined as the following: “a variety of language that signals where a person comes from.” They are usually regional, though sometimes there can be multiple dialects in one region, usually attached to different social classes. Dialects often include differences in syntax (sentence structure), vocabulary, and pronunciation. (Although differences in pronunciation are usually treated as accent, rather than dialect. Of course, an accent can be part of a dialect, but not all accents are their own dialect.) 

By this definition, Quebecois French is a dialect of French, the same way that American English is a dialect of English. (Notice I didn’t say “British English” because there are tons of different dialects of British English too. Similarly, there are dialects of French spoken in France that are not the same as the standardized language, which is also, itself, a dialect, it just happens to be the one that people think is “right.”) I understand how this could be confusing to some people, especially since the word “dialectal” is often used to refer to “uneducated” or “rural” speech in a pejorative manner, and I know that for many Quebecois, who have spent decades fighting for recognition and destigmatization in Canada, it might have seemed like I was trying to denigrate them. Believe me when I tell you that this was not the case; it just so happens that linguistic definitions are not always the same as everyday speech, and I should have been more clear in the original post. 

The definition of dialect in this post is from the Encyclopedia Britannica article on linguistic dialects, and was written by David Crystal, a fairly prominent linguist. You should check out his books if you’re interested in the history of English. 

[linguisticsbunker]

Language Breakdown: Quebecois French

Correction: An earlier version of this post got some things wrong about grammar and pronunciation. They have since been corrected by helpful commentors who actually speak Quebecois French. 

When you go to university in Scotland, you acquire Canadian friends. My Canadian friends are not Francophones (they’re all from British Columbia), but they do occasionally discuss French Canadians, namely that they can’t understand their French. 

Plenty of people do not realize that the French spoken in Canada is not the same as is spoken in France. In fact, people who have learned modern, relatively standard French sometimes struggle to understand Quebecois French, especially if it is being spoken in a casual setting, rather than a formal broadcast or speech. 

This is not going to be a standard language breakdown, because Quebecois French is a dialect, not a completely different language. But we’ll start with some history anyway. 

Before it was part of the glorious British empire, Canada was a French colony, settled by French people. Today, French speakers in Canada are largely concentrated around the east coast, in the provinces of Quebec and New Brunswick, as well as to a lesser extent in Manitoba and Ontario. This is why French speaking people in Canada are often referred to as Quebecois, as is the dialect of French that they speak. Of course, there is not one single dialect of French spoken in Canada, and the language has not been standardized. However, the Quebec dialect is predominant, and I will mostly be talking about it. 

The major differences, other than some vocabulary differences, which are  similar to the number of differences between British and American English, are the use of some archaic particles and sentence structures that haven’t been used in Metropolitan (French) French for a century or so. There are also  differences in pronunciation, especially in the number of long vowels and whether or not the “r” is trilled (although this also varies within France). Also, while Metropolitan French uses the formal “you” vous, it is less common in Quebecois French. 

Throughout history Quebecois French has been stigmatized as a sign of poor education or backwoods-ness. This changed, however, during the Quiet Revolution in the 1960′s and 1970′s, when the province of Quebec secularized its government and created a modern welfare state. This revitalization of the province led to a separatist movement that has attempted to gain independence for Quebec. While none of the referendums have worked, government services, including all school instruction in Quebec, are carried out almost solely in French. 

[linguisticsbunker]

The Flammifer of Westernesse

And now for something completely different. 

Like many people who write about language on the internet for fun, I like weird words. Even more than that, I like archaic words with odd meanings. And today, we’re going to look at the etymology of some interesting archaisms brought to you by J.R.R Tolkien’s Lay of Earendil, a long poem detailing the adventures of the hero Earendil and his wife, Elwing. (I am using this text because it is free online and contains a lot of odd archaisms and I’m on a train at six am, so please forgive me for using what I know. It is a nice train, for anyone who wanted to know, and I have some skyr and a lotus moon cake to eat for breakfast, but I have not had very much sleep.) 

 Panoply: A panoply is a full suit of armor, from the Greek panoplia, from Greek pan, meaning “all”. It was first used in print in the 1570′s. In the Lay of Earendil, this word shows up in the second stanza, referring to Earendil’s armor as he’s being prepared for his quest. 

