Hello, good people! We heard your cries of despair yesterday, when the Fun Etymology failed to appear. But fear not! We haven’t forgotten about you. We only have horrid social media management skills.
Yesterday’s word was “person”!
This very common word might seem boring, but its etymological meaning is very intriguing (and, dare I say, philosophically stimulating), and its roots sink into one of the most mysterious languages of Europe.
The word “person”, like so many other words, comes to English through Old French from Ancient Rome, specifically from Latin “persōna”, which originally meant “exterior appearance, face”. Where the Latin word comes from, though, is the really interesting part.
One etymology of that word is per (through) + a form of the verb sonare (to sound, make noise). So “that through which you make noise”. This would make sense, except that nobody has been able to make sense of the long ō in persōna, which by all accounts shouldn’t be there.
A far more intriguing etymology is that the word is ultimately a loanword from the Etruscan “phersu”, meaning “mask”.
Etruscan was the language of the greatest civilisation extant in Italy before the arrival of the Romans, and it was still spoken during the time of the Roman Empire. It is not related to any other known language, and unfortunately we know very little about it. The last known speaker, Emperor Claudius, is said to have written a grammar and even a dictionary, but sadly these were lost to us. The Etruscans were great architects and possessed a vast and famous culture. They are thought to have brought the alphabet to Rome and even to the Vikings!
So is a person just a mask? Do we really show our true selves to others? Some questions to ponder.
Hello splendid followers! It’s Tuesday and it’s time for our usual Fun Etymology! Today is not only Tuesday but also May Day, the last offspring of a long tradition of Spring festivals in Europe. But you might have wondered one thing: why do aeroplane pilots scream the name of this particular occurrence when they are in distress?
Well, unsurprisingly, it turns out that the emergency signal “mayday” has absolutely zilch to do with the festival. What it is is an English interpretation (almost certainly influenced by the name of the day) of the French phrase “m’aider”, itself an abbreviated form of “venez m’aider”, i.e. “come help me!”
Feel free to quote this lovely bit of trivia to the pilot next time you’re involved in an emergency landing!*
*Please don’t bother the pilot during an emergency landing. THAT’S A REALLY BAD IDEA.
If you’ve been following us at the HLC, and especially our Fun Etymologies every Tuesday, you will have noticed that we often reference old languages: the Old English of Beowulf[1], the Latin of Cicero and Seneca, the Ancient Greek of Homer, and in the future (spoiler alert!), even the Classical Chinese of Confucius, the Babylonian of Hammurabi, or the Egyptian of Ramses. These languages all have extensive written records, which allows us to know them pretty much as if they were still spoken today, with maybe a few little doubts here and there for the older ones[2].
Egyptians might have had a bit TOO great of a passion for writing, if you catch my drift
But occasionally, you’ve seen us reference much, much older languages: one in particular stands out, and it’s called Proto-Indo-European (often shortened to PIE). If you’ve read our post on language families, you’re probably wearily familiar with it by now. However, here’s the problem: the language is 10,000 years old! And writing was invented “just” 5,000 years ago, nowhere near where PIE was spoken.So, you may be asking, how the heck do we know what that language looked like, or if it even existed at all? And what do all those asterisks (as in *ekwom or *wlna) I see on the Fun Etymologies each week mean? Well, buckle up, dear readers, because the HLC will finally reveal it all: the dark magic that makes Historical Linguistics work. It’s time to take a look at…
The Comparative Method of Linguistic Reconstruction
“Linguistic history is basically the darkest of the dark arts, the only means to conjure up the ghosts of vanished centuries.”
-Cola Minis, 1952
If we historical linguists had to go only by written records, we would be wading in shallow waters indeed: the oldest known written language, Sumerian, is only just about 5,000 years old.
The oldest joke we know of is in Sumerian. It’s a fart joke. Humanity never changes.
Wait, “only just”?? Well, consider that modern humans are at least 300,000 years old, and that some theories put the origins of language closer to a million years ago. You could fit the whole of history from the Sumerians to us 200 times in that and still have time to spare!
