#Lexicology

[victusinveritas]

Some major European languages by lexical difference to Turkish.

[possessivesuffix]

I read somewhere (forgot where) that proto uralic may be constructed with having a base 6 number system. Is this bullshit or something to take seriously?

Basically bullshit. There's zero evidence whatsoever for 6 as a base, i.e. for expressions to the effect of 6+1, 6+1, 6×2, 6×3, 6×6… The actually published hypotheses that I'm aware of only makes any argument for a limited number system with unique terms ending at 6, supposedly with no firm evidence for how anything larger would have been expressed. The broken telephone transmission from here to various random lists of trivia is kinda like claiming that English "has a base 12 system" just because eleven and twelve are their own not-morphologically-analyzable lexemes (and ignoring that already thirteen is then 3+10 and not 1+12).

We have good odds for actually reconstructing the number 10, too, in Proto-Uralic (*luka); but it is apparently in some morphological relationship with 'to count' (*lukə-), so leaves open some room for independent parallel developments. There's even a candidate for 20, but it comes in a few variants (ca. #komćV ~ #koćV) and is proposed to be derived from 'man' (*kojə ~ *koj-ma) (i.e. '20 fingers and toes'?).

It is a stronger argument still, I think, for base 10 already in PU that 8 and 9 are very widely in Uralic derived from 2 and 1, i.e. as something like "two short [of base]", "one short [of base]". As the constructions in question tend to be kinda opaque, I suppose someone could try to plead that 8 originally meant instead 6+2 and was reanalyzed as 10-2 afterwards, and then inspired a new formation for 9… but at minimum I'd want some evidence for the actual appearence of the term for 6 in there too then, which is not at all the case. (One long-standing hypothesis of derivation is instead that a handful of them, like Finnish kahdeksan, contain the PIE root for 10.)

Some additional arguments exist for a special status of 60, based on Permic and Mansi, but this still implies 10 as the primary base and there's again no evidence whatsoever even for "secondary-base" expressions like 60+10 or 60×2.

— Kind of besides all this is that I think I have some very tentative reasons to suspect an earlier, maybe pre-Proto-Uralic, base 4 system instead (e.g. Proto-Ugric *ńëla '8' has already been noted to kind of look similar to *neljä '4').

[english-lessons-bolzano]

WATER PRONUNCIATION

Silvio Pasqualini Bolzano inglese ripetizioni English

[eastern-lights]

Fellas, friends, pray for me, for I have state exams in English philology in a week and I will randomly pick a question from either phonetics, lexicology or stylistics and it’s not that I suck at phonetics or stylistics per se but...

I FUCKING LOVE LEXICOLOGY AND I WANT TO GET TO RANT ABOUT IT FOR 20 MINUTES BEFORE A COMMITTEE

so please fingers crossed that I pick lexicology, pretty please

[thepastisalreadywritten]

By Leanne Italie

November 27, 2023

NEW YORK (AP) — In an age of deepfakes and post-truth, as artificial intelligence rose and Elon Musk turned Twitter into X, the Merriam-Webster word of the year for 2023 is “authentic.”

Authentic cuisine. Authentic voice. Authentic self. Authenticity as artifice.

Lookups for the word are routinely heavy on the dictionary company’s site but were boosted to new heights throughout the year, editor at large Peter Sokolowski told The Associated Press in an exclusive interview.

“We see in 2023 a kind of crisis of authenticity,” he said ahead of Monday’s announcement of this year’s word.

“What we realize is that when we question authenticity, we value it even more.”

Sokolowski and his team don’t delve into the reasons people head for dictionaries and websites in search of specific words.

Rather, they chase the data on lookup spikes and world events that correlate.

This time around, there was no particularly huge boost at any given time but a constancy to the increased interest in “authentic.”

This was the year of artificial intelligence, for sure, but also a moment when ChatGPT-maker OpenAI suffered a leadership crisis.

Musk himself, at February’s World Government Summit in Dubai, urged the heads of companies, politicians, ministers and other leaders to “speak authentically” on social media by running their own accounts.

“Can we trust whether a student wrote this paper? Can we trust whether a politician made this statement? We don’t always trust what we see anymore,” Sokolowski said.

“We sometimes don’t believe our own eyes or our own ears. We are now recognizing that authenticity is a performance itself.”

Merriam-Webster’s entry for “authentic” is busy with meaning.

There’s “not false or imitation: real, actual,” as in an authentic cockney accent.

There’s “true to one’s own personality, spirit or character.”

There’s “worthy of acceptance or belief as conforming to or based on fact.”

There’s “made or done the same way as an original.”

And, perhaps the most telling, there’s “conforming to an original so as to reproduce essential features.”

“Authentic” follows 2022’s choice of “gaslighting.”

And 2023 marks Merriam-Webster’s 20th anniversary choosing a top word.

The company’s data crunchers filter out evergreen words like “love” and “affect” vs. “effect” that are always high in lookups among the 500,000 words it defines online.

This year, the wordsmiths also filtered out numerous five-letter words because Wordle and Quordle players clearly use the company’s site in search of them as they play the daily games, Sokolowski said.

Sokolowski, a lexicologist, and his colleagues have a bevy of runners-up for word of the year that also attracted unusual traffic.

