Language Expert Answers English Questions

Hi, I'm Stephen Turton, and this is Etymology Support.

[upbeat music]

First question.

SamuelM80056720 asks,

I have a semi-serious question for etymologists.

If feet is the plural for foot,

why is beet not the plural of boot?

Is it because of the vegetable?

Foot belongs to a category of words

that derive from Old English in which to make the plural,

you change the vowel in the word.

So other words in this category

are tooth-teeth, and goose-geese, mouse-mice.

Book also used to be in this category in Old English,

but later on we regularized the spelling,

so it's book-books.

If we'd kept the Old English pattern,

it would now be one book, two beech.

The word boot, on the other hand, is not from Old English.

It was borrowed from French into Middle English,

which is why it just gets the default plural -s.

There are lots of different ways of pluralizing nouns

in Old English.

So you might form the plural

by changing the vowel in the base word,

or you might form the plural by adding a suffix,

which could be, -as, -a, -an, -u, -ru.

In the Middle English period most of these ways

of forming the plural fell out of use

and the -s plural came to predominate.

So it basically replaced the old plurals

for a lot of English words just because it was easier.

SharPhoe asks, Weird etymology question.

When and why did whoops/oops

become the default sound made when making a mistake?

So, whoops is actually more recent than you might think.

The earliest evidence we have of whoops being used

in writing dates to the 19th century.

It actually seems to have been derived from oops-a-daisy,

which we have slightly earlier evidence for.

Oops-a-daisy might have been

a kind of whimsical alteration of lackadaisy,

which is in turn a whimsical alteration of alack-a-day,

which is in turn a whimsical alteration of alack,

which is a very old way of saying, oh no.

This is from the FindingFennsGold subreddit.

Origin of the word clue.

Clue originally meant a ball of thread.

Then, during Middle English it came to be associated

with the Greek myth of Theseus

who used a ball of thread to find his way in and out

of the Minotaur's Labyrinth by unspooling it on the way in

and then following it back out.

From this, a clue came to mean

something that helped lead you to a solution to a problem.

And that is now the only meaning

which is common in English today.

RonilBBK asks, Silent letters in words

don't make any sense.

How about you just don't add the letter in the word?

So there are a couple of reasons

that silent letters exist in English.

One is that the pronunciation of the language has changed

and the spelling system just hasn't kept up with it.

For example, the G-H in words

like through and thought and night.

The G-H exists there

because that sound used to be pronounced.

In Old English and Middle English,

that was the velar fricative [vocalizes].

Eventually, because that's quite a difficult sound

to pronounce, it dropped out of the language,

but we continue to spell words with that G-H

through a process of sheer inertia.

There have been calls for spelling reform in English

for literally centuries.

In the 19th century, one author complained

that the word fish might as well be spelled G-H-O-T-I.

G-H, as in the f at the end of rough,

O as in the i in women,

and T-I as in the sh in mention.

Now, in reality no would actually spell fish this way

because we know that there are implicit rules

to where letter combinations can go in words.

So we know that G-H can stand for the sound f,

but only at the end of a word, as in rough, enough, tough.

There was also a moment in time where a word like mention

would've been pronounced ment-i-on or something like that.

But the T-I-O-N in English,

if you say it enough times over and over,

tion, ti-an, ti-an, chi-an, chi-an, chin, shin,

it just becomes a lot easier to say shin.

So T-I I becomes sh.

Ease of articulation is a common trigger

for sound change in English and other languages.

Crowzur asks, Why do question words,

why, who, where, when, et cetera, all start with WW-H?

So this goes all the way back to Proto-Indo-European,

which is the earliest ancestor of the English language

and many other European and Asian languages

that etymologists have been able to reconstruct.

Proto-Indo-European had an interrogative stem,

an element of a word that would go into building other words

that looked something like qui.

And this and its variants were used to coin question words,

And this qui survives into many modern languages.

So for example, in French and Spanish as Q-U

as in qui, que, quando, quel.

