Posted on

Fun Etymology Tuesday – Moon

Hello, my language friends! It’s Tuesday again and this means, you guessed it, another fun etymology!

Today’s word is “moon”.

Ah, the Moon. If the Sun is the originator of all life and movement on Earth, the Moon is certainly the great timekeeper. Various animal species use its light to time their reproductive cycles, and, since time immemorial, humans have used its convenient phase cycle to determine where they were in time. It’s also the closest astronomical body to Earth, and our greatest companion. Countless poems have been written of its beauty, and its pockmarked face is a constant friend in the sky: Europeans saw a man looking down at them in the patterns of craters and dry lava seas; the Chinese a bunny zealously working on the elixir of immortality.

From its use as time measurer, the Moon gets its name: it comes from Old English “mona”, from Proto-Germanic “*monan”, itself from Proto-Indo-European “*menses-“, which means “a measure of time”, and is the same root that gave us our word “month”. The ultimate root is PIE *me-, ‘to measure’, which arrived to English also as the word “meter”, through Ancient Greek.

Posted on

Lies your English teacher told you – Second language edition

Hi there! Remember how we go on and on about prescriptivism, and how these weird language norms are stressed in classrooms despite them having no basis in how we actually speak?
Well, language attitudes and norms do not only affect native English speakers, but also interferes with the way English is taught as a second language.

If you’ve read my posts about Standardisation and Bad English, you will be familiar with the idea that some varieties of English are perceived to be better than others – standard British English is usually considered particularly desirable. When I started learning English, 15-20 years ago (gulp!), it was still the norm in Swedish schools to teach this variety. This lead to some interesting prescriptive teaching: Being brought up in Sweden, where foreign-language tv and films are subtitled rather than dubbed, we primary-schoolers were already quite proficient in American English lexicon and expressions. However, we were taught that some of the things we had learned were not correct, for example that we should say flat instead of apartment or trousers instead of pants (although, we did not know yet that the latter meant underwear in British English). We were given these British words not to use as an alternative, but to use instead of the American words we already had a comfortable grasp of. This even stretched to pronunciations; instead of pronouncing the weekdays in the, for us, intuitive way, ending with a diphthong, as in Monday (/mʌndeɪ/), we were told to use the, now quite archaic, RP pronunciation Mondi’ (‘mʌndi’).

Image source.

Some other things taught could be plainly wrong. A friend from Germany was told to not use constructions like “I’ll give you the book” but always use the construction with a preposition “I’ll give the book to you”. This is, of course, bonkers: the first construction is a double object construction, perfectly grammatical and frequently used in English! In fact, double object constructions have been a feature of English going back to the time when nouns still had cases and could go just about anywhere in the sentence.

Another friend from Hong Kong (where English is actually an official language and many are bilingual), recalls being told in English class that you must not use the expression ‘long time no see’ as it is “Chinglish” and therefore not proper. Of course this expression is well established in English, even if its origin is likely to be a mapping of English words onto some Chinese variety1:

好久 = long time
不 = no
见 = see1

This example shows some of the problematic attitudes towards post-colonial English varieties, and how these attitudes can even be internalised by the speakers themselves; the fact that this expression has its origins in Chinese overshadows how fixed the expression is in standard English, so much so that this English teacher wanted their students to distance themselves from it. In general, post-colonial English varieties such as Chinese or Indian English do not have the same status as, for example, British or Australian English, and this is often due to mere ignorance: linguistic innovations in such varieties are often seen as imperfections, features of foreign accents, because many do not understand that they are spoken as a first language.

Image source.

Even if American English is much more accepted in Swedish schools today, the idea that one form of English is more appropriate to be taught still remains. Sure, there is a point in teaching one style of English when it comes to formal writing, but this is a much later stage in most people’s English education. Teaching English-learning children that certain forms of English are wrong, despite that they’ve heard them being used and already have acquired them, might affect their confidence in speaking English – and may have more severe confidence effects for those who speak a post-colonial English variety as a first language. As always, prescriptivism disallows variation, and thus makes languages way more boring.

Footnotes

1The expression first appears in American English.

2Thanks Riccardo for providing the Mandarin translation! The mapping works on Cantonese as well, and it is unclear which language is the origin.

Posted on

Fun Etymology Tuesday – Planet

Hello good (and not-so-good, we don’t judge) people!
It’s Tuesday and it’s time for our appointment with the history of the English vocabulary.

Today’s word is “planet”.

