mike's web log

Crossword puzzles in Old English

Sat, 27 Jun 2026 12:11:18 GMT

I like doing crossword puzzles — they’re a challenge, I learn all sorts of things, and they're saving my brain.[1] I occasionally think that it would be fun to try my hand at writing a crossword puzzle.

The last couple of years I've also been taking classes in Old English, the language of the Anglo-Saxons. At some point these two interests came together and I thought well, how about a crossword puzzle in Old English?

I've done three of these now. It's been … a learning experience. (If you want to try your hand at them, they're on my Old English page.)

The first lesson, naturally, is that writing a crossword puzzle is not a trivial exercise. And I've had to think about and/or learn a bunch of other stuff as well:

No grid layout for me!
Self-imposed guidelines

Student vocabulary
Grid size
Number of crosses
Word length
Long versus short vowels

Writing clues
Grammar
Publishing the puzzles
Finally …
Suggestions?

No grid layout for me!

I learned pretty quickly that I probably was not going to be able to create — at least, not at first — the traditional grid-style puzzle:

[more]

Cleaving to forms of the past

Wed, 28 Jan 2026 08:53:27 GMT

English verbs can occasionally involve some "Wait a sec …" moments. For instance, here's an example where even a native speaker might hesitate a moment. How would you fill in the blanks?

Today he ______ (cleave) the tree with an ax.
Yesterday he ______ (cleave) the tree with an ax.
The tree was ________ (cleave) with an ax.

The verb cleave is old; we inherited it from Old English, where it was the verb cleofan. And this is where our issues of today started. In OE, it was an irregular ("strong") verb — to mark the past tense, it changed vowels and its participle ended in -n (like fly > flew > flown). Let's look at the OE versions of the sentences from earlier:

Todæg he cliefþ æxe þone beam.
Giestrandæge he cleaf æxe þone beam.
Se beam wierþ æxe geclofen.

But as happened with some other verbs that started as irregular/strong (help, laugh), cleave developed a regular ("weak") form, where the past tense ended in -ed/it. Unlike a verb like help, though, cleave hung on to remnants of its irregular/strong past.

The result is that now we have quite a choice of past tense forms! He cleaved/cleft/clove the tree, the tree was cleaved, it was cleft, it was cloven.

I was thinking about this because I ran across an instance of cloven recently in an unexpected (to me) place:

(source)

I think that while all of the past tense forms are technically correct, there might be affinities there. For example, we say a cloven hoof or cleft hoof, but apparently we don't say *cleaved hoof.

[more]

The Life of "St. Arthur" in Old English

Thu, 01 Jan 2026 17:12:06 GMT

Here's the final exercise that I did for our Old English poetry class. During that week we read something written in what's called metrical prose — it's essentially prose, but apparently Anglo-Saxon writers still liked their rhythms and their alliteration. ("Prose shaped like song" — Paull Franklin Baum) Unlike poetry, metrical prose isn't too concerned about the fussier metrical rules, and it doesn't include fancy kennings/metaphors.

A frequent topic of metrical prose was the life of a saint, such as Ælfric's Life of Saint Oswald. It's easy to imagine these pieces as entertaining (and, importantly, edifying) texts that were read out loud while monks ate their meals.

Our assignment was to write something in metrical prose that was kind of hagiographic. Here you go! :)

Wæs on þām tīdum yfel ealdum, micel unsibb wæs on þām lande,
In those days there was ancient evil, great unrest was in the land,

mǣnige fīend wǣron feorrancumen and āfeohtan woldon.
many enemies were come from far away and wanted to fight.

Se eþelweard Engla, Uther wæs hē gehāten,
The king of the English, he was named Uther

on weg gehworfen wæs, þus wearþ rīce hlāforde bedroren.
had passed away, thus the realm was bereaved of a lord.

Cnapa on þām lande lifde, cnihte tō his brēþer.
A boy lived in that land, a squire to his brother.

Artur wæs his nama; þes esne his mǣge wel þēowode.
His name was Arthur; this servant served his relative well.

