Ryan Byrd’s Ramblings

Cognates are words that have common linguistic roots (annoying people call these etymological origins.) These words sometimes look the same too. Contrast false cognates, on the other hand, which are pairs of words in different languages that are similar in form/meaning but have different etymological origins. Many people confuse false cognates with false friends (faux amis) which, on the other hand yet*, are pairs of words or phrases in two languages that look or sound similar, but differ in meaning. To summarize, whereas false cognates mean roughly the same thing in two languages, false friends bear two distinct (sometimes even opposite) meanings. Examples, please!

In Arabic (and Hebrew) akh means brother and in Mongolian akh is also the word for brother, but these false cognates have no etymological relationship.

Next, consider the French word magasin, which you might think means magazine, that is, a periodical publication. But it doesn’t. Magasin is the French word for store. Faux amis!

But back to cognates. Let’s use them to learn the same word in a ton of languages.

For instance, the word “night”:

• nacht (German) / nacht (Dutch)
• nicht (Scots)
• natt (Swedish, Norwegian) / nat (Danish) / nátt (Faroese)
• nóttIcelandic)
• noc (Czech, Slovak, Polish)
• ночь, noch (Russian)
• ноќ, noć (Macedonian)
• нощ, nosht (Bulgarian)
• ніч, nich (Ukrainian)
• ноч, noch/noč (Belarusian)
• noč (Slovene) / noć (Croatian) / noć (Bosnian)
• νύξ, nyx (Ancient Greek
• νύχτα/nyhta in Modern Greek)
• nox (Latin)
• nakt-Sanskrit)
• natë (Albanian)
• noche (Spanish)
• nos (Welsh)
• nueche (Asturian)
• noite (Portuguese & Galician)
• notte (Italian)
• nit (Catalan)
• noapte (Romanian)
• nakts (Latvian)
• naktis (Lithuanian)
• nuit (French)

All from the Proto-Indo-European nókts. Commit them to memory and then impress your Albanian, Romanian and Czech friends!

* that would be three, and yes, I can count.

Silly Riddle of the Day:

Think of words ending in -gry. ‘Angry’ and ‘hungry’ are two of them. What is the third word in the English language? You use it every day, and if you were reading carefully, I’ve just told you what it is.

(First one who posts the answer gets a gold star.)

MORE WORD FUN:

• Maybe you know that there are four words with no rhymes: silver, orange, purple and month. BUT silver and orange have HALF RHYMES! Lozenge with orange and salver with silver.
• “Bookkeeper”/”bookkeeping” are the only words with three consecutive repeated letters, unless you include hyphenated words, then you have “sweet-toothed” too.
• After primary, secondary, we have tertiary, quaternary, quinary, senary, septenary, octonary, nonary and denary. Jumping to 12th we have duodenary and let’s not forget 20th, vigenary.
• Though the letter ‘e’ appears more often in words than any other, there are more words beginning with the letter ‘s’.
• I’ve claimed that the longest one-syllable English word is screeched, at nine letters, but there are other 9 letter words with one-syllable as well: scratched, scrounged, scrunched, stretched, straights and strengths.
• Vacuum and continuum are two words that have two u’s in a row.
• “Ough” can be pronounced in at least nine different ways: “A rough-coated, dough-faced, thoughtful ploughman strode through the streets of Scarborough; after falling into a slough, he coughed and hiccoughed.”
• ‘Skepticisms’ is supposed to be the longest word that is typed using alternate hands, try it and see!
• The abbreviation for pound, “lb.,” comes from the astrological sign Libra (symbolized by scales.)

Here are two more of my famous word fun and word trivia posts.

src: my brain, google, http://www.askoxford.com/asktheexperts/faq/aboutwords/contranym?view=uk, http://www.jayp.net/trivia/lang01.htm

It’s local election time here in Salt Lake City and candidates vying for votes have littered every spare square foot of public land with their signage:

Jinkins for Sheriff
Smith for Auditor
Robbins for District Attorney
Potter for some other boring position no one cares about

Everyone wants to get elected, or reelected. So bad, that the politicians have had to re-invent the language rules to emphasize that they’ve already been elected once. As a part-time, amateur English language bigot, I’d like to re-spond to their blatant dis-respect of our tongue. In sum, they need to re-view their signs, re-align themselves to the rules, re-write the copy, or re-move the Re-Election signs altogether!

A quick Google search reveals The Blue Book of Grammar and Punctuation, which states ( Rule 8 ):

Use the hyphen with the prefix re only when:

the re means again
AND
omitting the hyphen would cause confusion with another word.
Examples Will she recover from her illness?
Re does not mean again.

I have re-covered the sofa twice.
Re does mean again
AND
omitting the hyphen would have caused confusion with another word.

The stamps have been reissued.
Re means again but would not cause confusion with another word.

I must re-press the shirt.
Re means again
AND
omitting the hyphen would have caused confusion with another word.

Yes, I know that the hyphen-less faction loses in the Google reelection fighting, then again, a lot of people go to Vegas and gamble, watch NASCAR and smoke cigarettes. Plenty of company does not intelligence make.

It is our (my) position that reelect is the correct writing and that re-elect is a deviant variant form.

Speaking of deviating, you probably know that the words “language” and “tongue” are related. Bilingual, the ability to speak in two languages, is quite literally “two tongues”. Here are some lingual (meaning tongue, not language) dexterity tests* for you:

• cherry stem tying
• starburst unwrapping
• sunflower seed cracking

* I feel confident to comment on this matter because I’m often told I am a particularly good kisser. It’s mostly perfected technique gained from years of experience.

Thanks go to Beau Scott for the hyphen research.