Everybody in the modern world knows of planets, whether it be from astronomy classes in school or science fiction, and we all know what a planet is, right?
Well, it turns out that amongst astronomers, the actual definition of “planet” is still a bit controversial. The currently accepted definition is the following: “an astronomical body massive enough to be rounded by its own gravity (which excludes asteroids), not massive enough to initiate thermonuclear fusion (which excludes stars), and which has cleared its orbital neighbourhood of planetesimals (i.e. small rocky bodies)”. The addition of this last clause to the definition famously resulted in the “demotion” of former planet Pluto to “dwarf planet”, or “Kuiper belt object”, a decision that was made firstly because of its very small size (it’s smaller than Russia!), and secondly because the cascading discovery of similar objects would have made the Solar System have thousands of planets. You don’t want to memorise thousands of names at school, now, do you?

To the ancient Greek, though, the definition of planet was very simple: it was a star which moved instead of staying still. This is why they gave them the name “planetes”, which in Ancient Greek means “wanderer”, and from which our modern word “planet” comes.

Posted on

Fun Etymology Tuesday – Concert

Hello, my smart followers!
It’s Tuesday and as (somewhat less than) usual, it’s time for our weekly Fun Etymology!

Today’s word is “concert”.

When we think of concerts today, we mostly think about music. Whether it is a roaring rock or metal concert, or a refined classical concert, most of us have probably taken part in and, hopefully, enjoyed at least one of two.
The story of the word, however, is pretty curious, and at one point its meaning even flipped 180 degrees.

The word “concert” ultimately comes from Latin “concertare”, from “cum”, ‘with’ + “certare”, ‘fight’. The original meaning was ‘fight against’. How did it go from that to a music get-together? Well, in medieval Italian, the meaning of the word unexpectedly flipped to mean ‘to work together’, the exact opposite of its original meaning! We don’t really know how this happened, but the most likely explanation is that the first switch happened due to confusion between the two meanings of Latin “cum”: ‘against’ and ‘together with’. The word would then have switched from meaning ‘fight against’ to ‘fight alongside’.
From there it moved to English in a musical context through the influx of Italian musical vocabulary that accompanied the formalisation of musical theory in the late 17th century.

Posted on

Don’t never use no double negatives

Multiple negation? I ain’t never heard nothing about that!

“Two negatives make a positive,” your friend may primly reply to such a statement. Even if you’re not exactly fond of math, you surely remember enough to acknowledge the wisdom and veracity of such sound logic.

But the funny thing about languages? They have a logic all their own, and it doesn’t always play by the same rules as our conscious minds.

Take, for example, this phenomenon of the double negative. Like the other formal, prescriptive rules we’ve been exploring with this series, the distaste for double negatives is relatively new to English.

Back in Old and Middle English (roughly AD 1000-1450), English wasn’t particularly fussed about multiple elements of negation in a sentence. If anything, they were used for emphasis, to drive home the negation. This trick of negatives supporting each other (rather than canceling each other out) is called negative concord. Far from being frowned upon, some languages crave it. Spanish, for example, regularly crams several negation words into a single sentence without a second thought:

¡No toques nada!
‘Don’t touch anything!’

This isn’t merely the preferred method of negation. In languages like Spanish and French, negative concord isn’t for emphasis; it’s mandatory. That’s just how they express negation.

The idea that two negatives grammatically make a positive in English was first recorded in the 1700s along with most of the other prescriptive rules. Unlike the other rules, there is some evidence to suggest that negative concord was naturally beginning to disappear in mainstream varieties of English even before the early grammarians codified the rule. This really isn’t too surprising. Languages like to change, and among the other moving parts they scramble around, they commonly go through phases of double negation (we linguists know this as Jespersen’s Cycle).

Math has naught to do with language, but it’s certainly true that in our Modern English, double negatives have the potential to leave a lot of ambiguity. Do they cancel? Do they intensify each other? It’s all about that context. This is one rule that might be here to stay1 (at least in formal English).

Notes
1 At least for now!

Posted on

Fun Etymology Tuesday – Paper

Hello, my sweet, sweet followers. I hope you’ve been well!
After a rather baffling two-week hiatus, we bring back what you’ve all been craving for: our weekly instalment of Fun Etymologies!

Today’s word is “paper”.

Paper is a wonderful material. Invented in the 2nd century by the Chinese Han imperial court eunuch Cai Lun, this humble wood fibre byproduct has revolutionised the world.
Thanks to paper, writing became immensely easier, no longer being dependent on laboriously curated animal skin, or fragile clay, or intractable rock. And writing is just one of its uses: it can be used for cleaning, packaging, art and much much more, and it ushered in the paper money revolution.