[more]

Cattes wīsdōm/Cat wisdom

Sat, 15 Nov 2025 10:46:58 GMT

This week's Old English reading was a poem that goes by the name "Precepts", in which a father ~~lectures his son~~ dispenses life wisdom. You can read a modern English translation; here's a sample:

A fourth time the father taught again
his mind-beloved son, so that he remembered this:
“Abandon not your most intimate friend,
but ever always keep him close—
as is rightly fitting. Perform this courtesy,
so that you never become vile to your own friend.”

... and so on.

Well, heck, I knew someone around our own household who attempts to dispense wisdom in this way every morning. Thus my attempt at a precept.

Þus catte cræftglēaw, ful cene socc-þēof,
Thus the wise cat, very keen sock-thief,

āgendfrēan idelne undierne lǣrde,
the lazy owner clearly admonished,

hlaforde hlȳdde, uht-hlemman cȳþde:
to the master clamored, with dawn-noise said:

"Nǣfre ne lata þū on lof-dǣde, þǣt lēof-dēor forhyge,
"Never be late with glory-deeds, don't ignore the dear-animal,

þearfan þīnes hūs-þegnes. Beþence nīede,
the needs of your house-thane. Consider the distress,

gelǣste langoþum þīnes lēo-cynnes.
attend to the longings of your lion-kin.

[more]

I speak for the trees ... in Old English

Sat, 08 Nov 2025 13:39:25 GMT

One more, I think. Our assignment for the Old English class this week was …

Write 8–12 lines (not a strict limit) of Old English verse retelling a fable. It should end with a moral, or a bit of proverbial wisdom. Include 5 formulae. Use the Beowulf poet’s technique of following a description of an event with a lesson. Often these morals take the form: swā sceal… or swylc sceal….

People retold some excellent fables — The Scorpion and the Frog, The Wolf in Sheep's Clothing, and The Peacock and the Crane. One person retold Schleicher's fable (!), which was originally a fable written in reconstructed Proto Indo-European about a sheep and some horses.[1]

Anyway, I (as usual) didn't entirely follow the assignment, and I retold a more modern "fable" about capitalism written in 1971. The tale concerns a greedy Once-ler, a forest of profitable Truffula trees, the inhabitants of the woods, and a moralizing Lorax.

Gieddaþ glēomann fram gēardagum
Sings the minstrel from days gone by

bē wuda wrǣtlicum, wealde geþūfum,
about the wondrous woods, the leafy forest,

grāfe geapum grēne standan,
the spacious grove standing green,

trēowa getrumum, Truffula hāten.
the troop of trees called Truffula.

[more]

Gettysburg Address in Old English

Fri, 31 Oct 2025 15:24:36 GMT

Another fun assignment in our Old English class:

Write 6–10 lines (not a strict limit) of Old English verse paraphrasing a famous speech from history or literature. Include at least four formulae and at least one hypermetric line.

In Anglo-Saxon poetry there are 4 beats ("lifts") per line, 2 in the first half-line (the A verse) and 2 in the second half-line (the B verse). Here's an example from a modern English rendering of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; the half lines are separated with a caesura marked with ||.

The siege and assault || having ceased at Troy
as its blazing battlements || blackened to ash

But sometimes poets created "hypermetrical" lines that had more beats than this 2+2 convention, typically 3+2 or 3+3. As one source puts it, "No one knows what these changes in rhythm are meant to imply." Per our instructor, it seems that hypermetrical lines sometimes set off quotations and sometimes implied a kind of elevated thought. To state a couple of theories.

Anyway, a famous speech, you say? An easy choice is the Gettysburg Address (the original is below). Here's my rendering, which is not a line-for-line restatement, given the length[1] and that the assignment has us including formulae and whatnot.

