Notices by Yoïn van Spijk (yvanspijk@toot.community)

The ancestor of the word 'girl' meant "child of any gender".

Its meaning narrowed to "young female human" during the Middle English period.

The meanings of words change over time. This is called semantic drift.

Click my new graphic below to have a closer look at five examples of narrowing.

Tomorrow we'll dive into the opposite semantic change: widening.

American far-right plutocrats are now targeting Wikipedia because it's a platform they don't control.

The Wikimedia Foundation is an invaluable non-profit organisation that is not for sale. Please help keeping it that way by making a donation - big or small:
https://donate.wikimedia.org

De bijsluiter van Roter paracetamol junior zegt dat je onmedicijnlijk contact moet opnemen als het fout gaat.

Dus, lieve kijkbuiskinderen, nooit klakkeloos in Word 'middel' zoeken en vervangen door 'medicijn'.

Na lange tijd heb ik weer eens een Nederlandstalig artikel op mijn website geschreven! 😃

Hoe klonk het Middelnederlands?

Hoe is die uitspraak gereconstrueerd?

En wat voor regionale verschillen waren er in die taalfase?

In een kwartiertje lees je het:
https://taalaandewandel.com/2024/11/28/winterse-liefde-in-het-middelnederlands/

Portuguese lacks a lot of n's.

For example, whereas Spanish has 'luna' (moon), in Portuguese it's 'lua'.

This n was lost in the Middle Ages.

Initially, it made the preceding vowel nasal, but this nasality was lost in many words after 1500.

Click the video to hear how it went:

The fact that 'Worcester' is pronounced 'Wooster' is wild.

But have you ever seen the five-syllable Old English name it stems from?

'Weogornaċeaster'.

It meant "fortified settlement of the Weogoran (a Saxon tribe)".

Click to hear a reconstruction of its pronunciation:

The word 'cretin' has the same origin as 'Christian'.

They both come from Latin 'Chrīstiānus'.

The meaning of 'cretin' made quite a journey:
Christian > person > simple person > poor fellow > person affected by Congenital hypothyroidism > idiot.

Click the graphic for more:

Italian 'sì', Spanish 'sí' and many more Romance words for "yes" come from Latin 'sīc', which meant "so; thus; like that". In Popular Latin it got an extra meaning: "yes", born out of the sense "like that", i.e. "like you said".

French 'oui' has a completely different origin. It comes from Old French 'oïl', a univerbation of 'o il', literally "yes, it (is/does/has etc.)".

'O' stemmed from Latin 'hoc' (this), which became 'òc' (yes) in Occitan, whose name was derived from this very word.

The Italian word 'aceto', meaning "vinegar", looks a lot like Spanish 'aceite', but that word means "oil". Why are their meanings so different?

That's because etymologically, these words are entirely unrelated.

'Aceto' comes from Latin 'acētum', while 'aceite' comes from Arabic 'az-zayt', literally "the oil".

The infographic shows how it went.

The word 'welcome' may be interpreted as 'well-come', like 'well-received' and 'well-deserved'.

However, it stems from a Germanic word meaning "desired guest".

Perhaps under the influence of French 'bienvenu' ("welcome", literally "well-come"), the perception and the form of the English word and its Germanic cognates were altered. The infographic shows how.

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Why is 'laugh' written with -ugh while it ends with an [f] sound?

It's because the spelling 'laugh' reflects how the word was pronounced in Late Middle English, some 500 years ago.

Click the video to listen to a phonetic reconstruction of how this verb evolved from 3rd-century BC Proto-Germanic to modern-day Standard English.

The Middle English to Early Modern English stages are based on the dialect of the region of London.

The word 'bairn' (child), which is used in Scots, Northern and Scottish English, is closely related to 'born' and 'to bear'.

These words all come from a root meaning "to carry".

When a baby is born it's been carried to term.
The infant is then carried around.

Zoom in for more:

The French adverb 'très' means "very", as in 'très grand' (very big).

It comes from the Latin preposition 'trāns' (beyond; across).

What happened in French was different from Spanish, where 'trāns' remained a preposition, 'tras' (after; behind; beyond), and Portuguese, where it became 'trás' (behind).

Here's more:

Why is 1/60 of a minute called a 'second', just like the ordinal number that goes with 'two'?

It's because a second is the second subdivision of an hour, a minute being the first.

The word 'minute' in turn simply comes from the Latin word for "small (part)".

Here's the entire story:

Spanish 'de donde' means "from where".

1000 years ago, in Old Spanish, this would've meant "from from from where".

Old Spanish had 'onde' (from where), but it ended up in a cycle where it was twice reinforced by 'de' (from):
onde > donde > de donde.

Click the infographic to read how this happened:

Beside singular and plural pronouns, the Germanic languages used to have dual pronouns.

For example, in Old English you could say:
'Hē seah unc' (He saw the two of us)
'Wit sāwon hine' (We two saw him)

My new infographic below tells you all about these Germanic dual pronouns.

What would the English, German, and Dutch dual pronouns look like now if they hadn't disappeared? Subscribe to my Patreon to find out: patreon.com/yvanspijk

'Lord' stems from Proto-Germanic *hlaibawardaz: "bread guardian".

This compound consists of two words:
- *hlaibaz, the ancestor of 'loaf'.
- *wardaz, which meant "guardian" and became English 'ward'.

Hear how over the course of 2500 years, its four syllables turned into one:

'Shirt' and 'skirt' are doublets: they both stem from Proto-Germanic *skurtijōn.

'Shirt' was inherited. It underwent the sound changes that turned Proto-Germanic into English.

'Skirt' was borrowed from another Germanic language: Old Norse.

Here's the finale of my doublets series: Germanic doublets in English.

Latin had six noun cases, but in all Romance languages except Romanian, nouns only have one singular form and one plural form left.

What happened?

This extra large infographic tells you in ten steps how the Latin case system collapsed – and how the accusative case emerged victorious:

If you dissect the French adverb 'aujourd'hui' (today) etymologically, you get five Latin words: 'ad illud diurnum dē hodiē' (on the day of today).

Many more Romance adverbs and prepositions were formed by combining words, already in spoken Latin or later in the history of its daughter languages.

In the infographic you see a number of stacked words that have an interesting history.