Here's something about English that amazes me:

TH at the beginning of a word (typically) stands for one of two sounds: /θ/ as in 'thin' or /ð/ as in 'this'.

The difference works according to what type of word it is: lexical TH words start with /θ/, functional TH words with /ð/! 'Lexical/functional' are vague terms, so to clarify: lexical words that those that refer to something in the world - things, actions, properties. They're 'meaningful'.

Functional words are different. They don't have a reference in the same way, and serve grammatical functions.

Recently, someone made the fair point that I don't cite sources with my tweets.

While I'm always happy to provide them if asked, it's true, there's hard work going uncredited.

So, it's a new year and a chance to remedy that! Here's a thread on some of the great resources I use. I rely so much on certain resources to do my funny little language tweets - it all wouldn't be possible without them.

Even when my knowledge of languages and historical linguistics are enough for me to think up the connections, I still need somewhere to check them!

There's a lot of difference between the Indo-European languages as to the dates of their oldest surviving sources.

While we have Hittite sources from the 2nd millennium BC, the earliest Albanian text is from 1462 AD.

It's a baptismal formula, quoted by the Archbishop of Durrës. The formula reads:

"Un'te paghesont pr'emenit Atit e Birit e Spertit Senit" ('I baptise you in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit')

It includes a borrowing from Latin Spīritus Sānctus, as well as the word emenit 'the name', a cognate of Latin nōmen and English name.

"For some say 'oc', others say 'oil' and others 'si' when agreeing."

This is Dante's description of the ways of saying 'yes' in three dialects of western Europe - among which we can recognise Modern French oui and Italian sì.

It's Romance linguistics from the 14th century! Oc is the word for 'yes' used by speakers, Dante continues, in "a western part of southern Europe, starting from the borders of Genoa".

It's from this use that the language within that area gets its name - Occitan, the 'yes' language!

"Quia cod estis, fui, et quod sum, essere abetis."

This Latin inscription dates to the 7th century (or later). To be precise, it's Late Latin and it contains features important for the history of the Romance languages - which get linguists rather excited.

Let's find out why! 🧵 The sentence has nothing to do with fish, but translates to "For what you are, I was, and what I am, you will be".

Not too surprisingly, the text was part of a tomb in the Basilica of Santi Quattro Coronati, in Rome. Sadly, I can't find a picture of the original.

The English modal verb 'must' lacks a past tense form. We say 'had to' instead.

This is because 'must' was once itself a past tense form - of the archaic verb 'mote'.

Present 'mote' and past 'must' began to lose their association in Middle English, just like 'owe' and 'ought'. This old 'mote/must' paradigm brings English into line with the verbs for 'must' in other Germanic languages.

Dutch has 'ik moet' in the present tense and 'ik moest' in the past, while German, with a bit of consonant shifting, has present 'ich muss' and past 'ich musste'.

Lunchtime quiz question:

The Oxford English Dictionary has bands for word frequency. The top band, 8, is for high-frequency words that appear 1000 times per million words in Modern English.

Band 8 contains pronouns, articles and common verbs - and only one noun. What is it? Please feel free to comment with your best shot and I'll post the answer in a hour or so when I've had lunch and thought of a way to make the big reveal less anticlimactic.

The words 'cow', 'butter' and 'bovine' are all related to each other - as well as, possibly, 'priest'. I have to stress "possibly", because multiple etymologies are possible, but I at least think it works - so, here goes.

'Priest' is commonly assumed to come, via Latin, from Greek presbúteros, the older, broader meaning of which was simply 'an elder'.

'Orkney' comes, via Old Norse, from a root meaning 'pig', the same origin as Latin porcus. The word as it looks today is a combination of ork- 'pig' (which Old Norse speakers reinterpreted as orkn 'seal') and Old Norse eyjar 'islands'.

The ork- part has to predate the arrival of Old Norse, because the islands are mentioned in Latin and Greek as the Orcades.

The Iliad gets its name from Greek Īlion, the alternative name for the city of Troy.

Because of poetic metre and a city called 'Wilusa' in Hittite, we believe that the Greek name used to be Wilion. This changed with the loss of the sound /w/, represented by the archaic letter ϝ.

https://twitter.com/DannyBate4/status/1308343490363953153

The usual name used for the letter ϝ is 'digamma', so called because it looks like two gammas put together.

When you bear in mind that many Greek words used to begin with ϝ and the sound /w/, connections to English appear.

For example:

oinos/woinos - wine
érgon/*wérgon - work

'Poodle' comes from pudeln, a Low German verb meaning 'to splash in water'. It's related to English 'puddle'. I don't know why, but that dog is really giving off a strong 'I have a weekly column in The Guardian' vibe

The archaic English verb 'low', meaning to moo like a cow, is not etymologically related to the everyday adjective 'low'. It is, however, related to 'ecclesiastical'. I think I might just leave it at this and go and get another beer

'Salsa' comes, via Spanish, from Latin salsus, meaning 'salted'.

The same word also passed from Latin into Old French, in which it underwent the sound change of original /al/ into Old French /au/.

The resulting word is found today in both French and English - namely, 'sauce'. The change from Latin /al/ to /au/ (and then simply /o/) had a widespread effect across Old French. Most other Romance languages, however, did not through the change.

For example, compare French saumon 'salmon', chaud 'hot' and au 'to the' with Italian salmone, caldo and al.

One interesting sound change in Old Latin was the change of /dw/ into /b/.

For example, bellum 'war' (from which English gets 'bellicose' and 'belligerent') was once duellom.

However, duellom did survive as an archaism, most often in poetry, and is the origin of English 'duel'. The modern meaning of 'duel' as a fight between two parties (rather than an all-out war) is probably due to a medieval association of the word with the number two, which in Latin is duo.

A History of Late Latin Grammar, Part 1: One big difference between Latin and the Romance languages is how they connect clauses together.

Latin made much use of the word ut (most often translated as 'that', 'so that' or 'to').

Though once so important, ut in fact has no descendant words in the Romance languages today.

history book: "...Venice was ruled by the doge..."

my brain: (serene meme innocently stolen from Know Your Meme, I do believe)

what I wanted was the Wikipedia article on Icelandic phonology, but I got rather distracted "the world's largest" is quite a claim, I demand to see the measurements, calculations and comparisons

The English words 'past', 'present' and 'future' come from a past, a present and a future participle in Latin. 'Future' comes from Latin futūrus, which in grammatical terms is a future participle - something halfway between a verb (with a future meaning) and an adjective.

The verb here is esse 'to be', so futūrus means 'to be going to be'.

(futūrus is also related to English 'be'!)

can't believe I got to spend the afternoon dragging @oldenoughtosay around Norwich's churches! also can't believe we met an actual celebrity??

pictured: the best man, trying to keep smiling and keep all his many emotions in check I have to say, I don't think the vicar appreciated it when she asked for me to hand over the ring and I said "the ring is mine", put it on and disappeared

The words 'parliament' and 'devil' come from the same origin - namely the Ancient Greek verb bállō, meaning 'I throw'. If you've thinking, as my friend put it, "sure Danny, whatever you say", let me explain.

Greek added the prefix dia- to bállō to make diabállō 'I deceive, slander'.

Going off a Hebrew original, this led to díabolos 'slanderer, devil', which, via Latin, would become OE dēofol.