It also survives in English as W-H.

And the resemblance is easy to see

once you know that the original spelling

and pronunciation in English was H-W, hua.

Nobody ever actually said wa-ha.

If you listen to older speakers today

who still pronounce the H in these question words,

you will hear that they put the H before the W.

So it's what, why, when.

At jpk_murphy asks,

Wonder where the word salary originated.

So the word salary comes from Latin salarium,

which ultimately comes from sal meaning salt.

In ancient Rome, a salarium was a wage paid to somebody

so that they could buy salt and other household goods.

The word salad ultimately derives from the same root, sal,

because a salad was a cold dish that was seasoned with salt.

This comes from the etymology subreddit.

What's going on with the word child?

Why does it pluralize into children rather than childs?

Child goes all the way back to Old English,

which had multiple methods of forming a plural.

One of the plurals for the word child in Old English

was childru.

During Middle English, this became childre.

However, at a later moment in time for some reason

people decided that this didn't look enough like a plural,

so they added a second plural ending N,

as in ox-oxen, to create the word children.

So it actually has two plural endings

stacked on top of each other.

It's equivalent to saying childses.

Delarosajl24 asks, Why do we call it deadline

for when something is due?

What does death have to do with finishing projects on time?

So this is a bit of a grizzly story.

During the American Civil War,

a deadline was a literal boundary around a prison

that prisoners were not allowed to cross

without being in danger of being shot.

From that, a deadline came to be used metaphorically

to mean a point of no return.

And that's why we get the sense of a date

on which something is due.

Jbud3570 asks,

Why are there multiple words that mean the same thing?

There are actually very few true synonyms

in English or in other languages.

You know words that have exactly the same meaning

in all contexts.

Even if two words appear to have exactly the same meaning,

they will tend to be used in somewhat different contexts.

For example, big and large,

you could say that you have big ideas,

you're a big spender, but then you end up in big trouble.

However, no one would say that they have large ideas,

they're a large spender, or they end up in large trouble.

And that's because we're very comfortable using the word big

in literal and figurative contexts,

but we prefer to use the word large

only with its literal meaning.

Sometimes multiple synonyms exist

because of language borrowing.

For example, in English we have the words

kingly, royal, and regal.

They all mean the same thing,

but kingly comes from English king,

royal comes from French roi, meaning king,

and regal comes from Latin rex, also meaning king.

Dworkphone asks, Is there any reason

for the alphabet being in the order it's in?

The clue is in the name.

The word alphabet comes from alpha beta,

which are the first two letters of the Greek alphabet,

and they correspond to Latin A and B.

Exactly how the letters ended up in this order,

A, B, C, or alpha, beta, gamma,

or ah, ba, ca, or ah, ba, ga is not known.

It might have been random to an extent,

but it's also worth noting that a lot of these sounds

are the first sounds that human babies make

when they first start babbling,

a, a, ba, ba, ga, ga, ca, ca, da, da.

The Latin alphabet ultimately derives

from the Greek alphabet,

which in turn ultimately derives

from the Phoenician alphabet.

And in all of these alphabets,

the letter orders starts out in the same way,

although the sounds attached to those letters

aren't exactly the same.

When the Latin alphabet spread to other languages

in Europe and beyond,

they tended to keep the same order of letters.

This is a question from Quora.

Why do some languages have formal

and informal versions of you, but English does not?

There's a bit of backstory to this question.

Initially, English had two second-person plural pronouns,

thou and you,

Thou was for addressing a singular person,

you was for addressing more than one person.

However, over time, because of the influence

of French in which the plural pronoun vu

can also be used as a polite pronoun,

you became a respectful way

of addressing a single person as well.

And at that point, thou started to fall out of use.

Because if you was the respectful way

of addressing one person, then if you called someone thou,

it implied that you disrespected them.

So after that happened,

thou eventually fell out of the language.

So English was left with you

as its only second-person plural.

Obviously, the problem with this

is you can no longer easily distinguish

between singular and plural.

