Anne Phillips

Yes, I have the Adam/atom/at 'em merger!

Oh, it was "up and Adam" for me. I had no idea why we were invoking Adam; I just accepted it.

Another interesting Italian word is 'codesto': "that (near you)", now archaic outside Tuscany.

It comes from Old Italian 'cotevesto'.

This word descended from Latin 'eccum tibi istum', literally something like "here's this for you".

In isolation, these words became 'ecco', 'ti', and '(qu)esto'.

Breakdown/break down, login/log in are not perfect homophones in that they have a difference in stress which you can hear if you say, "break down that box" vs. "I'm having a breakdown." I'm usually easygoing with language and orthographic change, but I'd prefer we keep the space here.

Today I saw a sign near an apartment garbage area that said, "breakdown boxes before putting in recycling". It is interesting to me that verbs + particle are so often written as closed compounds these days: "login here" or "signup for a class". 1/

The Spanish word 'nada' (nothing) stems from a Latin word meaning "born".

'No veo nada' (I don't see anything) comes from 'nōn videō rem nātam', literally "I don't see a born thing".

Here are the origins of 'niente', 'rien', 'ninguno' and many more Romance words for "nothing" and "no one":

1/

Yesterday I posted about the Romance words for "to want".

Spanish and Portuguese use 'querer' instead of a descendant of Latin *volēre.

What would *volēre have become if it had undergone the sound changes that occurred in these two languages?

Listen to its hypothetical modern outcomes:

Yep, the b in debt is an etymological insertion and English phonotactics leave it unpronounced. But pedantic insertions did sometimes lead to a change in pronunciation as with the d in 'adventure'

Words that are pervasively misspelled are good candidates for one-off reform. "Lose" is such a word. If there were a mechanism for change, this would have happened long ago. "Lose" should be <loose> and "loose" can be <looce>. @merriam-webster.com let's do this!

Oh!!! I like to think of this as a continental pronunciation like "ee" is the continental pronunciation of i. How do you feel about "tall a"?

Do you mean <a> alone as opposed to as an element of a single grapheme <ay> <ea> etc?? Why not "A" if so?

Oh wait, gruntling must be positive, so I suppose I don't have enough ruth to gruntle Hank.

I have too much ruth for that.

Well, the very existence of the words underwhelm and overwhelm would point to "whelm" having undergone semantic change. I prefer to say "'whelmed' once meant 'capsized'... Thank you for this lovely bit of etymology and forgive my pedantry! Wishing you a ruthful day.

Controversial orthography opinion: we should use the words "long" and "short" to refer to the two most common pronunciations of each vowel letter.

They will definitely not forget that lesson!

Sounds like you are actually pretty good at listening to these things!

This manifesto could have been an email.

Oh, you haven't heard? They all died in the pandemic. It was awful, but families are soldiering forward without them.

What is the GLP view of echolalia?

It is commonly believed that the 100 most common words of English are of Germanic origin. Mostly, but not completely true. It depends on your list, but the following words are of Norman/French origin: use, very, people, person, just and the second element of "because".

They are human-piloted airplanes. And t.v. news is uncritically referring to them as drones while airing footage of airplanes. Wild indeed!

I was so happy the day I realized that the Spanish word for "fork", tenedor, can be glossed as a "holder" or "haver".

The ancestor of 'to forget' meant "to lose hold of".

It was the opposite of 'to get'.

Speaking of 'to get', this verb is special: it only has cognates in the Nordic languages, such as Norwegian 'å gjeta'.

It was even borrowed from their Old Norse ancestor 'geta'.

Here's more:

Just heard in the wild: "pivotal turning point". I think I'm in love.

Wow!

If the News feed gives you what you are looking for, you might be able to unfollow those big accounts and still see them when you click on News. I think I'm going to like this. Some days I'm looking for news, others avoiding.

And just discovered the Mutuals feed.