So, while writing is usually thought of as one of the oldest things we have, it is actually a pretty recent invention in the grand scheme of things. For centuries, it was just taken for granted that language just appeared out of nowhere a few millennia in the past, usually as a gift from some god or other: in Chinese mythology, the invention of language was attributed to an ancient god-king named Fuxi (approximately pronounced “foo-shee”), while in Europe it was pretty much considered obvious that ancient Hebrew was the first language of humankind, and that the proliferation of languages in the world was explained by the biblical story of the Tower of Babel.
Imagine your surprise when the guy who was supposed to pass you the trowel suddenly started speaking Vietnamese
This (and pretty much everything else) changed during the 18th century, with the dawn of the Age of Enlightenment. During this age of bold exploration (and less savoury things done to the people found in the newly “discovered” regions), scholars started to notice something curious: wholly different languages presented interesting similarities with one another and, crucially, could be grouped together based on these similarities. If all the different languages of Earth had truly been created out of nothing on the same day, you would not expect to see such patterns at all.
In what is widely considered to be the founding document of historical linguistics, Sir William Jones, an English scholar living in India in 1786, writes:
“The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of the verbs and in the forms of the grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists […]”
That source is, of course, PIE. But, again, how can we guess what that language sounded like? People at the time were too busy herding sheep and domesticating horses to worry about paltry stuff like writing.
Enter Jacob Grimm[3] and his Danish colleague Rasmus Rask. They noticed that the similarities between their native German and Danish languages, and other close languages (what we call the Germanic family today), were not only evident, but predictable: if you know how a certain word sounds in one language, you can predict with a reasonable degree of accuracy how its equivalent (or cognate) sounds in another. But their truly revolutionary discovery was that if you carefully compared these changes, you could make an educated guess as to what the sounds and grammar of their common ancestor language were. That’s because the changes that happen to a language over time are mostly regular and predictable. Think how lucky that is! If sounds in a language changed on a random basis, we would have no way of even guessing what any language before Sumerian looked like!
More like HANDSOME and Gretel, amirite?
This was the birth of the comparative method of linguistic reconstruction (simply known as “the comparative method” to friends), the heart of historical linguistics and probably the linguistic equivalent of Newton’s laws of motion or Darwin’s theory of evolution when it comes to world-changing power.
Here, in brief, is how it works:
How the magic happens
So, do we just look at a couple of different languages and guess what their ancestor looked like? Well, it’s a bit more complicated than that. A lot more, in fact.
Not to rain on everyone’s parade before we even begin, but the comparative method is a long, difficult and extremely tedious process, which involves comparing thousands upon thousands of items and keeping reams of notes that would make the Burj Khalifa look like a molehill if stacked on top of each other.
The Burj Khalifa, for reference
What you need to do to reconstruct your very own proto-language is this:
Take a sample of languages you’re reasonably sure are related, the larger the better. The more languages you have in your sample, the more accurate your reconstruction will be, since you might find out features which only a few languages (or even only one!) have retained, but which have disappeared in the others.
Find out which sounds correspond to which in each language. If you do this with a Romance language and a Germanic one, you’ll find that Germanic “f” sounds pretty reliably correspond to Romance “p” sounds, for example (for instance, in the cognate couple padre and father). When you find a correspondance, it usually means that there is an ancestral sound underlying it.
Reconstruct the ancestral sound. This is the trickiest part: there are a few rules which we linguists follow to get an accurate reconstruction. For example, if most languages in a sample have one sound rather than another, it’s more probable that that is the ancestral sound. Another criterion is that certain sound changes usually happen more frequently than others cross-linguistically (across many languages), and are therefore more probable . For example, /p/ becoming /f/ is far more likely than /f/ becoming /p/, for reasons I won’t get into here. That means that in our padre/father pair above, it’s more likely that “p” is the ancestral sound (and it is! The PIE root is *ph2tér[4]) Finally, between two proposed ancestral sounds, the one whose evolution requires the least number of steps is usually the more likely one.
Check that your result is plausible. Is it in accordance with what is generally known about the phonetics and phonology of the language family you’re studying? Does it present some very bizarre or unlikely sounds or phonotactics? Be sure to account for all instances of borrowing, coincidences and scary German-named stuff like Sprachbunds[5]. If you’ve done all that, congratulations! You have an educated guess of what some proto-language might have sounded like! Now submit it to a few journals and see it taken down by three different people, together with your self-esteem.[6]But how do we know this process works? What if we’re just inventing a language which just so happens to look similar to all the languages we have in our sample, but which has nothing to do with what any hypothetical ancestor language of theirs would have looked like?