Gefirn ūre fæderas on foldan forþbrohton
Long ago our fathers on earth brought forth [more]

Unlikely Anglo-Saxon heroes

Sat, 25 Oct 2025 10:55:47 GMT

This semester I'm taking a class in Old English (Anglo-Saxon) poetry. In the class we read poems and learn about poetic techniques. That includes the mechanics (alliteration, meter) as well as the themes and styles that were favored by Anglo-Saxon poets.

We also compose our own poems! The assignment for our most recent class was this:

Write 6–10 lines (not a strict limit) of Old English verse likening a particular fictional character to a Germanic hero. The more incongruous the comparison, the better! Include at least 5 formulae.

A fun challenge. In addition to tending to the mechanics, there's this "formulae" thing. Poetry was an oral art in the old days; the formulae are quasi-stock phrases — things like þegnas æt þearfe ("thanes at the hour of need") and strang and stiþmod ("strong and resolute"). It seems that Anglo-Saxon poets would improvise poems and could throw in these formulae to keep the poem moving along. Our class keeps a hoard of these stock phrases, conveniently sortable by how they alliterate.

Students wrote some outstanding stuff: there were two (!) poems with Star Wars themes (people came up with Old English terms for "X-wing fighter" and "lightsaber"); one about Bugs Bunny, with the excellent twist that the hunter has a lisp (hawa instead of hara for "hare", i.e. "wabbit"); and a poem about Babe the Sheep-Pig.

I wrote about a beloved character who was about as un-warrior-like as I could imagine. I took the "not a strict limit" instruction to heart and ended up summarizing (sort of) an entire chapter of a well-known children's book. Here's the attempt:

[more]

It's literally figurative

Mon, 29 Sep 2025 11:01:28 GMT

I shouldn't follow social media discussions about language usage, because the chance of insightful commentary is ... small. But even knowing this, I did follow a thread in which people were complaining about the figurative use of the word literally, as in something like "I literally died laughing".

A couple of sample cites from that thread:

This is the one change of usage I find most distressing. "Literally" is a word we previously used to clarify whether someone was using a word literally or figuratively. However, now we end up in an infinite regress: "did you use literally to mean literally or figuratively?".... "I meant literally".... "and by that do you mean figuratively?"... "I mean literally".... "and by that do you mean figuratively?" etc etc

language should (and does) evolve. But when a word shifts from a specific and precise meaning to an ambiguous, inexact or contrary meaning, we have not improved our ability to understand each other.

Apparently some people don't know that the "figurative" sense is listed as a second meaning in many dictionaries, including Merriam-Webster, American Heritage, Oxford Learner's, Collins, and Cambridge. In fact, I'd be surprised to find a contemporary dictionary that doesn't include this sense. When I noted that M-W has this entry, one guy argued "not the OED and therefore not definitive".[1 [more]

Slaughter-choosers and other "wæl" terms

Tue, 06 May 2025 10:58:14 GMT

Anyone who reads Old English poetry will soon enough encounter the word wæl, which means "slaughter". (There are a lot of fights in Old English poetry.) In poetic senses, it was also used for "battlefield" or sometimes metaphorically for those who had been slain in battle (hold that thought).

Naturally, there are compounds:

wælsceaft: "slaughter-shaft" = spear
wælstow: "slaughter-place" = battlefield
wælfus: "slaughter-eager" = ready for death
wældreore: "slaughter-gore" (dreore gave us "dreary", originally meaning "bloody; gory")

... and many more.

Ok. The word wæl died out in English, and we don't have any words today that directly descend from it. But the word also appeared in other Germanic languages, like Old Norse, which kindly lent us some words that are relatives of wæl.

One is Valhalla, the place in Norse mythology where slain heroes go. Although this concept wasn't widespread in Saxon thinking (apparently), you can see the etymological connection to wæl + hall, where wæl here refers to those who have been slain.

Another wæl-ish borrowing is Valkyrie, who are "maidens of Odin" (M-W) who conduct those slain heroes to Valhalla. The Norse/Germanic roots are again val, a relative of wæl, plus kyrie. The word kyrie is an inflection of the verb for "to choose" (ceosan in Old English).[1] So literally "slaughter-choosers".