What some people have since done

is they have coined new second-person plural pronouns

like y'all and yinz in Pittsburgh,

and yous which is used in Scotland

and Ireland and some other places.

Ganson asks, Why do we say it's raining cats and dogs,

but not any other animals?

There are a couple of theories about

where this expression came from.

Some people say that it's because medieval people

used to keep their livestock and pets on the roof

and during heavy rain they would fall through the thatch.

Seems unlikely.

Other people say it's because during heavy rains

dead animals in the gutters of London

would float down the streets.

But it's worth noting that there is an earlier idiom,

which is they agree like cats and dogs,

which means two people don't agree at all,

they're constantly fighting.

So it's possible that that meaning

then informed the expression it's raining cats and dogs,

as in it's raining so hard,

it's like the weather is fighting outside.

Yokernat asks, Does the language you speak

make you feel and think differently?

And if, how so?

So, linguistic determinism is the technical term

for the belief that the language we speak

fundamentally controls and limits the way we can think.

In the strong form, this obviously isn't true.

If it were true,

we would never be able to learn a new concept

unless we already knew the word for them,

and we also wouldn't be able to learn a second language

unless it's vocabulary mapped

exactly onto our first language.

But there is a weaker version of this hypothesis

called linguistic relativity,

which is just the suggestion that yeah,

maybe language does affect the way we think to an extent.

And there is some evidence for this.

For example, some linguists did a study

where they showed native speakers of German and Spanish

a series of pictures of objects.

And it just so happened that those objects

had names in Spanish and German

that had different grammatical genders in the two languages.

And what they found was when they asked speakers

of those languages to describe the objects they saw,

the speakers would tend to use adjectives

that reflected certain cultural gender stereotypes.

So for example, they showed them a picture of a bridge.

In Spanish a bridge is puente, which is masculine,

and Spanish speakers tended to describe the picture they saw

as big and strong.

But when they showed the same picture to German speakers

for whom bridge is brucke, which is feminine,

those speakers tended to say

that the bridge was beautiful or elegant.

So clearly there is some bias

that goes into how we think about language,

but that doesn't mean that a speaker of German

would be incapable of imagining a bridge as masculine.

Sometimes you see posts on social media of people saying,

Here's this word in my language

that is untranslatable into other languages.

Welsh word hiraeth, which means a sense of longing

for something, possibly home, possibly something else.

But the thing is you can actually translate

these words into other languages.

I just translated hiraeth into English,

I just have to use a sentence

rather than an individual word.

But clearly we can translate concepts

from one language into another.

Just because we don't have a direct single word for it

doesn't mean that we can't fully grasp what it means

in another language.

And if we really want to,

we can always just borrow that word

from another language into our own.

AXDAJQ asks, Why do we say break a leg

to wish someone good luck?

Wouldn't breaking a leg be the opposite of good luck?

The expression break a leg originates in the theater

where superstitious actors thought it was bad luck

to wish someone good luck

and good luck to wish someone bad luck.

DerekAtTheChase asks, I am curious.

How do etymologists/wordsmiths

determine the pronunciation of Old English words?

Thinking emoji.

So there are a number of ways etymologists do this.

One thing is that luckily Old English

was a lot more phonetic in its writing system

than modern English is.

There was much closer match between how words were spelled

and how they were pronounced.

Old English also borrowed its alphabet from Latin,

and it happens that a lot of the sounds those letters had

in Latin are the same sounds they then had in Old English,

which makes it a lot easier.

We know what modern German and Dutch sound like.

We know what modern English sounds like.

So from that we can reconstruct what earlier forms of words

in those languages might have sounded like

and how they might have diverged

based on regular processes of sound change.

For example, we have the word night in modern English.

It's spelled N-I-G-H-T.

In Old English, it was typically spelled N-I-H-T.

We know that the German word for night is nacht,

which has this velar fricative sound at the end [vocalizes].