Well, the first linguists asked these very same questions, and did a simple experiment, which you can do at home yourself[7]: they took many of the modern Romance languages, pooled them together, and tried the method on them. The result was a very good approximation of Vulgar Latin.
Well, it works up to a certain point. See, while the comparative method is powerful, it has its limits. Notice how in the paragraph above I specified that it yielded a very good approximation of Vulgar Latin. You see, sometimes some features of a language get lost in all of its descendants, and there’s no way for us linguists to know they even existed! One example of this is the final consonant sounds in Classical Latin (for example, the -us and -um endings, as in “lupus” and “curriculum”), which were lost in all the modern Romance languages, and are therefore very difficult to reconstruct[8]. What this means is that the further back in time you go the less precise your guess becomes, until you’re at a level of guesswork so high it’s effectively indistinguishable from pulling random sounds out of a bag (i.e. utterly useless). That’s why, to our eternal disappointment, we can’t use the comparative method to go back indefinitely in the history of language[9].
When you use the comparative method, you must always keep in mind that what you end up with is not 100% mathematical truth, but just an approximation, sometimes a very crude one. That’s what all the asterisks are for: in historical linguistics, an asterisk before a word basically means that the word is reconstructed, and that it should therefore be taken with a pinch of salt[10].
The End
And so, now you know how we historical linguists work our spells of time travel and find out what the languages of bronze age people sounded like. It’s tedious work, and very frustrating, but the results are well worth the suffering and the toxic-level intake of caffeine necessary to carry it out. The beauty of all this is that it doesn’t only work with sounds: it has been applied to morphology as well, and in recent years we’ve finally been getting the knack of how to apply it to syntax as well! Isn’t that exciting?
It certainly is for us.
Stay tuned for next week, when we’ll dive into the law that started it all: Grimm’s law!
P.S. Remember that Fun Etymology we did on the word “bear”? Yeah, “Beowulf” is another of those non-god-angering Germanic taboo names for bear! It literally means “bee-wolf”. ↑
Or even some big ones: we know very little about how Egyptian vowels were pronounced and where to put them in words, for example. ↑
Yes, the same guy who wrote the fairy tale books, together with his brother. ↑
I won’t explain the “h2” thing, because that opens a whole other can of worms we haven’t time to dive into here. ↑
And it doesn’t involve any explosives or dangerous substances, only long, sleepless nights and the potential for soul-crushing boredom. Hooray! ↑
I don’t say “impossible”, because in some cases a sound lost in all descendant languages can be reconstructed thanks to its influence on neighbouring sounds, or (as in the case of Latin) by comparing with different branches of the family. But this is, like, super advanced über-linguistics. ↑
Which would instantly solve a lot of problems, believe me. ↑
Historical linguistics is an exception here. In most other fields of linguistics, the asterisk means “whatever follows is grammatically impossible”. ↑
Hello everyone! It’s Tuesday again and that means another Fun Etymology fresh out of the oven!
Today’s word is “explode”.
This one is another fun example of how the meaning of a word can change drastically over the course of history. “Explode” is another of the many words that come to English from Latin via Old French, and its original form “explodere” comes from the language of Roman theatre.
The word, formed of the two parts “ex-” (‘out’) and “-plaudere” (‘to clap or make noise’, with the ‘au’ diphthong reduced to ‘o’), literally meant “to chase a bad actor out of a theatre by making noise”. From there, it was borrowed into English in the 1500s with the meaning “to reject with scorn, chase away”, then “to expel with force”, and finally with the modern meaning of violent shattering or combustion.
So next time you are the unwilling witness of a very bad play, remember that you always have the option of exploding the actors out of the stage!
Tuesday has arrived, followers, and that can only mean one thing: Fun Etymology!
Today’s word is “zero”.
The concept attached to this little word is one we take for granted today, but it revolutionised mathematics and changed history forever. The idea of “nothing” being a number seems intuitive today, but for millennia nobody ever thought of it, until the idea came to someone in Gupta dynasty India. From there, it exploded, and it made possible kinds of calculation previously undreamed of. Mathematics would not see such a revolution again until the invention of calculus in the 1600s.