That was in Old Norse mythology; whatever the Saxons might have believed about slaughter-choosers, [more]

In the "hood"

Tue, 29 Apr 2025 12:59:16 GMT

Old English had a word hād that meant "condition, state, character, nature, form". We don't have this word anymore, but the Old Englishers also used this word in a lot of compounds, some of which are still with us.

For example, they added hād to a number of ecclesiastical terms:

cirichād: order of the church ("churchhood")

munuchād: monastic state ("monkhood")

biscophād: bishopric ("bishophood")

One that we still have is prēosthad (priesthood).[1]

They used hād in a lot of terms that described the condition, state, character, nature, or form of people:

werhād: manhood

wīfhād: womanhood

cildhād: childhood

geogoþhād: youth ("youthhood")

ealdhād: old age ("oldhood")

cnihthād: boyhood, youth, (male) virginity[2]
hagosteadhād: bachelorhood

mægdenhād: (female) virginity, that is, maidenhood

You can see how hād was a useful term to cover concepts like these:

camphād: contest, war ("warhood")

gīslhād: being a hostage ("hostagehood")

þēowhād: service ("servicehoood")

druncenhād: drunkness ("drunkenhood")

A term that made me laugh was the term wǣpnedhād, which literally means "manhood". This (definitely attested) term was used to refer to a dude's "male sex", a usage we still see today.
[more]

The, um, joys of Old English pain

Tue, 22 Apr 2025 09:54:09 GMT

The human condition involves a fair bit of pain, so it's not surprising that Old English had a number of words for that unfortunate experience. Some, it turns out, are familiar to us even now. For example, one term was sār, which we know today as "sore, soreness". The Leechbook suggests that ...

Mugcwyrt ðæt sār ðara fōta of genimþ
("Mugwort the pain of the feet away takes")

In Beowulf (l. 975), there's a more vivid (indeed, poetic) description of how Grendel suffered:

ac hyne sār hafað
in nīð gripe nearwe befongen
balwon bendum
("but him pain has/in hostile-grip narrowly grasped/with baleful bonds")

Another OE word for pain was ece, which might initially look weird but is actually just "ache". Medieval medical texts were all over remedies for this:

Wiþ mūðes ece & wið tungan & wið þrotan genim fīfleafan wyrtwalan[1]
("For mouth pain or for tongue or for throat take root of cinquefoil")

Wiþ hēafod ece genim diles blōstman, sēoð on ele, smire þa þunwangan mid
("For head ache take dill flower, seethe it in oil, smear the temples with it")

One OE term for pain that seems to have been pretty common was wærc (sometimes wræc[2]). In the dictionary I use, I find these compounds, which frankly sound like a catalog of what it's like to get old, haha:

bānwræc: bone pain
brēostwærc: chest pain
cnēowærc: knee pain
[more]

An "Ur"-iginal term in Old English

Thu, 17 Apr 2025 18:48:44 GMT

In my Beowulf class, we’re about two-thirds of the way through. In this week's reading, I learned in line 2085 that Grendel the monster had a bag[1] that was made with orþanc (#); this is glossed as "skill, invention".

The word orþanc made sense to me only after I learned that þanc (the origin of "thanks") meant "thought; favor" and that the or prefix had a cognate in the German Ur, meaning "original" or "proto". So orþanc = "proto-thought", i.e., invention or skill. This sort of thing tickles me.

The or prefix in OE has several meanings, but in this sense of "original/proto" it also shows up in oreald (Ur-old="very old, primeval"[2]) and orlæg (Ur-law="fate, destiny"). This sense of the or prefix stopped being productive in English — that is, we can't create new words with it. But oddly, we did borrow some words from German (mostly in academic contexts) that use the equivalent Ur prefix, as in Urtext.

And maybe the German borrowing is a tiny bit productive? I found cites with references to ur-American, to the Ur- model of the Leica M3 [camera] (#), and to an Ur- boutique hotel (#). On Facebook, the editor and linguist Jonathon Owen found a reference to an "ur-feedback loop".

