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Fun Facts About English #87 – Capitonyms

11/05/2020 by admin

A capitonym is a word that changes its nuance, meaning, and sometimes pronunciation when it’s capitalized; capitalization being applied due to one form being a proper noun, such as Bill/bill, or an eponym, such as Augustus/august. Some capitonyms are homonyms (Rose/rose), and others can be heteronyms (Polish/polish, Tangier/tangier) where pronunciation changes accordingly. The word capitonym is a portmanteau of the word capital with the suffix -onym.

Besides the list of first names above, last names that are capitonyms often fall in the realms of labor, colors, and animals, like baker, cook, farmer, brown, white, green, wolf, fox, and parrot. When first meeting people with such surnames, best to spare them your witticism.

Capitonyms may or may not be etymologically related in their capitalized and un-capitalized forms. The month of May and the verb may don’t share an etymology, whereas Catholic and catholic both derive from a Greek adjective meaning “universal.”

Capital letters can be used to differentiate a set of objects or people and an example of that set, like a moon and the Moon, a dad and Dad, or a bible and the Bible.

Religious contexts have very specific rules for capital spelling. The general word god is capitalized to God when referring to the deity of monotheistic religions. When referencing said deities, common pronouns like me, mine, you, and yours are usually capitalized as well. Within the liturgy, there is Mass as opposed to physical mass, and church denoting a building compared to Church when referring to members of a religious group. In the same lofty vein, words carrying a meaning of transcendence, religious or secular, are often capitalized, such as Truth, Beauty, and Justice.

Because political parties are often named after political philosophies, capital letters differentiate one who supports a philosophy, such as a conservative believing in a philosophy of conservatism, and one who claims herself a Conservative in support of the Conservative Party.

Finally, there’s one pesky little glitch in the English scheme to differentiate capitonyms: the beginning of a sentence. Consider the mental sort and the necessity of context and punctuation when reading these examples:

Bill the patient, please.
Turkey requires a visa.
Rusty waters plants.
Crystal is clearly delicate.
Nice winters are mild compared to Paris.
Cook wages war in court.
Iris blossoms on the piano.
Pat the dog.
Will Will?
March!
Randy?

If you enjoyed this post, you might also be interested in reading about palindromes, the conundrum with contronyms, or why the word widow is unique among gender-specific nouns!

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Fun Facts About English #85 – The Big Bad Wolf

11/01/2020 by admin

ablaut reduplication Kinney Brothers Publishing

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To understand this anomaly, we’ll need to review a few grammar points. Bear with me and you’ll come to a sparkling revelation by the end of the post.

Adjectives

An adjective is a word or phrase that describes a noun, e.g., small, red, or awesome. When using multiple adjectives in a sentence, there are two orders: coordinate and cumulative adjectives.

Coordinate adjectives are in the same category and require a comma between each one:

My dog is brown, black, and white. (color)
This is a Spanish, English, and French dictionary. (purpose)
He’s intelligent, handsome, funny, and a great dancer! (opinion)

Cumulative adjectives come from various categories and don’t require commas, but must be ‘stacked’ in a specific order:

Opinion
Size
Age
Shape
Color
Origin
Material
Purpose

This is a cute little blue bag.
We rode two gorgeous big black Arabian horses.
I have a tiny 10-week-old brown beagle puppy.

Reduplicates

Reduplication is when a word or part of a word is repeated and sometimes modified to make a longer term, like hush-hush or boogie-woogie. There are two types of reduplicates: exact and rhyming.

Exact: goody-goody, choo-choo, bye-bye, wee-wee, yum-yum, aye-aye, boo-boo, so-so, tut-tut, no-no, night-night, poo-poo, yada-yada, ta-ta
Rhyming: okey-dokey, itsy-bitsy, arty-farty, razzle-dazzle, fancy-schmancy, walkie-talkie, raggle-taggle, super-duper, boo-hoo

Interestingly, there are a large number of ‘h’ words in the rhyming group: hocus-pocus, hanky-panky, hokey-pokey, hoity-toity, higglety-pigglety, harem-scarem, helter-skelter, holy-moly, honey-bunny, hum-drum, Handy Andy, Humpty Dumpty, and Henny Penny.

Ablaut Reduplication

Ablaut is a term introduced by the 19th-century German linguist, Jacob Grimm, the elder of the Brothers Grimm duo. Ablaut refers to a vowel change which, in reduplicates, often follows a particular vowel pattern, such as zigzag or sing-song. If there are two words, the first vowel is I and the second is usually either A or O. If there are three words then the order is often I, A, O.