The word itself comes to English from Arabic ‘sifr’, through Latin ‘zephirum’, then Italian ‘zero’ and French ‘zero’ (probably abbreviations born to differentiate the new word from the already existing word ‘Zephyr’, the name of a wind). The Arabic word was itself a translation of the Sanskrit ‘sunyam’, meaning ’emptiness, desert’, and is also the source of English ‘cipher’ or ‘cypher’.
Hey guys! The weekly circle has come full round again and here we are on another Tuesday with another Fun Etymology!
Today’s word is “manage”, and its derivation, “manager”.
Both these words appeared in the English language around the 1560s, and are especially close to me because they’re loanwords from my native language, Italian!
They come from the Italian verb “maneggiare”, a derivation of the noun “mano”, meaning “hand”. They’re exactly parallel in derivation and meaning to the English pair “hand” and “handle”.
Originally, the verb “maneggiare” meant “to handle horses” (in Italian a horse stable is still called a “maneggio” today), and, like so many Romance loanwords, it came to English through the French “manège”, where its meaning was quickly extended from “handle horses” to “handle affairs or people”.
So next time you speak to your manager at work, remember that their job title etymologically means “horse handler”. Now that’s not very flattering towards employees, is it?
Every linguist on the planet knows and dreads this question, known simply as The Question™. The fact that it’s the first question most people ask when hearing of a linguist’s occupation certainly doesn’t help.
Right now you’re probably thinking “Give me a break, Riccardo. It’s quite a natural question to ask when you learn someone works with languages, isn’t it?”
Well, yes. Yes it is a very natural question. The problem is that it springs from a very common misunderstanding of a linguist’s job, and, to make things worse, it’s one of the most difficult questions to answer for a linguist.
Let me explain in a bit more detail what I mean.
Dammit Jim, I’m a linguist, not a linguist!
One of the reasons The Question™ is so popular amongst laypeople is semantic ambiguity. To our eternal annoyance as academic linguists, the word “linguist” has two different meanings in the English language. The meaning we use on this blog, and the one most people who call themselves “linguists” intend, is “a person engaged in the academic study of human language”. As you’ve probably gathered if you read our blog, this doesn’t necessarily involve the study of any particular language: while there are many linguists which specialise in one language only, many (perhaps even most) specialise in linguistic branches or whole families, and some specialise in particular fields of linguistics, like phonetics or semantics, and work with multiple completely unrelated languages.
Crucially, the job of an academic linguist doesn’t involve learning any of the languages we study, a point which I’ll talk about in more detail in the next section.
Unfortunately, this first meaning of the word “linguist” is not the one the public knows best. Not by a long shot.
The second meaning of “linguist” comes from military jargon, and it’s the one most familiar to laypeople due to its being spread far and wide by films, TV series, books and other popular entertainment media. In the military, a “linguist” is the person tasked with learning the language of the locals during a foreign campaign, with the goal of helping his fellow soldiers interact with them. In short, they’re what in any other field would be called an interpreter. Why the military had to go and rain on our lovely linguistic parade by stealing our name instead of using the proper name for what they do is a mystery, but they’re probably snickering about it as we speak. Regrettably, due to the greater popularity of films and stories set in a military/combative milieu, as opposed to the far superior and more engaging world of academics, with its nail-biting, edge-of-your-seat deadlines and paper-writing all-nighters, the second meaning of the word “linguist” has been cemented in the popular imagination as the primary one, and the rest is history.
It certainly doesn’t help that Hollywood likes to portray their “linguists” as knowing every single language they come into contact with, which has gone a long way towards making The Question™ as popular as it is.
Knowledge is relative, and numbers even more so
If our problem with The Question™ were only a matter of misunderstanding of our job description, it would be no big deal. We’d just list out all the languages we speak and then explain what a linguist actually is to whoever is asking. Problem is, while for a wuggle (non-linguist) listing the languages they know is an easy task, for a linguist it’s absurdly difficult. If you’ve ever exposed a linguist to The Question™, you’ve probably already seen the symptoms of ALLA (Acute Language Listing Anxiety): panicking, profuse sweating, stammering, making of excuses, epistemological asides (“Well, it depends on what you mean by know…”), and existential dread about the possibility of The Followup™ (“So you speak X? Say something in X!”).