And so based on the spelling in Old English

and the fact that this velar fricative sound

has survived in other Germanic languages,

we can conclude that in Old English

night was pronounced nicht.

JakeUnusual asks, How do new words form,

get approved, and get added in the dictionary?

Okay.

[book slams]

This is volume one of The OED.

It goes from A to bouzouki.

I couldn't bring the whole thing with me

because it is 20 volumes long.

The Oxford English Dictionary is an attempt

to document every word pretty much

used in the English language

from the year 1150 to the present day,

which is why it keeps getting longer and longer.

So in theory, words should never be taken out

of The Oxford English dictionary,

although in practice sometimes they are.

So this is basically the mother of all dictionaries

in English.

Any word that enters the language

and gets used by enough people

and stays in the language for long enough

will be added to the OED eventually.

Quo210 asks, Why do Americans say the bee's knees

to refer to something amazing?

The bee's knees originated in the 1920s

in the flapper culture.

That's when a woman wore long necklaces and short dresses.

Bee's knees was one of a number of phrases that people used

to suggest that something was beyond compare.

Another one is cat's pajamas, which still survives,

but there are also a host of others that we no longer use

like the eel's ankle, the sardine's whiskers,

and the elephants in step,

which I think we should bring back.

This question comes from the NoStupidQuestions subreddit.

Why the [beep] are pineapples called pineapples

when they ain't got [beep] to do with pine or apples?

So, pineapple originally meant a pine cone,

and when Europeans first encountered pineapples,

they thought they resembled pine cones.

That's where the word comes from.

But the apple is basically the default fruit

that Europeans use for talking about

new fruit they've encountered in other parts of the world.

So a potato used to be known as an earth apple,

which is modeled after French pomme de terre.

A tomato used to be called a love apple, no idea why.

Dunno what it has to do with love.

This is from the AskSocialScience subreddit.

Why did we stop using words like thou and hath

and words with -eth on the end?

So words like hath, doth, goeth, words that end with T-H,

reflect the original way of marking a verb

to show that it had a third-person singular subject

in English, so he goeth, she hath, it doth.

Roundabout the Middle English period,

this -eth started to fall out of use

and it was replaced by -S, so she has, he has, it does,

which is still the form we use today.

Today, we most associate words like hath

with the works of William Shakespeare

or the King James Bible.

But interestingly, even though the word hath

was commonly spelled around this time in the early 1600s,

it had already fallen out of use in the spoken language.

So we actually have a spelling book from this time

that tells young students

that although we write the word hath and doth,

we pronounce them as if they were written with an -s,

has and does.

So this is an instance where writing

has taken longer to catch up with the spoken language.

Busy-Consequence-697 asks,

Do people really use those funny collective nouns,

murder of crows, et cetera?

I mean, I guess people can use these words

if they're feeling whimsical enough.

So these collective nouns started out life

in the Middle Ages as hunting terms.

That's where we get phrases like a gaggle of geese,

a herd of deer, and a siege of herons.

They quickly spread to other domains of use,

often with humorous intentions.

So the 15th century Book of Saint Albans, for example,

gives us a long list of collective nouns,

including a drunkenship of cobblers,

an eloquence of lawyers, and a superfluity of nuns.

Neurotic-parents asks, How did the word okay

come to be used in so many languages

with practically the same meaning and pronunciation?

Okay originated as an abbreviation of all correct

in the US in the 19th century.

There is a theory that originated in the army

where a particular general used to sign off documents

as okay because he didn't know how to spell

all correct properly.

We don't have any evidence of that

and it seems more likely

that it was a deliberate joking misspelling of the words

to indicate that actually things were just adequate

rather than entirely satisfactory.

The first evidence we have for it comes from newspapers.

This is from the AskHistorians subreddit.

Did people actually talk how Shakespeare wrote?

Yes and no.

Putting aside the fact that Shakespeare wrote in rhyme

and iambic pentameter a lot of the time,

he also lived at a time of intense linguistic creativity.

So, writers of all kinds were eager to coin new words

or use old words in new ways.