[more]

And now to "Beowulf"

Wed, 04 Sep 2024 08:04:58 GMT

This week I start an Old English class in which we begin our reading of Beowulf. I believe that the arc for most (all?) Old English courses is to start with the basics, work one's way through shorter pieces, and culminate with reading the big B.

This week's assignment is to read the first 79 lines, in which Hrothgar has the great hall Heorot built. (Soon, as many of us know, it will be visited by Grendel ...)

I had to think for a bit about whether I even wanted to take this Beowulf class. Back in 1980, I took the Old English series at the University of Washington. That consisted of two parts: part 1 was grammar and shorter readings, part 2 was Beowulf, one semester (quarter?) each. As I've been taking OE classes again over the last couple of years, I marvel at how rapidly we must have worked our way through the readings. I absolutely could not keep that pace up now in my dotage.

The experience back in the day also must have traumatized me a little, because ever since I restarted Old English classes, I've been stressed about the prospect of revisiting Beowulf. I expressed this hesitancy to our instructor, who has assured us multiple times that the readings we've done so far — including "The Battle of Maldon", "The Wanderer", "The Seafarer", and the horrible (to me) "Andreas" poem — have prepared us well for tackling Beowulf.

But I also had to stop and think about a question that several people have asked me: why am I taking Old English classes at all? The answer at first was easy — because it's fun! I've had enough German to recognize and be delighted by the resemblance between OE and German, not to mention the joy of finding ancestral and fossil words of modern English.[ [more]

The Bible and (my) language study

Tue, 14 Nov 2023 14:12:14 GMT

After I published my book, I was chatting with fellow word enthusiast Tim Stewart, who was one of the first readers. At one point he noted that there are a lot of references to various religious texts, and he gently asked “Do you have a background in Christianity?”

It was a keen observation. Per a casual count, I mention or cite the Bible about ten times, and I have references to the Lindisfarne Gospel, the Book of Common Prayer, and the Dead Sea Scrolls. I also have a reference to the Quran.

I can see why someone might conclude that I might have studied these texts in a religious context. But no. I was raised outside of any faith. In fact, because I didn’t go to Sunday school (or equivalent) and hadn’t read any religious texts growing up, I’ve often thought that I’ve been at a disadvantage when it comes to Biblical knowledge.

I apparently recognized this early on. When I was in high school, I took a class that was named something like “The Bible as Literature.”[1] I don’t remember much about that class, other than that I did a presentation on representations of the Madonna in art—something that seems like the type of knowledge one can have without having any religious motivation.

[more]

Covid and name-spelling

Sun, 11 Oct 2020 22:26:21 GMT
Covid and name-spelling
I've always had an issue in trying to tell people what my last name is. As I've written about before, people have a hard time understanding the name Pope. "Hope?" "Polk"? There's just something about that combination of consonants that's always hard to hear, especially over the phone.

Well, Covid certainly hasn't helped. I'm not a particularly clear talker under the best of circumstances. Add to that wearing a mask and talking through a plastic shield, and I feel like I practically have to yell to transact business when I'm at a store. One of the local shops posted the following sign, which might seem vaguely rude, but I think everyone understands the issue.

However, even yelling is often not enough to make my name clear to people across the counter. For some people, it can help to spell their name. But the letters P-O-P-E sound similar to other letters, like B, D, E, and spelling my name can just generate a second round of "did you mean …"? Another option is to say something like P as in Peter, and so on. When I talk on the phone with people who are accustomed to the problems of transcribing names, they'll sometimes do this.

Long ago the military solved this problem by inventing a so-called spelling or phonetic alphabet. You probably know this alphabet, which starts with Alfa (or Alpha), Bravo, Charlie, and finishes with Yankee, Zulu:

[more]

Duolingo Latin, Part 3: The limits of grammarless teaching

Wed, 22 Jan 2020 19:30:02 GMT

As I explained in part 1 and part 2, Duolingo's pattern- and repetition-based instruction is supposed to teach you a language without grammar instruction. How's that working for me?