What is the reason for this affliction? Well, it all comes down to what I said in the previous section: a linguist might very well study a language, but they are by no means expected to speak it. This gives rise to the apparent paradox of a linguist knowing the grammar of some language extremely well, while not being able to have anything more than the most basic of conversations in it, if even that. Some linguists manage to muscle through the pragmatics of The Question™ and only list the languages they speak fluently (which is what most people are asking, really), but many get stumped by it, because what a linguist means by “knowing a language” is very different from what a wuggle intends.
For example, by a linguist’s conception of “knowing”, I could be said to “know” a couple dozen languages. But before you go all wide-eyed with awe at my intellectual might, know that of those couple dozen I can be said to really speak only five or six. And of those five or six, I’m only really fluent in two, with a decent degree of fluency in a third. To make matters even worse, even the meaning of speaking is vague for a linguist: does “speaking” a language mean I can hold my own in basic conversation, or does it mean I can read a newspaper? Or a novel? Or a treatise on quantum physics?
You see, from a linguistic point of view, “speaking” a language isn’t a binary question: fluency is a spectrum. I can order stuff in a restaurant in German and read some basic texts, but I would never be able to read a novel in it. Do I speak German? I’ve translated an entire comic from Finnish to English for fun with the help of a dictionary, but I wouldn’t be able to talk to a Finnish person in Finnish to save my life. Do I speak Finnish? As you can see, it’s extremely difficult for a linguist to accurately gauge what “speaking” or “knowing” a language actually entails, which is why it takes them an impressively long time to come up with a list, to the puzzlement of wuggles who could list the languages they speak in a heartbeat.
Conversation tactics for wuggles
So, what should you ask a linguist upon meeting them? Well, the safest question is probably a simple “what do you do?”
Us linguists, like most academics, like explaining our jobs very much, and we’d be very happy to have the opportunity to geek out about what we study with an interested person.
Be sure to know when to stop us, though, unless you want to be regaled with a half-hour lecture on the pragmatics of Mixtecan questions.
Metaphor is a powerful tool: sometimes it can distort the meaning of a word to the point of transforming it in a whole different word. In today’s Fun Etymology we’re going to explore just one such word: “cloud”.
The word “cloud” begins its journey as the Old English word “clud”, meaning “hill” or “pile of rocks”. Somewhere along the way, someone must have noticed how clouds in the sky kinda look like big hills made of fluffy white stuff, and started calling them “hills”, perhaps as a witticism or joke. Eventually, the name stuck, and by Middle English it had almost completely substituted the original Old English word for “cloud”, “weolcan”.
Old words are hard to die, though, and the old word still survives in poetry, where it’s now taken the form “welkin”.
Howdy, followers! It’s Tuesday and, as usual, this means a fresh out of the oven new Fun Etymology!
Today, we want to try something a bit different. For the past several months, we’ve brought to you the history of various words in English. But that is only half the fun in etymology! The real fun is exploring how a word evolves in related languages, so today we bring you the first Fun Etymology Tree of Amazement! (Cooler name pending, suggestions accepted and highly encouraged)
Today’s word is “gold”, the shiniest of shiny metals and eternal symbol of wealth and status. Words in rhombuses are not direct descendants but result from borrowing.
Did you know that in Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs, the word for gold, “teocuitlatl”, literally means “god poop”?
Or, How No Language is Any More (or Less) Difficult than Any Other
Lessons I learned from Latin
How did Latin speakers remember which case a word goes in, and its form, as they spoke? We probably all wondered about this question at some time or another. I remember studying Latin in middle school (it’s mandatory in Italy) and being absolutely baffled at the thought that such a byzantine language could have been spoken fluently at some time in the past as I struggled to learn by heart dozens of declension tables as well as lists of environments which required the presence of some case or another (and even longer lists of exceptions to those lists!). The Romans must have been geniuses with prodigious memories who would probably find Italian a ridiculously simple and unsophisticated language to learn.
Then one day, in high school, I stumbled upon a textbook which used a different method to teach Latin from the one I was used to: it taught it as a living language. No more declension tables, no more long lists of baroque rules, no more grand examples of complicated rhetorical stylings; instead, it had everyday dialogues, going from simpler to more complex, and bite-sized grammar sections. Suddenly, Latin became easy: with the help of a dictionary, I could read and write in it with a reasonable degree of proficiency (which, alas, I’ve largely lost).