The word “paper” comes to English from Old French “papier”, itself derived from Latin “papyrus”. That’s right: the same as the modern English word “papyrus”, the name of a plant native to Egypt whose fibres allowed the creation of a material very similar to paper, which made the Egyptians the undisputed masters of ancient writing.
The origins of the word “papyrus” itself are uncertain.

So next time you find yourself writing a letter, or an essay, or a novel, or whispering your most intimate secrets to a padlocked diary, remember to stop and appreciate paper, that most versatile and useful of materials.

Posted on

A preposition is not a good word to end a sentence with

Lies your English teacher told you: You can’t end a sentence with a preposition

Hello and welcome to the third episode in our ongoing series on stuff about the English language people in positions of authority misled you into thinking was true! Last time, Lisa showed us why it is perfectly fine (and in some cases, even preferable!) to split an infinitive.

Today, I will tackle a “rule” that’s every bit as well-known as it is routinely disregarded: “you can’t end a sentence with a preposition”.

This rule is interesting, as far as prescriptive rules go, in that its is hardly ever observed in practice. We all end sentences with prepositions, and it’s no use denying it. But don’t worry: the grammar police will not come busting down your door just yet. The reason we do it is because it’s perfectly natural in English, and in many cases even unavoidable!

The process of ending sentences with prepositions is technically known as preposition stranding, or P-stranding, and it is fairly common amongst Germanic languages.

This phenomenon is due to something we in the biz call wh- movement. Let me explain quickly what it is.

When you turn a statement into a question, you unconsciously perform a series of operations that transform that statement. In the case of wh- questions (what?, who?, when? etc.), the steps you follow are these:

  1. Take the statement.
    The boy ate the apple.
  2. Turn the part you want to question into a wh- word.
    The boy ate what?
  3. Move the wh- word to the beginning of the sentence.
    What the boy ate?
  4. For a series of hellishly complicated reasons I won’t go into here, transform the verb into it’s do-supported form (i.e. with “do”).
    What the boy did eat?
  5. Invert the subject and the verb.
    What did the boy eat?

And Bob’s your uncle! Pretty insane that you do this all the time and don’t even realise it, huh?

The process is basically the same for relative clauses (i.e. “The apple (which) the boy ate”), except without steps 4 and 5 (because it’s not a question), and with an extra step where you copy the “questioned” part to the start of the sentence before turning it into the wh- word. So:

  1. The boy ate the apple.
  2. The apple the boy ate the apple.
  3. The apple the boy ate which.
  4. The apple which the boy ate.

What interests us is what happens when this process takes place in a sentence where the moved object (or constituent, to use the proper lingo) is preceded by a preposition.

  1. The boy went to the cinema with the girl.
  2. The girl the boy went to the cinema with the girl.
  3. The girl the boy went to the cinema with who(m).

And here we hit the point of contention. What should be done on step 4? Until the 18th century, the answer was easy: the most natural option was to move the wh- word and leave the preposition where it is. Stranded, if you like.

  1. The girl who(m) the boy went to the cinema with.

The same applied to questions (“Who(m) did the boy go to the cinema with?”). However, there was a second option, in which the wh- word dragged the preposition along with itself to the start of the sentence or clause, so that step 4 would look like

  1. The girl with who(m) the boy went to the cinema.

This particular construction is technically known as pied-piping, from the German fairy tale “The Pied Piper of Hamelin”, where a magic piper freed the city of troublesome mice by playing his flute and mesmerising them into following him out. He applied the same procedure later to kidnap all the city’s children to punish the inhabitants for their ingratitude. Talk about overreacting.

This option, while always possible, was seen as rather cumbersome, and therefore dispreferred. Until the 18th century, when a sustained campaign by a number of intellectuals flipped the status of the two constructions in the public consciousness. What happened?

Well, as you might remember from many of our posts about the history of prescriptivism, people in the 18th and 19th century displayed an unhealty obsession over Latin. Since Latin was The Perfect Language™, each and every aspect of the English language that didn’t look like Latin was, of course, wrong and barbaric, and had to be eliminated. I’ll give you one guess as to what Latin didn’t do with its prepositions during wh- movement.

If you guessed “stranding them”, then congratulations! You guessed right.

In Latin (and all the languages which descend from it), only pied-piping is acceptable when applying wh- movement to a sentence with a preposition. Our example sentence in Latin would go like this (cum = with, quā = who(m)):

  1. Puer ad cinematographeum cum puellā īvit.
  2. Puella puer ad cinematographeum cum puellā īvit.
  3. Puella puer ad cinematographeum cum quā īvit.
  4. Puella cum quā puer ad cinematographeum īvit.