I should note that I've had a lot of language instruction—I rassled with two-way prepositions in German and with the subjunctive in Spanish. I can explain phrasal verbs in English. I know what vocative means in "vocative comma."

So I'm probably an outlier in Duolingo's audience. Still, language learning is language learning, and even when you're studying a language the traditional way, you're only going to get better if you practice and practice, which is one of Duolingo's mantras. Could I learn Latin through repetition alone and with no explanations?

Possibly, but I wasn't patient enough to find out. Even at the very beginning, when I was presented with a new pattern, I was both learning it and analyzing it. To repeat an example from earlier:

Feminae domi sunt. (The women are at home)
Viri domi sunt. (The men are at home)
Pueri domi sunt. (The boys are at home)
Puellae domi sunt. (The girls are at home)

From this I abstracted that one plural ending was -i and another was -ae. I might have even concluded that -i is a plural for masculine nouns and -ae [more]

Duolingo Latin, Part 2: How to learn a language "naturally"

Tue, 21 Jan 2020 21:40:27 GMT

As I said in part 1, when I started with Duolingo, I realized that it used the principles of the audio-lingual method (ALM), which emphasizes patterns and practice over grammar instruction. But how do you teach someone a language starting from nothing? And, as per the ALM/naturalistic philosophy, without explaining anything?

When I started with Duolingo, I didn't know how the app worked. Now I'm sorry that I didn't start capturing screenshots right at the beginning. But I'll try to recapture some of it by showing you roughly how the teaching progresses.

1. Start with pictures

Duolingo started by introducing basic vocabulary with pictures, like this:

As you can see, they make these as easy get as possible. Hey, Latin is fun!

2. Solicit sentences where it's hard to make errors

The next phase is to have you recognize words that you've been introduced to. They do this in a couple of ways. One approach is the classic multiple-choice answer. In my exercises, there have only been 3 choices, and I've found that the 2 incorrect answers are pretty easy to eliminate. They're not trying to trip you up; they're trying to make you successful, so they're asking for just a tiny bit of effort. So far.

(By the time I got around to snapping this screen, I'd gone quite a bit beyond the intro to the words puer ("boy") and urbs ("city"), obviously.)

[more]

Duolingo Latin, Part 1: It's ALM!

Mon, 20 Jan 2020 22:19:59 GMT

A couple of months ago, I started learning Latin by using Duolingo, a language-learning app for your phone or browser. I sort of knew about Duolingo because my kids had been using it, one to work on Spanish and the other to work on Japanese. They'd shared with me some of the amusingly strange sentences that Duolingo produces, like "A cat does not play piano" in Japanese.

When I learned that Duolingo had a course in beta for Latin, I thought I'd give it a shot. I'd somehow managed to never study Latin, a language that's always seemed not only inherently interesting but useful for understanding Spanish and, of course, for grokking English word origins.

We pause briefly here for my favorite scene from the movie "Life of Brian":

As soon as I started Duolingo, I recognized the pedagogic technique they were following. When I was learning German in high school, we knew this as the audio-lingual method[1]. To quote one source, this "foster[s] naturalistic language acquisition in a classroom setting." The idea is that you learn (internalize) patterns of the language. They don't explain any grammar. Instead, the instruction teaches you short snippets that it then changes in very controlled ways so that you can follow along. Here's an example:
[more]

Friday words #153: WOTY 2018 edition

Fri, 28 Dec 2018 07:49:06 GMT

I will not be attending the American Dialect Society's 2019 conference, which takes place next week in New York. This means I'll miss the highlight of the conference, which is the annual selection of the ADS Word of the Year. The nominating and voting meetings are raucous events that are hugely entertaining, even if you otherwise don't care one single fig for the rest of the ADS conference. (It's true; ask my wife.)

So this week for Friday words, instead of the normal, I'm going to list the words that I personally have been tracking for 2018.[1] Since anyone can nominate a word of the year, I also offer these as nominations in case anyone wants to present them at the live session.