Habergeon: Another word from the stanza about armor, (yes, there is an entire stanza devoted to armor, welcome to Tolkien,) a habergeon is a chainmail jacket that is shorter than a hauberk, another type of chainmail jacket/shirt. Habergeon comes from French, brought into English by the Normans, and it means “little hauberk.” 

Adamant: Adamant is a word of varying and somewhat unclear definition. In Old English, it was the word for any type of very hard stone, but the Old French word it was borrowed from referred to both diamonds and magnets. The modern word is usually used to refer to something unbreakable, often made of diamond. Interestingly, while the word can be traced back to Ancient Greek “adamas”, it is unclear where it came from, as it is apparently a strange construction for a Greek word. 

Errantry: Errantry is a noun construction of “errant”. Today, “errant” is usually used in the sense of a stray animal or wandering child, but in medieval chivalric romances, an errant knight was a knight that was not in the service of a lord and instead wandered about in search of adventure. Errant comes from two identical French verbs with different meanings, both spelled errer. One meant “to err” and the other meant “to travel, to wander,” and both were combined in the adjective’s original meaning. In the Lay, Earendil is said to “tarry there from errantry” when he reaches the elven city of Tirion, essentially meaning that he stayed there and hung out for a while before continuing on his quest. 

Carcanet: There are very few people who know the word “carcanet” from something other than this poem. It enjoyed a some popularity in the 1500′s, first used in print in 1530, but it has definitely dropped off since. A carcanet is a piece of jewelry, usually a heavily jeweled collar, but sometimes a headband or circlet. It is probably from Middle French carcan, meaning “yoke,” implying something heavy worn around the neck.  

The final word I wanted to include in this post was flammifer, but I think Tolkien may have made it up, because I can’t find it anywhere except for Tolkien-related sources, and the only etymology for it is based solely on the Lay. In any case, a flammifer is an exceptionally fancy, epic lantern. 

[linguisticsbunker]

The Indo-European Family Tree

The Indo-European language family one of the largest (in terms of number of languages, population of speakers, and area covered) and most diverse in the world. Today, I’m going to attempt to give an overview of the Indo-European family tree.

First, a quick introduction to Indo-European languages. All Indo-European languages are descended from a single language, called Proto-Indo-European. It was spoken between the Black and Caspian Seas during the Neolithic Era, and it gradually spread from there to cover almost the entirety of Europe, Central Asia, and India, diversifying into different languages as it did so. There are no written records of Proto-Indo-European; everything linguists know about it comes from reconstructing it from all the living and dead Indo-European languages we have records of. 

Without further ado, the following is all of the branches of the Indo-European family tree, by the date of the first written evidence of them. For some of these languages, this is very late, because they were just not being written down in anything that got preserved. This often happens when a language is spoken by the majority of a population, but not their ruling or religious classes, because the people who speak the language can’t read, and therefore don’t write anything down in it, or if they do, it’s not preserved because they’re not part of the ruling class.

Indo-Iranian: 

This language family includes two main branches, the Indo-Aryan languages, which are mostly spoken in India and Pakistan (as well as Bangladesh and Sri Lanka), and the Iranian languages, which are spoken in and around Iran. The Indo-Iranian family includes Persian, Punjabi, Bengali, Pashto, and Kurdish. (Though Kurdish is usually viewed as a collection of mutually intelligible dialects, rather than a single language.) The most widely spoken Indo-Iranian language is Hindustani, which is considered a single language despite having two different writing systems. In India, it’s called Hindi, and uses a Brahmic script, while in Pakistan, it’s Urdu, and uses the same script as Persian. While some speakers of both languages will argue that they are separate, most linguists say that the major differences between Hindi and Urdu are socio-linguistic and that they are not linguistically distinct enough to be separate languages.

Anatolian: 

The Anatolian languages have all been extinct for roughly the last two thousand years, and some of them well before that. The best known of them is probably the Hittite language (remember those guys from history class and/or the Bible?). It is notable largely for being the oldest known Indo-European language. 

Hellenic:

In modern times, the Hellenic language family is basically just Greek. In Ancient times, Hellenic languages were spoken throughout the Balkans and Anatolia (Turkey), but those languages are largely extinct. The only strong contender for a spot in the Hellenic language family is Tsakonian, which is spoken in the Peloponnese in Greece and is not intelligible to modern Greek speakers, which weakens the traditional argument that it’s a dialect of Greek. Unfortunately, the language is also rapidly dying, so Greek will soon go back to being the only living Hellenic language unless a significant restoration effort starts. 