Two-Word: flim-flam, knick-knack, mingle-mangle, dilly-dally, pitter-patter, chit-chat, Tic Tac, wishy-washy, criss-cross, flip-flop, tick-tock, ping pong, clippity-cloppity, bibbity-bobbity, King Kong
Three-Word: bing-bang-bong, ding-dang-dong, bish-bash-bosh, splish-splash-splosh, clink-clank-clunk

We have our Germanic/Old English heritage to thank for this familiar vowel pattern. A similar vowel shift occurs with verb conjugations like drink, drank, drunk (trinken, tranken, getrunken) or sing, sang, sung (singen, sang, gesungen).

The Anomaly of The Big Bad Wolf

If we understand that cumulative adjectives are stacked in a specific order, a sentence with the words bad (opinion), big (size), and wolf (noun) should read, “bad big wolf.” This logic holds true for “cute little kittens,” “scary old house,” or “nice long drive.” So, why are the two adjectives in “big bad wolf” flipped? The writer, Mark Forsyth, explains this phenomenon in his title, The Elements of Eloquence:

“The reason “big bad wolf” is reversed is that the phrase skips the stacked-order rule to follow the ablaut reduplicative I-A scheme where big-bad acts like zig-zag!”

It would be easy to assume this anomalous ordering is the way it’s always been said, until you look at early versions of The Three Little Pigs. In Jacob’s English Fairy Tales (1890), the story includes “not by the hair of my chiny-chin-chin” and lots of huffing and puffing, but not the phrase “big bad wolf.” In the much older Grimm’s Fairy Tales version, you’ll find the piggy threesomes’ “Tra-la-la!” refrain, as well as the agreeably-ordered “wicked black wolf,” but no “big bad wolf.” So, when did this happen?

In 1933, the song, “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf,” was featured in Walt Disney’s Silly Symphony rendition of The Three Little Pigs. The theme song was a Depression-era hit and continues to be one of Disney’s most well-known songs. So successful was the animation, the studio spun several sequels. The theme song was repeated in The Big Bad Wolf with Little Red Riding Hood, and Li’l Bad Wolf, the son of Big Bad Wolf. Unsurprisingly, the wolf pup inherited his father’s ablaut reduplication, further cementing the adjectival reversal in our collective memories.

So, now you know! (I was going to say “That’s all folks!” but remembered that’s a different pig altogether.)

You might also be interested to learn about the most common adjectives, test your own knowledge of stacked adjectives, or how to begin teaching stacked adjectives to your youngest ESL students! Read more on the Kinney Brothers Publishing blog!

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Fun Facts About English #82 – Test Your Knowledge of Stacked Adjectives

10/30/2020 by admin

Nothing made me feel more inculcated into my own language than the idea of stacked adjectives. In an English speaker’s subconscious mind, multiple adjectives have a specific order if accumulative. When they fall out of that order, the brain glitches, and the meaning can be lost, confused, or even misconstrued.

Adjectives

We learn in school that adjectives fall into categories, such as color, size, shape, age, etc. When multiple adjectives are used in a sentence, they appear in one of two types of groups: coordinate or cumulative adjectives.

An example of coordinate adjectives is, “It’s a black, brown, and white cat.” The adjectives are all in the same category of color, can be understood in any order, and must be separated with commas.

“I have two cute little pink pigs,” is a sentence with cumulative adjectives. With each successive adjective, categorical information is accumulated about the noun they modify and don’t require commas between them. The crux of stacked adjectives is the order that they are expected to appear.

Stacked Adjectives

Though there’s nothing semantically different between “a white big house” and “a big white house,” the second aligns itself to an English speaker’s internal ordering of adjectives – the result of a linguistic potty training we don’t even remember. An invisible code snaps into place and an adjectival conga line forms with all the modifiers in a proper queue:

Quantity or number
Quality or opinion
Size
Age
Shape
Color
Proper adjective (nationality, place of origin, or material)
Purpose or qualifier

There are linguists and laymen alike who oppose this strict order, such as size after opinion, arguing that a person is no less correct or clear in saying “a mean little dog” or “a little mean dog.” Nonetheless, patterns are imprinted from an early age and set with children’s stories like My Naughty Little Sister or Lily’s Purple Plastic Purse. (There is the curious case of “the big bad wolf” that doesn’t follow the size after opinion rule. That is the subject of another Fun Facts About English.)

Adjective order is still flexible enough for changing the character or meaning of an object being described. For example, a “fake Japanese watch” is a knock-off of a Japanese-made watch, but a “Japanese fake watch,” is a thing (dummy, toy, or phony) from Japan masquerading as a watch.

It would be impossible for most of us to elucidate this adjectival order, though we employ it in our language every day. Take the following sentence for example:

“This is a yellow new French cotton handsome jacket.”