They include “X” (lookups spiked in July after Musk’s rebranding of Twitter), “EGOT” (there was a boost in February when Viola Davis achieved that rare quadruple-award status with a Grammy) and “Elemental,” the title of a new Pixar film that had lookups jumping in June.

Rounding out the company’s top words of 2023, in no particular order:

RIZZ: It’s slang for “romantic appeal or charm” and seemingly short for charisma.

Merriam-Webster added the word to its online dictionary in September and it’s been among the top lookups since, Sokolowski said.

KIBBUTZ: There was a massive spike in lookups for “a communal farm or settlement in Israel” after Hamas militants attacked several near the Gaza Strip on October 7.

The first kibbutz was founded circa 1909 in what is today Israel.

IMPLODE: The June 18 implosion of the Titan submersible on a commercial expedition to explore the Titanic wreckage sent lookups soaring for this word, meaning “to burst inward.”

“It was a story that completely occupied the world,” Sokolowski said.

DEADNAME: Interest was high in what Merriam-Webster defines as “the name that a transgender person was given at birth and no longer uses upon transitioning.”

Lookups followed an onslaught of legislation aimed at curtailing LGBTQ+ rights around the country.

DOPPELGANGER: Sokolowski calls this “a word lover’s word.”

Merriam-Webster defines it as a “double,” an “alter ego” or a “ghostly counterpart.”

It derives from German folklore. Interest in the word surrounded Naomi Klein’s latest book, “Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World,” released this year.

She uses her own experience of often being confused with feminist author and conspiracy theorist Naomi Wolf as a springboard into a broader narrative on the crazy times we’re all living in.

CORONATION: King Charles III had one on May 6, sending lookups for the word soaring 15,681% over the year before, Sokolowski said.

Merriam-Webster defines it as “the act or occasion of crowning.”

DEEPFAKE: The dictionary company’s definition is “an image or recording that has been convincingly altered and manipulated to misrepresent someone as doing or saying something that was not actually done or said.”

Interest spiked after Musk’s lawyers in a Tesla lawsuit said he is often the subject of deepfake videos and again after the likeness of Ryan Reynolds appeared in a fake, AI-generated Tesla ad.

DYSTOPIAN: Climate chaos brought on interest in the word. So did books, movies and TV fare intended to entertain.

“It’s unusual to me to see a word that is used in both contexts,” Sokolowski said.

COVENANT: Lookups for the word meaning “a usually formal, solemn, and binding agreement” swelled on March 27, after a deadly mass shooting at The Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee.

The shooter was a former student killed by police after killing three students and three adults.

Interest also spiked with this year’s release of Guy Ritchie’s "The Covenant” and Abraham Verghese’s long-awaited new novel, “The Covenant of Water,” which Oprah Winfrey chose as a book club pick.

More recently, soon after U.S. Rep. Mike Johnson ascended to House speaker, a 2022 interview with the Louisiana congressman recirculated.

He discussed how his teen son was then his “accountability partner” on Covenant Eyes, software that tracks browser history and sends reports to each partner when porn or other potentially objectionable sites are viewed.

INDICT: Former President Donald Trump has been indicted on felony charges in four criminal cases in New York, Florida, Georgia and Washington, D.C., in addition to fighting a lawsuit that threatens his real estate empire.

[idi-o-mate]

Believe

After years of not searching but having this hypothesis in my head, the Oxford English Dictionary helped my find what I thought had to exist somewhere in the dark realms of past Englishes:

during my research on pragmatics and how they evolved over the past centuries, I stumbled across a neat verb: "lieve". Mind you, it's extinct now - at least its simplex form (which means that no bound lexical morphemes are affixed to the lexeme). You might see a resemblance to believe, however.

Many years ago, I noticed that this be- occurs in words like berept, beguile, before etc. and hypothesised that {be-} might be a now obscure morpheme indicating that the meaning of what it attaches to is forced in a certain direction. I have since analysed *{be-}*{lieve} as multimorphemic - at least for any specific past variety of English, perhaps even Proto-Germanic.

Now, browsing the OED, I find lieve and its Anglo-Saxon etymon liefan, carrying the meaning 'trust, exercise faith'. Considering that belief is 'faith in something or someone', I feel confirmed in my hypothesis. That's neat, isn't it?

I love this job.

[daybringersol]

wait. is ‘op’ a pronoun. it is used like a pronoun. if so that is really fucking cool.

[my-wordbook]

Revenant

1. a person who has returned, especially supposedly from the dead.

[theneptunianmind]

[martinshep]

Just found out about adrian room this guy is a mad scientist but in lexicology and onomastics instead of anything destructive

[english-lessons-bolzano]

WATER VS WATERS

The noun 'water' is part of a category of nouns known as 'uncountable', which means that they do not have plural forms. However, in literature, particularly in poetry, a huge amount of water as in a storm, river flood or tidal wave, can be referred to in plural as "waters".

Silvio Pasqualini Bolzano inglese ripetizioni English

[heich0e]

what's a word that you like to see when you read/use in your writing that always just HITS? i like intransigent. and perfunctory. and vociferous. leal. jubilant. besotted. opulent.

[cringefailnarwhal]

fighting demons every time when the inversion theory works on me because i won't let it fucking win

[daybringersol]

the internet has completely changed the meaning of the mark of ponctuation / and i dont even think people noticed.