Italic: 

The current members of the Italic family include the Romance languages, which are Latin and its Iinguistic descendants, (Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, French, and Romanian, as well as several smaller ones like Occitan and Romansch.) However, the Italic family also includes the now-extinct languages spoken on the Italian peninsula before the rise of the Roman empire and the subsequent latinization of the entire peninsula. There is debate about how related the Italic languages were before Latin took over, and therefore the family’s current definition is somewhat awkward because it is the “languages of the Italic peoples,” which may or may not have been linguistically related (there is not a ton of written evidence of most of these languages. Thanks, Roman Empire.) 

Celtic:

In ancient times, Celtic languages were widely spoken across Europe. However, in modern times, they are confined to the edges of Western Europe, having been driven out by Italic and Germanic empires. Currently, the Celtic family consists of Scottish and Irish Gaelic, which are fairly mutually intelligible but are usually considered separate, Welsh, Breton, Cornish, and Manx. Cornish and Manx technically went extinct in 1777 and 1974 respectively, but recent revitalization efforts have led to a small but growing community of speakers for both languages, and a few children being born in Cornwall today are being raised as native speakers of Cornish along with English. All Celtic languages other than Welsh are considered endangered, and most people who speak Celtic languages speak them as a second language or co-first language with English or French. 

Germanic: 

The language family that English belongs to, Germanic consists of several major subfamilies, namely West Germanic and North Germanic. (The East Germanic languages have gone extinct.) West Germanic includes English, German, Dutch, Yiddish, and Afrikaans, while North Germanic includes Icelandic, Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish, but not, as is sometimes assumed by the average person, Finnish, which is not an Indo-European language at all. Here is a very funny little bit of stand up comedy about this:

Armenian:

I’ve already done a post about Armenian, which you can find here. Suffice to say that Armenian comprises its own branch of the Indo-European family, and is a fairly old language with a complicated history. 

Tocharian:

The Tocharian languages, like the Anatolian languages, are all extinct. We know of their existence only from a few fragmentary manuscripts found in what is now northwest China. They are distinct from all other Indo-European languages and very little is known about them. 

Balto-Slavic:

Obviously, this family is composed of two major subgroups, the Baltic languages, which include Latvian and Lithuanian, as well as a number of extinct languages, and the Slavic languages. The Slavic languages are a much larger and more diverse group, including Russian and Ukrainian, Polish, and Bulgarian, to name a few. The Baltic and Slavic languages are grouped together because they came from a single ancestor, known as Proto-Balto-Slavic and they all share several grammatical features and words. A small group of linguists think this is because of the prolonged period of contact between the two language families, rather than a common ancestor, and that they should therefore not be grouped together. 

Albanian: 

The most recently recorded of the Indo-European language families, Albanian, like Armenian and Greek, is the sole language in its branch of the family. However, there is a significant dialect of Albanian, called Arberesh, which is spoken by the Albanian communities in Italy and is fairly different from modern standard Albanian. While it probably does not count as its own language, it is interesting in that much like Quebecois French, it preserves several now archaic features of the language. 

This has been a quick guide to all ten of the substantiated branches of the Indo-European language family. There are, of course, many now-extinct languages and language groups that may or may not have also been part of the Indo-European family, but I thought this was enough to be getting on with.

[linguisticsbunker]

Linguistics Bunker Season Five

Hello, good morning, and welcome to Season Five of the Linguistics Bunker!

We are back and better than ever with the full weight of a university library behind us. Last semester got a little rough, in that I had to stop posting a couple times to do my actual work, and that is probably going to happen again, but for the first few weeks, at least, there should be weekly posts! 

This season will feature a mini-series on translation, the long awaited international names post, and some Arabic and Persian fun. (Sorry, I’m learning them now, so that’s what I’m talking about.) 

I hope you have all had a lovely Christmas/Winter Holidays and are ready for a new year of linguistics fun!

[linguisticsbunker]

Money Money Money

Now that I am no longer in the land of the dollar and not hearing the word every day, it’s occurred to me that it’s a funny sounding word. This inspired a post on the etymologies of the names for American coins. 

Dollar: Dollars are technically a coin, we have dollar coins, even if no one uses them. (Every so often, I’ll get a fifty cent piece or a dollar back in change and it always feels special.) Dollar actually has a long and complicated etymology that starts with German valleys and ends in Spanish pesos. Dollar comes from German Joachimstaler, which was a sort of universal currency of the German states around the time of the American revolution. It was abbreviated into thaler and then “dollar.” British colonists in the Americas used it for Spanish pesos, which were the universal currency of the colonies. After the American revolution, British pounds were out of fashion, and Spanish “dollars” became the national currency. 