To reiterate the pretty generous ADS criteria for nominations for WOTY:

doesn't have to be brand-new

needs to have shown a rise in popularity in 2018

can be a multiword phrase or compound

I'll mostly use the categories that ADS uses for their nominations, except that I have no particular hashtag to offer, and emoji? Not me. I have not actually picked winners here, for any category or overall. Feel free to vote for your favorite(s)!

Content warning: The list contains offensive terms and terms with possible political bias.

Political word of the year

[more]

"Who": and then there were 5

Sun, 09 Dec 2018 22:50:07 GMT

There was a flutter of discussion recently on social media (again) about who and whom. Mary Norris, an editor formerly of the The New Yorker, argues "So does civilization depend on the vulnerable 'whom'? Yes." John McIntyre, long-time editor at the Baltimore Sun, instead argues Just use "who"—in other words, forget about whom.

A not uncommon pro-whom position is that it's important to maintain the distinction for the sake of clarity. Is that true? I've been thinking about something I read recently about case marking in English, which is what the whole who/whom thing is theoretically about. We case-mark some words in English—that is, we change their form to indicate whether they are the subject or object in a sentence:

She called him and then sent them a text.

She is the subject; him and them are objects. We use specific forms of the pronouns here to indicate who's doing what. Just for fun, let's create a Very Incorrect Sentence:

*Her called he and then sent they a text.

I think we agree that in this sentence, the case marking for the pronouns is all wrong.

But let's look at a similar example:

Mary called John and then sent the editors a text.

Same sentence, only this time we use nouns instead of pronouns. Which is the interesting point: in all of English, we use case marking to distinguish subject and object for a mere seven words: I (me), he (him), she (her), we (us), they (them), who (whom), and whoever (whomever).

Notice what's missing in this list of case-marked words:

Other pronouns (you [more]

Grandboy talk update

Sun, 25 Nov 2018 22:20:36 GMT

Over the Thanksgiving holiday I got another chance to eavesdrop at leisure on grandboy J’s language development. (I did part 1 in April when he turned 2.)

The tl;dr is that he’s progressing quickly, as one would expect from a kid who’s 2-1/2 years old. He talks up a storm, and he’s reached a point where you interact naturally with him using language—that is, you talk to him assuming that he’ll understand you, and virtually everything he says makes sense. Of course, he makes errors, but they're interesting because they seem to tell us something about language development.

Phonology

J has trouble with unvoiced th (/θ/), which he often pronounces as an /f/ (“wif,” “I’m firsty”). I thought I detected that he can produce soft th sounds (/ð/), as in the and this. This would not entirely make sense, and it's possible that for /ð/ he's producing /v/ sounds and I just wasn't hearing it.

He also has issues with /r/, which he sometimes pronounces as /w/ (“weally” for really). I didn’t pay close enough attention to determine whether he always does this.

J has trouble with some other clusters as well. The one that struck me was “code” for cold. There must be something systematic about that one, because I’ve heard some adults do something similar, like “woof” for wolf.

Other

Those are Triceratopses.
Generalization of -s/-es as plural.

Guys, look!
Imperative; second-person plural vocative (guys).

Opa, knock down!
Used to mean both “I am knocking you down!” and “Knock me down!”

Can you take[ ]apart it?
Not yet recognizing take apart as a phrasal verb, or just a mistake in moving the particle to the end.

I don't know what happened.
Do-negation ( [more]

Friday words #133

Fri, 10 Aug 2018 07:48:56 GMT

Here we are in August, which reminds me that the name of the month is a capitonym—a word that changes meaning depending on whether it’s capitalized: “The august professor was born in August.”

I have two new-to-me words this week that are related to shapes. The first is scutoid (apparently pronounced SCOO-toid), which is a remarkable thing: a heretofore unknown geometric shape. I mean, you’d think by now we’d pretty much found them all, right? The actual shape is a bit involved to describe, so I’ll lift the definition and more from the article where I learned about this: “prism-like, with six sides one end, five on the other, and a strange triangular face on one of the long edges of the prism.”