Podcast

Everybody has their English language pet peeves; things other people say incorrectly that bother us.
I’ll try to debunk two I hear often:

1. “to be honest“
   I think the real meaning of “to be honest”, is “to be perfectly upfront, frank, candid, transparent”. That’s not the same as being truthful. When used in that sense, it doesn’t imply that you’re normally (or at least you have been) dishonest.
2. “Continue On”
   first some definitions:
   • Continue means “To go on with a particular action or in a particular condition; persist”
   • Onward means “Moving or tending forward.”

   And now my analysis: I could be swayed to believe that “continue on” is short for “continue onward”. Buying that, the inclusion of “on/onward” does provide the additional information of direction (sort of a vague analog to scalar and vector quantities). So, in contraposition to continuing on, you could: continue backwards/backing up, continue downwards, continue along a tangent, continue turning, etc.

And that concludes today’s unsolicited English language rant. Oh, my pet peeves? the misuse of flesh out/flush out, and the use of “irregardless”.

For a comprehensive summary of english errors

A previous entry on English mistakes

I’ve been thinking a lot about homographs lately and, in particular, their subclasses. Here is a new word for you: dihomograph*. A dihomograph is a homograph where the pronunciation or syllabic stress of the word changes based on the part of speech. Here are some examples:

• You record a record
• You address an address (when talking about a location, not a speech)
• You contest a contest
• You refuse refuse
• You convert a convert
• You reject a reject
• You subject the subject
• You abstract an abstract
• You extract the extract
• You can envelope the envelope
• You present the present
• You probably can’t incense the incense, unless you do so anthropomorphically
• You can route a route
• You might be able to upset the upset
• Can a defect defect?

*Coined April 19, 2006 Cory Bickmore, Ryan Byrd

On the rare occasion my television viewing happens to stray from the History Channel and land on MTV, I’ve come to expect to see very little of quality. I am accustomed to seeing heavily adorned rapstars surrounded by less-than-dressed libidinous women. The rapstars constantly yell about how much bling-bling they have and how good they are at rapping.

Imagine my surprise when I heard a rhythmic back-beat with lyrics that included “ratiocinate” followed by “recalcitrant” and “circumlocutions”. Something just wasn’t right. This was MTV afterall; polysyllabic is just not cool.

I’m not given to recreational narcotics (unlike our fictional friend Sherlock Homes), nor was I inebriated at the time (or any time for that matter). In generation X parlance, some wack cats had spun some dope phat licks. Remind me never to try speaking like that again.

In case I’ve not been clear, what I’m trying to say is that Blake Harrison and Alexander Rappaport just put out a CD called Flocabulary and MTV was letting them plug their music.

I’d like to jump on that promotion bandwagon. I like the concept of Flocabulary — mixing SAT level vocabulary with hiphop music and rhymes. I also like listening to their CD, which came in the mail earlier last week ($12.95). You can get a study guide too ($9.95).

So you should all go out and buy their CD, unless, of course, you already know what pellucid, protean, and physiognomy mean. But, I didn’t know, and I’m betting you don’t either.

Now you can find out: it’s a cool reverse dictionary; you describe the word and One Look returns the word. Very nice. (Thanks, CBB for the link)

While browsing through dictionary.com, you might discover (and it ought not to come as much of a surprise) that the word “mister” is related to the word “master.” That they sound alike is a bit misleading I think. I believe they’re connected, but the path is a bit more circuitous (though not exactly serpentine.) Let’s begin.

Hierarchical feudalistic Europe; a bunch of people work for a higher-up (the master) who ostensibly, in turn, protects them. In a generic sense, the word “lord” means master. Think “lord of the castle.” In French, “lord” is “seigneur.” So, “my lord,” becomes “mon seigneur.” Say that a few times fast and we have efficient Frenchmen coming up with “monsieur.” The English overhearing “monsieur” came up with their version, “mister.”

That’s how I believe it happened. “Mister” began appearing in the 1500s, and as soon as I get around to it, or get my butt in gear (see below), I’m going to find references proving that “monsieur” is much, much older. That wont prove the connection, but might bolster my claim somewhat.

Motivational Tools:

Left-handed people have been lingually discriminated for some time. Let’s take a short journey and see what we can uncover.

First, the word right means not only “the opposite side of left”, but also “correct.” To be saved, for example, we must find ourselves on the “right hand of God” (note the usage of both meanings.)

Then we have the word “ambidextrous” which is from Latin ambi- “on both sides” and Latin dexter, right-handed. Thus, to be ambidextrous means to have two right hands.

Focusing on Latin dexter, we derive “dexterous”, which means skillful or adroit. Left-handed people aren’t so handy.

First, in French, left is “gauche”, which means “the opposite side of right” as well as lacking social polish or tactless or awkward. What about Latin? Well, left in Latin is sinister (with all the English word’s connotations) and means “on the left” as well as unlucky. Hence, in English, to describe as gauche means to attribute backwardness to something.

Famous left-handers include:

Benjamin Franklin
Lewis Carroll
Michelangelo
M.C. Escher
Albert Einstein
Bill Gates

We all know that when two roads diverge in a yellow wood we’re supposed to take the one less traveled. ‘Cause it makes all the difference.

But what do you do at the confluence of three roads? If you like to people watch, you might sit at the corner and idly chat with the passersby. It’s likely that near such intersections would be posted information notices, etc. Throw in a tavern and you’d have quite the conglomeration. Such common meeting places were looked down on in Roman times as of little importance and time wasting.

Latin lesson of the day: Tri=three, via=road. As three roads we have the word “trivia”, or something of little importance. Ta dah!