Penny: Penny comes from German pfennig. It has been used throughout the history of English and other Germanic languages, but its origin is unknown. Interestingly, “penny” has two plural forms. “Pennies” is used for the coins individually, as in “I have three pennies,” whereas “pence” is used for the coin as a collective. (Although pence is pretty much only used in British English.) 

Dime: Dime actually comes from Latin decimus, meaning “one tenth.” This was distorted into dime in French and made its way into English as a word for “tithe.” In 1786, it was adopted as the name of the US ten cent coin. 

[linguisticsbunker]

The Herb Garden Part 2

The first part of this series was posted almost a year ago, and you can find it here. I know I have promised everyone a post on naming conventions from around the world, but that will have to wait until I am no longer being swamped by work. (It’s that time again, and by that time I mean I have an International Relations essay due on Monday that’s only half done, and a Persian assignment due next week. Can you feel my panic through the internet?) There will hopefully be a brief respite after next week, as all my assignments will be in and there will still be another few weeks before exams start. I’m also hoping to do a series on translation, as the university library has some great resources on it, but that will probably have to wait until February. (I won’t have access to the library during January because of winter break.) But now I’ve been rambling when you came here for herbs. Onwards!

Parsley: Parsley comes from a merger of Old English petersilie with Old French peresil. Both came through Latin from a Greek root, petroselinon, meaning “rock-celery.” In Ancient Greece, parsley was associated with death and was used to decorate tombs, while in Ancient Rome, it was used to freshen breath after meals and was often put on the plate alongside the food, hence its modern use as a decorative garnish. Uprooting parsley is said to bring bad luck, probably because it does not transplant well and trying to move the plant generally kills it. 

Rosemary: Rosemary actually has no affiliation with the name Mary. It comes from Latin rosemarinius, meaning “dew of the sea”. The plant is traditionally associated with good luck and protection and has been used by a variety of cultures as a way of warding off evil or purifying a place. It is also associated with memory, and bathing in rosemary supposedly makes you more memorable. 

Anise: A plant that I have never actually used, mostly because my mother refuses to grow it as she hates the smell, anise is a licorice-y sort of plant that resembles the top of a carrot. Anise comes from Latin anisum. The scent is said to create feelings of lust, though I think this would only happen if you really liked licorice. 

Basil: Basil came to us through French and Latin. It is ultimately from a Greek root meaning “king,” and the plant is believed to have been used in royal perfumes. The plant’s scientific name, basilicum, is actually from the same root as “basilisk” and the plant was believed to be an antidote to the snake’s venom. Basil is said to aid you in both physical journeys and astral projection, if that’s your thing. 

Chamomile: The dictionary I use says “chamomile” is an archaic spelling, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen it spelled without the “h”. To anyone who has read my fruit etymology post, we’re about to re-encounter an old friend. That’s right, chamomile comes from Greek chamaimelon, literally meaning “earth-apple.” Everything is apples. Even things that are not fruit, apparently. Chamomile is known for its calming effects and is often used in “relaxation” teas. 

As always, herb meanings and uses are from witchipedia. If you’re into witchcraft, you should check it out. It seems to have a lot of useful information. (I don’t know how accurate it is, given that all my knowledge of modern witchcraft comes from the occasional wikipedia odyssey or from asking one of my friends who practices.)  

[linguisticsbunker]

Language Breakdown: Armenian

 Somewhere on the long list of countries that most people in the West regularly forget the existence of, you will find Armenia. Which is a shame, because Armenian history is deeply interesting and complex, and the language’s development reflects that. Also, Armenian has its own alphabet, and I’m all about Indo-European languages that have their own alphabets. 

So where to begin? To the surprise of absolutely no one, there is some debate over the origins of Armenian. (If I ever find a linguistic topic about which there is no debate, I will be shocked.) It is definitely Indo-European, but beyond that, linguists are unsure. It is most closely related to the Indo-Iranian languages and Greek, and has a significant number of Greek cognates. (If you are interested in the development of cognates across the Indo-European languages, I recommend the Armenian language wikipedia page.) 