So much so that some people actually complained about this

and objected to the rise of what they called inkhorn terms.

An inkhorn is a vessel

in which you would keep your ink for writing.

So an inkhorn term is a word that never had any real life

in the language.

It's almost as if you've just plucked it

straight from your inkwell on the end of your quill.

In everyday language,

most speakers would not have had such a vast vocabulary

or contorted grammar in such unusual ways.

@jesse_cassino asks,

Alexa, what's the origin of the word quarantine?

Quarantine comes from the French quarante, meaning 40,

which ultimately comes from a Latin word

meaning the same thing.

Originally, a quarantine was a period of 40 days

set aside for a special purpose, like fasting.

It then changed to mean a period

during which somebody was isolated from a community

to prevent the spread of disease.

A Quora user asks, How do words change meaning over time?

Semantic change is a regular feature

of all living languages.

There are a number of common processes

through which words change their meaning.

One process is narrowing,

which is when a word's meaning becomes more specific.

So for example, the word girl in Old English

meant a child of any gender,

but then it's meaning narrowed to mean only a female child.

The opposite process is broadening,

which is when a word's meaning becomes more general.

For instance, the word bird used to mean a little chick,

a nestling, a fledgling,

and it was only later that it came to mean

a fowl of any age.

And at that point it started to replace the word fowl

in the rest of the English language.

Another process is amelioration,

which is when a word's meaning

becomes more positive over time.

The word nice originally meant foolish.

It then came to mean fussy,

then it came to mean meticulous,

then it came to mean delicate,

then it came to mean attractive.

The opposite process to amelioration is pejoration,

which is when a word gains a more negative meaning.

So kind of in the opposite process to the word nice,

the word silly used to mean holy or blessed.

It then came to mean innocent or harmless,

then it came to mean helpless,

and then it came to mean foolish.

This is from the etymology subreddit.

Why does cow, pig, sheep, all have different names

when referring to them as food, beef, pork, lamb,

but chicken, fish, or rabbit stay the same?

The words beef, pork, and mutton

were borrowed into English from French

after the Normans invaded England.

At that point in time,

French became the language spoken by the nobility.

The author Walter Scott suggested that the reason

we had these pairs of native English words

like cow, sheep, and pig versus French words for the meat,

so beef, pork, and mutton,

had to do with the fact that English-speaking peasants

would raise these livestock and then they would be eaten

by the French-speaking nobility.

The reason that rabbit doesn't have a separate word

is that there was no native English word for rabbit

because they didn't exist in England

until the Normans brought them over.

Tiny-Werewolf-4650 asks,

Why aren't English words pronounced

as the way they are written?

There are a couple of reasons that English pronunciation

divots from English spelling.

One is sound change.

Words have changed the pronunciation over time,

but we haven't updated the spelling to match.

Another reason is language borrowing.

So English has borrowed a lot of words from other languages

that have their own different spelling systems,

and sometimes these spelling systems

have been partly imported into English.

For example, in English words that have P-H pronounced f,

like physics or phlegm,

are all borrowed from Greek where there is no letter F.

Another reason is folk etymology,

which is when people change the spelling

or pronunciation of a word due to an erroneous belief

that it's related to another word.

So a good example of this is the word island.

Island comes from Old English iegland.

It did not have an S in Old English.

But during the Middle English period,

English borrowed another word meaning the same thing

from French, isle, which English now pronounces isle.

The reason that isle or isle has an S in it

is that the French word

ultimately derives from the Latin word insular.

So people thought, well, there's an S in insular,

therefore we should put an S in isle,

even though the S was always silent

in English and in French.

And once this had taken place, people thought,

Wait a minute, we have these two words, isle and island.

They must be related.

And so they inserted a silent S

into the word island as well,

even though historically

there is no reason for it to be there.

MecHR asks, Why is it that some sayings

between certain languages are the same?

There could be two reasons why two languages

have very similar idioms.