It’s difficult to discern what the sentence is trying to convey and comes off like an adjective salad. In their proper order, the descriptors should be aligned thusly:

“This is a handsome new yellow French cotton jacket.”

Of course, one can stack adjectives so high that it becomes a categorical nightmare to mentally sort — whether you’re listening or speaking. This is why it’s often recommended that we limit the number of adjectives in a sentence to keep the lingual conveyor moving smoothly, for example:

“This is a handsome new yellow jacket. It’s from France and made of cotton.”

The Test

Imagine that you’re a foreign speaker of English. You’ve spent weeks memorizing adjectival order to answer test questions like the five below. Marvel at the sorting function that activates in your native English brain! The answers are below. Good luck and let me know your score in the comments!

Which sentence uses the correct order of adjectives?
A. We took a ride on a green old Korean bus.
B. We took a ride on a Korean old green bus.
C. We took a ride on an old green Korean bus.
Which sentence uses the correct order of adjectives?
A. My brother rode a beautiful big black Arabian horse in the parade.
B. My brother rode a beautiful Arabian big black horse in the parade.
C. My brother rode a big black beautiful Arabian horse in the parade.

For the next three questions, insert the adjectives that are in the correct order.
I bought a pair of _________________boots.
A. new nice yellow rain
B. nice new yellow rain
C. yellow nice new rain
Put the money into that __________________box.
A. little old round red
B. round little old red
C. little old red round
She was surprised to get a ________________ puppy for her birthday!
A. little beagle cute ten-week-old
B. cute ten-week-old little beagle
C. cute little ten-week-old beagle

Answers: 1-C, 2-A, 3-B, 4-A, 5-C

You might also be interested to learn about the most common adjectives, why Big Bad Wolf follows a different adjectival order, or how to begin teaching stacked adjectives to your youngest ESL students! Read more on the Kinney Brothers Publishing blog!

Go to the previous or next Fun Facts About English.

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Fun Facts About English #79 – The Letter Z

10/24/2020 by admin

In most English-speaking countries, including the United Kingdom, Canada, India, Ireland, New Zealand, Zambia, and Australia, the name of the letter Z is zed, pronounced /zɛd/. Zed takes its name via French and Latin from the Greek equivalent, zeta. In American English, its name is zee /ziː/. Zee is thought to have originated from a late 17th-century British dialect and influenced by the bee, cee, dee, ee pattern of much of the alphabet.

This British dialectical form was likely what the English Puritan minister and author, Thomas Lye [Leigh, Lee], was drawing from when he published his New Spelling Book in England in 1677; the full title of which is:

A New Spelling Book, Or, Reading and Spelling English Made Easie: Wherein All the Words of Our English Bible are Set Down in an Alphabetical Order and Divided Into Their Distinct Syllabls

At the time of its publishing, Britain was home to a variety of dialectical pronunciations of the letter Z that included zed, zod, zad, zard, ezod, izzard, and uzzard. Samuel Johnson, in his highly influential Dictionary of the English Language published in London in 1755, referenced izzard as the name of the letter. In King Lear, 150 years earlier, Shakespeare had used zed.

Beginning in the 1600s, zee and other British pronunciations made the voyage across the Atlantic to colonial America. By 1883, British historian, Edward Augustus Freeman, noted that zee was mainly found in (formerly Puritan) New England, while zed was the accepted form in the American South. Areas such as Philadelphia vacillated between the two. He also noted that not a few Americans still used izzard, a fact that tickled his British funny bone.

Nonetheless, by the 19th century, zee became firmly established in the U.S. with several important developments. New England born, Noah Webster, published his own American Spelling Book in 1794 with the letter “ze.” In 1828, Webster also published A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language asserting the pronunciation of the letter Z as “zee.” Finally, “The Alphabet Song,” copyrighted in 1835 and published by Boston-based music publisher, Charles Bradlee, rhymed Z with “me.”

FYI: The tune of “The Alphabet Song” is based on the 18th-century French song “Ah, vous dirai-je, maman” and popularized by Mozart. The melody is also used in other children’s songs such as “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” and “Baa, Baa, Black Sheep.”

It’s worth noting that, like zee, Webster also defined the standards of American spelling for words like theater for theatre and honor for honour,” spellings that were not invented by Webster himself. These were spelling variants in use in the English language, including in Britain. Webster simply chose to institute one variation as a standard.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, Britain was undergoing a similar change, namely a push-back against izzard and its variants. Sticking with the etymological legacy of its French origins (zéde), zed became enshrined as the proper name of the letter in British English.