Armenian is an old language: there was an established Armenian language by the second century BC at the latest. (Yes, BC. Compared to Armenian, English is a tiny baby.) Obviously the similarities between this language and Modern Armenian were are fairly few, but this was the start. The oldest example of written Armenian dates from the 400s AD, and it is a translation of the Bible. This translation also uses the Armenian alphabet, which is credited to Mesrop Mashtots, an Armenian theologian, philosopher, linguist, and statesman. (Basically, Mesrop Mashtots was the dude to be in 5th century Armenia.) 

There are differing versions of the evolution of Armenian, but the basic story is this: Classical Armenian was the spoken from the 400′s to around the 1000′s, when it began to develop into Middle Armenian, which was spoken until around the 1700′s. Classical Armenian was also used as a literary language until the 1700′s. However, that is where it gets complicated. During the next century, Armenia would be divided in half; part of it conquered by the Russian empire and part conquered by the Ottoman empire. These empires were not huge fans of each other, meaning that the Armenian communities in each had little contact with each other, and as is usual, the languages spoken in these communities began to diverge. Both communities developed distinctive dialects and literary styles, as well as modernizing the language extensively. Today, the two dialects are recognized as seperate, though they remain mutually intelligible. Both dialects purged their Turkish loanwords following the Armenian genocide, which you can find out about here. 

Linguistically, Armenian has several noun cases, though like other Indo-European languages in the region, (including Modern Persian) it has no grammatical gender. Like English, Armenian uses auxiliary verbs to denote some tenses and conjugates some verbs differently in the negative. The alphabet contains 39 letters, many of which represent sounds not found in English. Interestingly, the letters of the alphabet are also used as numbers: the first 36 letters all have numerical values. The alphabet also uses ligatures; two letters combined into a single character. 

I hope you enjoyed this week’s exploration of Armenian. Comments, suggestions, and corrections are, as always, appreciated. 

[linguisticsbunker]

1000 Followers, My Goodness!!

Thank you so much to everyone who has followed this blog over the past year. I can’t believe I have 1000 people following me! To celebrate, I will be doing... something. Is there anything you’d particularly like to see on the blog? Let me know! As it stands, my current plan is to do name etymologies for people, but if anyone has a more exciting idea, please let me know! 

[linguisticsbunker]

An Announcement

Hey, so recently, I’ve been posting on the weekends, because that’s when I have the most time. I already mentioned that I will be very busy next weekend because of a music festival and will probably miss a post. However, I didn’t realize that the weekend after that is also going to be extremely busy because of a school tradition that involves trying to give first-years alcohol poisoning. Normally this wouldn’t be a problem: I could find time to post something during the week inbetween. However, next week is known as “Week Five” and is the week when all the arts students, including me, have our assignments due. Needless to say, this is a very hectic time. Because of this, the Linguistics Bunker will be pausing in our operations for two weeks while all of this happens, and resuming transmissions sometime after October 24th. 

The ask box is still open, and I will still probably be online from time to time. But there will be no new posts unless something strange and miraculous happens. 

[linguisticsbunker]

Friends, Romans, Countrymen:  Americas Addition

Once again, it is time to learn the origins of some country names. Last time we explored Europe, so today we turn to the Americas, my homeland. 

Brazil: The word brasile has been around since the 1300′s, when it referred to a type of red wood from India used in dye making. The name is possibly related to the French word for embers, since the color of the wood resembled glowing red-orange embers, although this could be a folk etymology. The name came to apply to Brazil in South America because a similar redwood tree was found there. 

Barbados: This island was originally named las barbadas, meaning “bearded” by the Portuguese. This became Anglicized to “barbados” when the British formally made it a colony. The name is probably a reference to the moss hanging from trees around the island. Of course, the true reason for the name could be entirely different. Many place names in the Americas come from now-extinct native languages that were never written down by natives or Europeans, leaving linguists with few clues as to their origins. 

Canada: The true north strong and free derives its name from an Iroquoian word for “village” or “town”. The specific language the name is said to have come from is now extinct, but the story is corroborated by the similarity of Mohawk “kana-ta”, which also means “town.” (For those not raised in the Northeastern part of the Americas, Mohawk is also an Iroquois language, and is still spoken today.)  

Argentina: Argentina’s name comes from a Latinized form of the name of one of its most notable natural features: the Rio de la Plata. In English, this would mean “River of Silver,” and it is from the silver that we get “Argentina”, from the Latin word for “made of silver”, argentinius.