Needless to say, the prescriptivist scholars twisted themselves into logic pretzels to justify why this should be true of English as well. Some just openly admitted that it was because English should be similar to Latin, others tried to be clever and argued that a “preposition” is called that because it goes before a word (pre- = before + position), and must have thought themselves exceedingly smart, notwithstanding the fact that the word “preposition” comes from Latin, where P-stranding is impossible, so of course they would call it that.

Some got caught in their own circular reasoning and inevitably found sentences in which preposition stranding is obligatory, giving rise to comically frustrated rants like the following, courtesy of one Philip Withers, from 1789:

“It may be said, it is absolutely unavoidable on particular occasions. v.g. The Stock was disposed OF BY private contract. But an elegant writer would rather vary the phrase, or exchange the verb than admit so awkward a concurrence of prepositions.”

A little tip, kids: if someone tells you he would rather avoid or ignore pieces of data that they dislike, or actively tells you to do so, they’re not a scientist. In the case of linguistics, you’ve spotted a prescriptivist! Mark it on your prescriptivist-spotting book and move on.

What of the writers that came before them and regularly stranded prepositions? Robert Lowth (a name you’ll become wearily familiar with by the end of this series) commented that they too were somehow universally speaking bad English, and a guy named John Dryden even went so far as to rewrite some of Shakespeare’s plays to remove some of the unsightly and atrocious “errors” he found in them, preposition stranding included.

Such are the lengths fanatism goes to.

Stay tuned for next time, when Rebekah will explain to you why a negative plus a negative doesn’t necessarily imply a positive.

 

Posted on

Fun Etymology Tuesday – Electricity

Hello fantastic fellows!
P1: If it’s Tuesday the HLC posts a Fun Etymology.
P2: It’s Tuesday
C: The HLC posts a Fun Etymology

Today’s word is “electricity”.

It’s hard to overstate the revolution electricity brought about in the course of human history. Our entire civilisation runs on it: I’m using it to write this post now, you’re using it to read it, and we’re all using it to keep warm, to have light at night, to cook, to pump water in our houses, to drive our cars, and millions of other things. And to think that just a century and a half ago it was nothing more than an academic curiosity!*

It is a testament to the capacity of the human mind to get used to just about anything that we wake up every day in a world in which people move from one continent to another in giant metal birds powered by the chained might of lightning and we still manage to be bored.

The discovery of electricity goes back surprisingly far in history, to the time of our favourite nerd-jocks: the Ancient Greeks. They discovered that when you rub a piece of amber on a rough cloth, it develops the property of attracting other materials, including water. This is due to what we today call static electricity or the triboelectric effect. It has to do with electron exchange, look it up! It’s really cool.
In Ancient Greek, the word for “amber” was “elektron”, so this property was called “electricity”, the property of being amber-like. This name was given to it by the English scientist William Gilbert, who first brought electricity to the academic world in 1600. Fun fact: in his “His Dark Materials” trilogy, Philip Pullman gives a different etymology to the word “electric”, which becomes “ambaric”, directly from “amber” (which comes from Arabic ‘anbar. Double etymology!)

It took millennia before someone discovered this property of amber was the same thing that made lightning work, when Benjamin Franklin famously tied a key to a kite string and let it fly in a lightning storm, demonstrating that lightning is electrical because it grounds itself through metal.
Don’t do this at home kids, it’s a miracle he survived.

*Which reminds me of something that really grinds my gears: when people disparage pure theoretical research as useless. “Why do we pour so much money in smashing particles together when we could spend it on hunger relief?” Well, if people in the 1800s hadn’t poured resources in useless (at the time) stuff like electricity, our modern civilisation wouldn’t even exist, and with it, all the benefits that it brings. Including hunger relief!

Posted on

Fun Etymology Tuesday – Gym

Hello, good people of the nets! It is Tuesday and in the best HLC tradition, I bring to you today’s Fun Etymology!

Today’s word is “gym”!

The gym: some weird people love it. As an academic, I find it an unsettlingly hellish mire of sweat and uncomfortable clothing where people go to voluntarily subject themselves to torture through astonishingly inventive implements. Though I’m told it’s actually good for you. Personally, I prefer a good long walk in the countryside, or, if you have them, mountains.

Oh well, no accounting for taste, I guess. Or, as Caesar used to say, “de gustibus non disputandum est”.