Finally, it’s important to remember, unlike most major languages in the world, English has never had a regulatory body that governed its use – anywhere nor at any time. As for slinging tired arrows at the U.S. for its “unilateral” divergence from British English, let’s reflect on the idea that even today, in a country the size of Louisiana, England has over 40 dialects (compared to 24 in the whole U.S.) and a long legacy of myriad spelling and pronunciation variations. Over several centuries and 4000 miles apart, the notion of a culturally freeze-dried, correct language and orthography simply didn’t exist, on either side of the pond.

You might also be interested to learn why North Americans pronounce R differently than the British, why rooster is the preferred euphemism in American English, or why English has no language academy!

Go to the previous or next Fun Facts About English.

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Fun Facts About English #73 – Contronyms

10/02/2020 by admin

The term contronym was coined by Jack Herring in 1962. Such words are also referred to as auto-antonyms or Janus words (after the Roman god Janus, who is depicted with two faces.)

Why do they occur?

Some contronyms are distinct words with different etymologies that come into the language in the same form or spelling, eg., rock, as in “a solid mineral material” (Old North French), or “rock a child” (Old Norse).

Other Janus words happen where a single word acquires different and sometimes opposite definitions. The word sanction, for example, diverged over time to mean both “permit” and “penalize.”

Auto-antonyms can also result from nouns being verbed, like dust. If you say, “I’m dusting the room,” it’s highly unlikely that you’re sprinkling dust on the tabletops in the same manner as powdering a cake with sugar.

Contronyms may occur due to varying dialects in the same language. In British English, to table a bill means “to put up for debate, whereas in American English, it means “to remove from a debate.”

Though the examples are numerous, here is a short list of 25 common contronyms:

bolt – to secure or to flee
bound – heading to a destination or restrained from movement
buckle – to connect or to break or collapse
clip – to fasten together or cut away
consult – to offer advice or to obtain it
custom – a common practice or a special treatment
discursive – moving in an orderly fashion among topics or proceeding aimlessly in a discussion
fast – quick, stuck, or made stable
fix – to repair or to castrate
garnish – to furnish, as with food preparation, or take away, as with wages
handicap – an advantage provided to ensure equality or a disadvantage that prevents equal achievement
left – remained or departed
mean – average, stingy, or excellent
model – an exemplar or a copy
overlook – to supervise or to neglect
screen – to present or to conceal
skinned – covered with skin or with the skin removed
strike – to hit or to miss in an attempt to hit
temper – to soften or to strengthen
transparent – invisible or obvious
trim – to decorate or to remove excess from
trip – a journey or a stumble
variety – a particular type or many types
wear – to endure or to deteriorate
weather – to withstand or to wear away

If you enjoyed reading about contronyms, you might also be interested in common eponyms and the notorious personalities behind them, the reason acronyms have exploded since the 19th century, or find out if your name is a capitonym!

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Fun Facts About English #61 – The Inclusive and Exclusive ‘We’

07/10/2020 by admin

Fun Facts About English 61 Kinney Brothers Publishing

The recently coined term, clusivity, (Filimonova, Clusivity, 2005) is defined as “a grammatical distinction between inclusive and exclusive first-person pronouns and verbal morphology,” aka the inclusive “we” and exclusive “we.”

English is one of the few languages that does not have separate words for “we” that includes the listener, and “we” that excludes the listener.

Inclusive and exclusive we Kinney Brothers Publishing

The distinction is either evident from context or can be understood through additional wording. Consider the sentences below. Without their accompanying sentences, there is no context to determine whether they include or exclude the listener.

We’re going to the beach! Are you ready yet?

We’re going to the beach! See you later!

Other first-person plural pronouns (us, our, ours, ourselves) are also affected by this inclusive/exclusive conundrum.

We have to do the work ourselves. Let’s get to work.

We have to do the work ourselves. Thanks for nothing!

When teaching English language learners, with a few such examples, even beginners can grasp the use of we. For more advanced learners, there are a number of atypical uses where we is used in place of I or you.

Royal we – traditionally employed by a person of high office such as a monarch or pope, it is often used today by anyone in a position of authority.
“We are not amused by your behavior, Mr. Jones.”

Editorial we – used when actually giving one’s own opinion:
“When listening to Donald Trump, we feel a strong sense of patriotism.”

Author’s we – a practice of referring to a generic third person as we:
“By adding four and five, we get nine.”

You – used to replace you with we when addressing a second party:
Parent to child: “Are we doing our homework or are we watching TV?”

You might also be interested in these posts about the peculiarities of the English language! Did you know every day and everyday have different meanings? What does the X in LAX mean? Why do we say pease porridge and not pea porridge? What the heck does paddywhack mean?

See the previous or next Fun Facts About English.

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