Something I found interesting was that scientists modeled geometries to determine which shape would fit together best when arranged both flat and in a curve. Then they went looking for that shape, and they found it! Apparently it’s all over the place in nature. Not only did they predict the shape and then find it, they got to name it. The name is based on the scutellum of a beetle, which is sort of the carapace of the insect.

A second shape name came to me recently via Friend Ralph on Twitter. He pointed me to a blog post that mentioned a lemniscate [more]

Friday words #132

Fri, 03 Aug 2018 10:03:15 GMT

Politics surely is a rich source of new terms, even if most of them are weasely. This week I saw an article about James Allsup, a prominent alt-right personalty. Allsup had been called a white supremacist, and various GOP officials in the state of Washington had officially distanced themselves from him. But in private, a local party chair who supported Allsup said that the candidate had been label-lynched.

There are a number of interesting things about this term. The connotation is that the Allsup had been metaphorically killed via language, moreover with the idea that this had been done extra-legally. Dictionaries I've looked at don't list metaphoric meanings of lynch, but it's not the first time that the word has been used like this; Clarence Thomas used the expression high-tech lynch mob to describe (and, as some say, shut down) uncomfortable questions that came up during his confirmation hearings for a seat on the Supreme Court.

The word lynch is a very fraught term in the US. It invokes senses of mob rule, of enduring and extreme prejudice, and of innocent victims. And of course lynching was prevalent for a long time in the US as a largely unpunished crime that was used to exert violent and unjust control over a minority population. Invoking the word lynch is serious business. So it's some kind of verbal jujitsu to use a term like lynch [more]

Lexicalization on-prem

Wed, 01 Aug 2018 08:10:10 GMT

Last week there was a technical conference about cloud technology that a lot of our colleagues went to. As they do, people live-tweeted about what they were seeing. At one point, our boss tweeted an observation about the term on-premises:

My main takeaway from #GoogleNext18 : ”on premise" in in such common usage we need to just adopt it @mikepope @JanJBultmann
— Jim Travis (@JimTravisTweets) July 27, 2018

This was a wee bit of a joke. Those of us who work in cloud technologies talk about on-premises resources, which refers to stuff that isn’t in the cloud, i.e., that's on the customer's site. And we’ve been adamant that it’s is on-premises, with an s at the end, not on-premise. The word premise refers to a proposition or basis ("The premise of the TV show is that …"), which is quite a different meaning than premises, which refers to the space occupied by a business ("No drinking is allowed on the premises").

[Source]

But in our editing we change on-premise to on-premises all the time. Which is to say, s-less [more]

Friday words #131

Fri, 27 Jul 2018 07:38:57 GMT

Up here in the northern hemisphere, we're in the midst of the so-called dog days, which does not stand for "drained of gumption," no matter what you might read on the internet.

Everyone knows the word schadenfreude, right? Taking satisfaction in someone's misfortune. German, of course: Schaden ("damage, injury, disadvantage") and Freude ("joy"). This week I came across two (!) additional new-to-me words that describe our feels about others.

The first is another borrowing from our linguistic cousins: gluckschmerz (or Glückschmerz, if you want to get all German-y about it). This is kind of the opposite of schadenfreude—gluckschmerz describes the pain you feel at someone else's good fortune—Glück ("luck, fortune, happiness") and Schmerz ("pain"). Your annoying neighbor got a promotion? Gluckschmerz. Some rando won the raffle that you were holding a ticket for? Gluckschmerz. Sure, we have the word envy, but there's something a little more precise about the word gluckschmerz, says me.

On a rather less solipsistic note, Friend Ashley introduced me this week to the word compersion, which refers to the joy you feel at someone else's joy, specifically that of a "loved one." This word derives from the Latin word for godfather (compater), which suggests a kind of familial connection between the people involved. That said, it's a word that has currency [more]