One could be because there are some basic metaphors

that many languages share.

For example, the Spanish idiom [speaking Spanish]

means literally to throw wood on the fire.

In English we would say to add fuel to the flames.

But they both mean the same basic thing,

which is to make a bad situation worse.

The reason they could be so similar

is just that the idea that conflict or danger equals fire

is one that is found as a basic metaphor in many languages.

Another reason that languages could have similar idioms

is because one language has just literally translated

an idiom from another language.

A Quora user asks, Why is the word muscle

pronounced mussel?

So muscle is one of a group of words in English

where there's a silent letter in the base word,

but then that letter gets pronounced in an adjective form.

Other words in this category include condemn

to condemnation and phlegm to phlegmatic.

The reason for this has to do with rules

around syllables structures in English.

There are certain combinations of consonants

that are not allowed to occur together

at the beginning or an end of an English syllable.

So for instance, the sound sequence muscle, S-C-L,

is not really permitted in English syllable structures,

so instead we drop the C.

However, in the word muscular,

a U is added to the middle of the word

and that breaks up the syllable boundaries

so that now we have mus-cu-lar.

That consonant cluster no longer exists.

The word muscle comes from Latin musculus,

which literally translates as little mouse.

Apparently the Romans thought

that muscles look like small critters

running up and down your skin.

EdLincoln6 says,

Words with the same spelling and pronunciation,

but different etymologies.

So these would be known as homonyms,

for instance bat as in the winged creature

and bat as in the stick of word.

Some of these are true homonyms,

as in they come from separate roots,

but actually a lot of words that look like homonyms

do share a root.

For example, bank as in a riverside

and bank the place where you keep your money,

these actually derived from the same Germanic root,

which originally meant a slope.

From there, it came to mean a shoreline,

the land sloping down to a river,

and also a counter on which you would exchange money.

ColomboSabani asks,

How do etymologists even find out the meaning of the words?

How do they know where to look back to?

So, it is rare for words to appear out of nowhere.

A new word is often a blend

or a compound of two existing words,

or it's an existing word that's changed,

a noun has become a verb or an adjective has become a noun.

If none of those cases apply,

then an entomologist will look at other languages

that the word might have been borrowed from,

and they'll try to trace back

the earliest known use of that particular word.

What an entomologist will have to do

is to compare the word they're looking at

to other words in languages they know to be related,

and then reconstruct from the evidence

what an earlier form of that word might have been.

For example, an entomologist would work out

that the word disaster in English

comes from Italian disastro.

From there, they would work out that dis-

is a negative prefix, astro means star,

so disaster or disastro literally means an event

that happens under a bad star.

Chatongie asks, What is that R like sound I hear

between vowels when you say something like,

'Did you eat?' but sounds like, 'Did youreet?'

Or, 'The idearof blah blah,' when meaning the idea of?

So this is known as intrusive R

and it's a way of resolving vowel hiatus.

So vowel hiatus is when two vowels in separate syllables

come together without a consonant separating them.

English speakers are very uncomfortable about this,

and so when it happens we'll often insert an R

to break up the hiatus.

So for example, this ice cream tastes bananary.

So people will insert an R as a way

of avoiding the vowels being together,

for instance in an expression like Africa and Asia.

Rdfporcazzo asks, Why is the letter R

pronounced so differently in each language?

So the letter R can be pronounced as an approximate er,

as an alveolar trill [trills], as a uvular trill [trills],

or as a tap [vocalizes],

and that's just in languages in Western Europe.

It's thought that in the Middle Ages

most Western European languages

used an alveolar trill [trills].

However, in the early modern period

the uvular trill [trills]

started to become fashionable in France

and then later in Germany.

And in English around the same time,

the trill [trills] was replaced with the approximate er,

which is easier to say,

although it doesn't sound as good.

One of the major reasons for sound change

is ease of articulation,

that and changing fashions.

There's often no more logic to it than that.

I hope you learned something today.

Thanks for listening.

See you next time.

[upbeat music]