A demonym is any name derived from a place that helps describe people who live there. Californians are people who live in California. Frenchmen live in France. And so on. But what about the demonyms that are seemingly random? How the heck did people from the Netherlands become the Dutch, for example? Where Dutch came from Before we dig into this demonym, there are three terms …
In English class, your grade doesn’t differentiate between how large your vocabulary is and how well you write a sentence. But recent research shows that your brain does! This evidence may mean that increasing your vocabulary won’t necessarily influence fluency when learning a new language. Two parts of the brain, Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area, play a large part in processing language. Broca’s area has been linked …
There are essentially two ways to pick a “word of the year.” One common approach is to select from words whose common usage reflects some quality of the year past. Expect to see occupy, winning, etc., on many selections this December. Another way involves actually using the dictionary. Is there a word that captures the character of 2011, regardless of its popularity or ubiquity? In …
Recently, we looked up the etymology of the word occupy. We found an unexpected obsolete definition. The term occupy formerly meant something very different than its current common meaning. From the early 1500s to the 1800s, occupy was used to refer to sexual relations, as in “to occupy a woman” as defined in the Lexicon Balatronicum in 1811. When occupy was used in that sense, …
If you’ve ever traveled within the U.S. and tried to order a sweet carbonated beverage, you’ve probably been misunderstood and confused. Depending on where you are, a soft drink might be called any number of things: coke, soda, pop. Ask anyone which is the right word and they will vehemently defend their preference, but why do people who speak the same language use different words …
Back in the 1940s, mathematician Warren Weaver made an audacious suggestion: what if translation was not a feat of literary theory and linguistics, but one of cryptography? Weaver suggested treating a foreign text as if it were a code to be broken. (This theory was the early basis of machine translation, a subfield of computational linguistics.) This metaphor of foreign language as code means that statistics …
Though neurology has made great strides in the past two decades, the brain is still the least understood organ in the body. How does it make thoughts? Even though research has not yet answered that question, a few intrepid scientists think that we will soon be able to communicate with machines using only our minds. A recent New York Times article explains that this ambitious …
Wherever we go on the internet, we encounter CAPTCHAs, those twisted words that block or enable entries on websites. Need to post an ad on Craigslist or log into your email from a new device? You may meet a CAPTCHA. Want to comment on an article or blog post? CAPTCHA. So, why do we have them? How do CAPTCHAs work? CAPTCHAs were invented to block …
We have all heard how differently people in London, New York, or Baton Rouge speak English, but are those different speakers still fluent in English? Where does accent stop and fluency begin? What does fluency mean? Fluency is defined as “being able to speak and write quickly or easily in a given language.” It comes from the Latin word fluentem meaning “to flow.” What does accent mean? …
Last week the New York Times ran this headline: “Twitter Study Tracks When We Are : )” That little emoticon printed in a venerated newspaper suggests growing acceptance of abbreviations and pictographic communication. Of course, the article is about the internet and technology, so a nod to common electronic communication is appropriate and light-hearted.
Language shapes how we think about the world. Benjamin Whorf, a linguist in the early 1900s, called this phenomenon linguistic relativity. It is often said that the Eskimos have fifty words for snow, but it turns out that’s not true. Eskimo-Aleut languages have about as many words for snow as the English language. But the Sami languages spoken by indigenous people near the Arctic Circle …
As readers, we recognize prefixes, like dis-, in-, non- and un-, as expressing negation. We immediately know that “unfair” means “not fair.” However, there are some clear exceptions to these rules. Such anomalies can cause confusion for a few reasons. For one, the prefix in- also literally means in, such as inquire, inclose, and insure. The word impromptu for instance comes directly from the Latin …