Had I become a genius? Did I start seeing my native Italian as a boorish, simplified version of the language of Rome? Absolutely not. All that changed was the way the language had been taught to me. That was the day I learned that no language is any more difficult than any other. Also, everything’s easier when you learn it as a baby, and the Romans spoke Latin since they were born, no declension tables necessary.
Latin is by no means the only language to be considered particularly difficult: we’ve all heard how difficult it is to learn Chinese, with all those ideographs[1] to learn, and with words being so ambiguous and whatnot; or Finnish, which has 15 cases and innumerable verbal inflections. Also, it’s a national pastime for everyone[2] to regard their language as the most complex to learn for foreigners, because that makes you feel oh-so-intelligent.
The idea that some languages are inherently more complex than others is, unsurprisingly, another legacy of the dastardly Victorians and their colonialist obsession with ethnocentric nationalism.
It was, of course, in the interest of Eurocentric racists to paint foreign languages as being either primitively simple and unsophisticated, or bizarrely and unnecessarily complicated (damned if you do, damned if you don’t). If this sounds familiar, it’s probably because you’ve read our post on phonaesthetics a few weeks ago, where we found out that the same reasoning was applied to how a language sounds.
Those Victorians… never happy until they’ve enslaved, massacred or culturally neutered someone different from them. Bless their little hearts.
Scientists estimate that a greater-than-average amount of moustache-twirling went into the making of this linguistic prejudice
My task today is showing you how this is not really true at all, and how your failure to realise your dream of learning Ahkwesásne Mohawk is more due to a lack of proper learning materials rather than any difficulty inherent in the language itself.
It all depends on your point of view
So, am I saying that all languages are equally simple in all their aspects? Well, no. While all languages are more or less equally complex, how that complexity is distributed changes from language to language. For example, while it is undeniably true that Finnish is far more morphologically complex than English, phonologically speaking English makes it look like toddler babbling.
Amazingly, although complexity might be distributed differently from language to language, overall the different parts balance out to make languages more or less as complex as each other. We don’t really know how this happens: various mechanisms have been proposed, but they all have fatal flaws. It is one of the great mysteries of linguistics.[3]
“But why do I find French so difficult, Riccardo?” you scream through a haze of tears as you once again fail to understand how the past subjunctive is of any use in any language ever. Well, the answer is that how difficult a language is to learn for you depends on your first language. Specifically, the more similar two languages are in their distribution of complexity, the easier it is for speakers of each to learn the other. If the languages are related, then it becomes even easier.[4] So, Mandarin Chinese might well be very difficult to learn for an English speaker, due to its very simple morphology, rigid syntactic structure and tonal phonology; but, say, a Tibetan speaker would find it much easier to learn than English, because the two languages are distantly related, and therefore have similar structure.
The moral of the story
And so, once again, we come to the end of a post having dispelled another widespread linguistic misconception.
Even though these myths might seem rather innocuous, they have real and sometimes very serious consequences. The idea that some languages are more or less complex or difficult to learn than others has, over the centuries, been used to justify nationalist, racist, and xenophobic sentiments which have ultimately resulted in suffering and sometimes even genocide.
What we need to do with languages is learn them, share them, preserve them, and speak them, not pitting them against each other in a competition over which is the best, most “logical”, most difficult or better-sounding one.
So enjoy the amazing diversity of human languages, people!
Stay tuned for next week, when Sabina will answer the old question: is English really three languages stacked upon each other wearing a trenchcoat?
They’re not actually ideographs, they’re logographs, but that’s a topic for another post. ↑
Except for English speakers, who, for various reasons, have convinced themselves that their language is stupid, unsophisticated, illogical and boring. More on this in a future post. ↑
It is important to note that this rule does not apply to pidgins and (young) creoles, due to the way they were formed, as pointed out by John McWhorter (2011). These languages truly are simpler than all others. This, however, does NOT make them any more “primitive” or “less expressive”. ↑
Paradoxically, if two languages are TOO closely related, it becomes slightly more difficult for their speakers to learn the other, because they tend to over-rely on the similarities and end up tripping up on the differences. ↑
