The Language of Confusion: Punctual

Give Liz credit for this idea, because it’s an awesome one, none other than the origin of punctuation itself.

The why of punctuation is easy. The printed word is a lot different than speaking. There’s no intonation or volume to know how something is being said. Thus, punctuation. But where did those symbols come from? Obviously no one’s going to wonder why we call a question mark a question mark. Why is the symbol a curly-cue with a dot under it? Look at it, sitting there finishing my question. Weird. And why when I’m excited is it a vertical slash with a point?

The period, or full stop, is a pause between sentences. The etymology is from the classical Latin periodus, literally meaning a complete sentence. The symbol is older than the word, having first been used by the Greeks to show the end to a thought in the second century BCE, before there were even spaces between words. It was given more wide use throughout Europe by 800 AD, even appearing in the middle of sentences has brief pauses rather than the full stop we know it as.

Other punctuation marks, like “-”, “/” and “:” were introduced to mark pauses, and then our friend “,” came around and soon after, “;”did, too. The symbols dueled for years but eventually “,” emerged as the victor, inserting pauses into our written phrases for years to come. The word comma is actually a phrase in Latin meaning “short phrase”, which comes from the Greek komma, meaning “clause”. It showed up in the 1520s while the word semicolon showed up in the 1640s, both naming symbols that had already been in use. Oh, and the word colon? Itshowed up in the 1540s, from colon in Latin and kolon in Greek, meaning limb (you know, part of a whole). Useless trivia of the day: it’s also distantly related to the word scalene.

The question mark and exclamation point are both the creation of scholars working in Latin. ? was originally the word “quaestio” at the end of any sentence that was a query. As you can imagine, it got annoying to write all that. It was shortened to “qo”, but that could be confusing if it was interpreted as a word, so they mashed the q on top of the o. Then the o shrank to a dot and the lower curve of the q disappeared. And so we have ?. Similarly, the exclamation point originated as “io”, an exclamation something like “Whee!”. Again, the o turned into a dot and the i lost its dot, making !.

Well, those are the big ones. Maybe next week I’ll look at some of the other ones and you can rest easy knowing just where the symbol “ comes from.

TL;DR: punctuation marks were made by different grammarians who couldn’t stand each other’s symbols for pauses. Also Latin.

Sources

Etymology Online

Google Translate

Decode Unicode

About.com

San Jose State University

Neatorama

Orbis Latinus

The Digraph

I think there is no pair of letters more confusing than g and h, though c and h are a close second. But why do we have this pair that can be pronounced “f” as in laugh, or isn’t pronounced at all like in bough or through. And if it’s at the beginning of the word like in ghoul, it’s just a plain g sound (apparently the h is there just because). Seriously, it’s like those two letters combine to cast a spell on pronunciation.

See, back in the old days, gh used to be what’s called a “voiceless velar fricative”. Or in normal terms, it’s a sound you make without the vocal cords (voiceless) with the back of your tongue on the roof of your mouth (velar) using the friction of a forced breath (fricative). The best way to think about it is pronouncing the Scottish word loch. Feel that hardness on the ch? That’s a voiceless velar fricative. However, over the years we softened it and moved from saying it in the back of our mouths to our teeth, making it into an f sound like in rough, laugh, or tough.

The silent pronunciation, where the letters just seem to be there to hang out, has little reasons if you look into etymologies. Though, for example, came from a word that was just “tho”. Similarly if you look at thoughtyou can see that in Old English it was spelled (basically) as “thoht”, with an h to give it breath. Same with fought, where you find that in Old English it was fohten. And if you remember my scare-themed etymology post, the word frightcomes from fryhto, a misspelling of fyrhtu.

That doesn’t explain much, does it? Unfortunately, this is as close to a reason as we get with the whole gh thing. The thing those words have in common is that in Old English, they were pronounced with that guttural, hard H sound. Modern English evolved after the printing press for the first time made grammar and style an issue. In order to get that hard H across, they paired it with G. We may not say it anymore but English is too old to change now. We’d just get confused.

PS. Since tomorrow is the end of the world, I suppose this is my last post ;). We had a good run. If only the Mayans thought to make their calendar longer! Or, you know, roll back to zero. What? That’s actually how it works? I have to think up a post for Saturday? Hm. I wonder why THAT wasn’t posted all over the news.

Sources

Online Etymology Dictionary

Dictionary.com

Tony Jebson’s page on The Origins of Old English

English Plus+

Language of Confusion: Parts of Speech, part 2

Last week, I talked about the origins of some parts of speech and how they were probably created because with the printing press making books available to more people, grammar suddenly mattered. The meaning may have existed before 1440, but the name did not.

Preposition showed up in the late fourteenth century, from the classical Latin praepositionem. It is a combination of prae(pre-, as in before) and positionem (I’m pretty sure you can guess what that word means). Together, they make “put/place before. The grammatical sense was inspired by the Greeks, the first for using “put before” as the name for by, to, and all the rest. You have a lot to thank the ancient Greeks for, either by way of Latin or directly. In terms of naming grammatical terms, they came up with virtually everything.

Next we have interjection. It showed up in the early fifteenth century and also comes from classical Latin, in this case interiectionem. (I would guess you can thank Old French for throwing that j in there). It comes from the prefix inter- (between) and icere (to throw, also the origin word for jet...really). So it’s “to throw between”, which is appropriate for the sense of the word.

Conjunction comes from the same time period, and it comes from the classical Latin conjunctionem, past participle of conjugare. That is also the origin word for conjugaland it means “join together”. Com- means together. Jugal, from jugular, means throat or neck (and before you ask, yes) and is related to yoke or join. Conjugal often used in the sexual sense, even today. So the next time you’re looking at and, but or or, just think that those two phrases are doing it.

You can’t unthink that.

Sources

Google Translate

Garret Wilson’s blog post on Greek influence

Idea Finder’s post on the Printing Press

And as always, the Online Etymology Dictionary

Language of Confusion: Parts of Speech

Being as nerdy about words as I am, I find it interesting to get into details like why the parts of speech are called what they are. Hence this post, which will be in two parts because there are a lot of details to get into.

Verb first showed up in English in the late fourteenth century. It came from the Old French verbe, which had the same meaning (not a big jump there). Verbe came from the classical Latin verbum—a word and can be traced even further back to the Proto Indo European were(side note: verbum is also the origin word for verbatim; both literally mean “word for word”). Adverb showed up a little later, in the early fifteenth century. It came from the Late Latin adverbium, a translation of a Greek word. It’s combination of verbum and the prefix ad- (to, at), which can be thought to mean to a verb or “that which is added to a verb.”

Noun also showed up in the late fourteenth century, from the Old French nom and the classical Latin nomen. Appropriately enough, both of those mean “name.” Pronoun, of course, is the same word with a shiny new prefix. It showed up a little later, in the early fifteenth century. Pro- has several meanings, including “in place of,” making the word “in place of a noun.”

The final word we’ll be looking at today is adjective. The word itself showed up in the late fourteenth century from the Old French adjectif and the classical Latin adjectivum. Adjectivum comes from another Latin word, adicere, which means “to throw or place near.” It’s a combination of icere “to throw” and the prefix ad-. It has a slightly different meaning than in adverb. Here it means to, as in “to throw to.”

Have you noticed they all showed up around the same time? It’s worth noting that the time period is just after the invention of the printing press in 1440. Before books were mass produced, very few people had the need to read and write (oh, how mind-numbing it must have been). And so, very few people had the need to qualify language. Then grammar came along and the rest is history.

Sources

Online Etymology Dictionary

Idea Finder's page on the printing press