Speaking of classical antiquity, do you know who was REALLY into gyms? The Ancient Greeks, that’s who! In fact, they invented them!
The ideal Greek was at the same time a philosopher and a sports person, busting once and for all the myth that nerds and jocks are incompatible categories. In fact, many of the most famous Greek philosophers started their careers as sportsmen: Plato, whose real name was Aristocles, was a wrestler, and his nickname means “the broad-shouldered”; Chrysippus, one of the founders of the Stoic school, was a long-distance runner; and Eratosthenes, the man who first measured the size of the Earth, was a gymnast.

Our modern word “gym” is the abbreviation of the word “gymnasium”, which comes from the Ancient Greek “gymnasion”, from the verb “gymnazein”, literally “to train naked”, from the word “gymnos”, “naked”.
This reflects the attitude the Ancient Greeks had towards physical exercise, where clothing was seen as an impediment and a shameful covering of the athlete’s body.

Thank Zeus that’s not the case in modern gyms anymore!

Posted on

To boldly split what no one should split: The infinitive.

Lies your English teacher told you: “Never split an infinitive!”

To start off this series of lies in the English classroom, Rebekah told us last week about a common misconception regarding vowel length. With this week’s post, I want to show you that similar misconceptions also apply to the level of something as fundamental as word order.

The title paraphrases what is probably one of the most recognisable examples of prescriptive ungrammaticality – taken from the title sequence of the original Star Trek series, the original sentence is: To boldly go where no man has gone before. In this sentence, to is the infinitive marker which “belongs to” the verb go. But lo! Alas! The intimacy of the infinitive marker and verb is boldly hindered by an intervening adverb: boldly! This, dear readers, is thus a clear example of a split infinitive.

Or rather, “To go boldly”1

Usually an infinitive is split with an adverb, as in to boldly go. This is one of the more recognisable prescriptive rules we learn in the classroom, but the fact is that in natural speech, and in writing, we split our infinitives all the time! There are even chapters in syntax textbooks dedicated to explaining how this works in English (it’s not straightforward though, so we’ll stay away from it for now).

In fact, sometimes not splitting the infinitive leads to serious changes in meaning. Consider the examples below, where the infinitive marker is underlined, the verb it belongs to is in bold and the adverb is in italics:

(a) Mary told John calmly to leave the room

(b) Mary told John to leave the room(,) calmly

(c) Mary told John to calmly leave the room

Say I want to construct a sentence which expresses a meaning where Mary, in any manner, calm or aggressive, tells John to leave the room but to do so in a calm manner. My two options to do this without splitting the infinitive is (a) and (b). However, (a) expresses more strongly that Mary was doing the telling in a calm way. (b) is ambiguous in writing, even if we add a comma (although a little less ambiguous without the comma, or what do you think?). The only example which completely unambiguously gives us the meaning of Mary asking John to do the leaving in a calm manner is (c), i.e. the example with the split infinitive.

This confusion in meaning, caused by not splitting infinitives, becomes even more apparent depending on what adverbs we use; negation is notorious for altering meaning depending on where we place it. Consider this article title: How not to raise a rapist2. Does the article describe bad methods in raising rapists? If we split the infinitive we get How to not raise a rapist and the meaning is much clearer – we do not want to raise rapists at all, not even using good rapist-raising methods. Based on the contents of the article, I think a split infinitive in the title would have been more appropriate.

So you see, splitting the infinitive is not only commonly done in the English language, but also sometimes actually necessary to truly get our meaning across. Although, even when it’s not necessary for the meaning, as in to boldly go, we do it anyway. Thus, the persistence of anti-infinitive-splitting smells like prescriptivism to me. In fact, this particular classroom lie seems like it’s being slowly accepted for what it is (a lie), and current English language grammars don’t generally object to it. The biggest problem today seems to be that some people feel very strongly about it. The Economist’s style guide phrases the problem eloquently3:

“Happy the man who has never been told that it is wrong to split an infinitive: the ban is pointless. Unfortunately, to see it broken is so annoying to so many people that you should observe it.”

We will continue this little series of classroom lies in two weeks. Until then, start to slowly notice split infinitives around you until you start to actually go mad.

Footnotes

1 I’ve desperately searched the internet for an original source for this comic but, unfortunately, I was unsuccessful. If anyone knows it, do let me know and I will reference appropriately.

2 This very appropriate example came to my attention through the lecture slides presented by Prof. Nik Gisborne for the course LEL1A at the University of Edinburgh.

3 This quote is frequently cited in relation to the split infinitive, you can read more about their stance in the matter in this amusing post: https://www.economist.com/johnson/2012/03/30/gotta-split