Econ CCX has a neat question. If BAD traces to the 1300s but WORSE traces further back to the 1200s, what kind of sense does that make, and is the source of WORSE in WAR?

I’m paraphrasing them, but their insights are perfect. We assume that the comparative form of BAD would emerge after the form itself, and we should.

The etymologies are misleading. BAD does first appear in the 1300s, but there is evidence that it existed earlier since there’s a term BAEDDEL in Old English that refers to people looked down upon in various ways. What is lacking is a mere, simple “BAED,” but that’s probably an accident. As I wrote in my book NINE NASTY WORDS, Old English sources record no “fuck” precursor, but then there is only so much material. I wrote that we wouldn’t think we knew everything about today’s English from Charlotte’s Web, an episode of “Good Times” and five issues of the New Yorker. I thought that was a good line … but have heard nothing about it! However, the point stands. BAD was surely first, and, almost as surely, at first there was a BADDER.

WORSE starts in Old English and further back as “more confused.” We can imagine why it would have been subbed in for BADDER — the similar sounding BETTER was already being used for “more good.” And wouldn’t you know, trace the WORSE root far enough back and it is indeed the source for, in another flowering, WAR, a confused thing as it is.

Gillis Heller writes:

It’s 2024 already and I still see references to “the late President John F. Kennedy”. What does late even mean in this context? How long will it go on?

He means, I assume, that “late” should refer to people only recently gone. And it indeed has, since many, many centuries ago. Here is a case where we have to check our natural impulses. I’m not sure I have ever seen a reference to JFK as “late,” nor is it “a thing” to me to see references to “the late FDR” or “the late Calvin Coolidge.” I feel like you stop saying “late” after about ten years.

I invite listeners to weigh in on this one — let’s see what happens!

Listener Valérie Lent wonders

why doctors who are supposed to alleviate suffering are called something-path, such as osteopath or naturopath. It reminds me of psychopath, referring to the person having the problem, not solving it.

Neat question. The path in all cases comes from the Greek for suffering. Thus, easily, a psychopath is someone whose psyche is suffering. But of course an osteopath is not someone with sore bones.

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Matthew Jedras wants to know:

Is there a language or group of languages that’s the most and least idiomatic? Does the frequency of idiom use affect how speakers of a language think?

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Max Schmalzl asks whether there is evidence that all languages emerged from one, or whether there were separate emergences of human language, with resemblances between at least some unrelated families due to contact over time.

So, I take it that he means: Is it possible that, say, human language emerged independently in China, long after it had first emerged independently in Africa, and that the only reason someone might today see Swahili and Mandarin as variations on a general human language pattern is that there have been contacts between languages for endless millennia (such as maybe some influences across the Silk Road reaching from Africa to China)?

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Michael Davidson is wondering how we have gotten from “My word is my bond” to his kids — white, for the record — using “word as fuck” as an exclamation.

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Jawahara Edwards notices that the words for Thank You in Japanese and Portuguese are oddly alike: arigatō in Japanese, obrigado in Portuguese. She wonders whether there is a relationship.

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Bob Woolley is reading Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night,” and in Act 3 Scene 3 came across this passage:

Once in a sea fight ’gainst the Count his galleys
I did some service,

He notes that his annotated edition says that “Count his” simply means “Count’s,” and wonders, as many have, whether our “apostrophe-s” is short for his.

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James Austin wants to know:

How stripped down could a language be and still function well and not just for communication but to live in? Could you sketch out what that would look like? For example, how much would it need in the way of tense, aspect, and mood; would it need a counterfactual (like “si” in French or “too” in English); how many words would it need — 10,000, 2,000, fewer? more?; how many phonemes would it need; and which subject pronouns? More generally, what features would you strip out of a language or not include in one that you were building?

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First off, Thomas Simpson has two Russian friends who tell him that there are

… no real accents in Russia, and that they would not be able to tell just by someone speaking if they were from Moscow, Vladivostok, or anywhere in between.

Thomas wants to know

… if it was a Soviet education initiative or something else, and how long it would take for regional accents to start appearing again. Are there any other languages with a surprising lack of regional variants?

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David Wyman wants to know:

You referenced about a year ago that there was some evidence of a Germanic language in Britain well before the Anglo-Saxons in 400 AD. I am guessing it is some sort of place-name evidence, but don't think you specified anything. I would love to know more about it.

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This week, Alexandre Arbitol tells us:

I’ve been learning Albanian and noticed an unusual irregular form for he/she is. In Albanian, “I am” is “unë jam,” but “he is” is “ai është.” I suspect it is borrowed from the Latin “est” from when the Romans conquered Ilyria (even though, as I understand, Albanian is in its own linguistic family within proto-Indo-European). But, I was wondering if there is something special about the third person singular that would make it a more likely candidate to be borrowed? For example, is it common in creoles for “is” to be different than the rest of the “to be” verb conjugation (if there even are different forms)?

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This week, Luke Juarez asks whether the words “respect” and “disrespect” have meanings within the Black American community that differ from their mainstream meanings. “I encounter these words in sports and other contexts around young black men and the meaning seems to be about honor. Curious if this is simply my whitey-brown bias or something real.”

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This week, Anne Giardini asks about the “similarities between the names of the first two or three numbers — i.e., one, two, three in English — and the words for first, second and third in many languages, including to some extent in English.”

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First up this week: Patricia Hirschl asks why Irish Gaelic looks so odd on the page. No offense to the Irish but I suspect you know what she means. “Where did Gaelic come from?” Ms. Hirschl asks.

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Sara is:

a baby boomer who was taught English with sentence diagramming and I find myself yelling “-ly” and “well” — “This is applied real quick” (ly!) or “Mix this real good” (really well!) — at YouTube and pre-taped courses.

Is this a normal language shift rather than something aggravating? Did you do something on where “-ly” came from?

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Jake asks us:

What are the origins of “open/close” the light? It seems like a regionalism (maybe based on historical immigration), but also there seem to be other languages that use those verbs.

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Anna Meyer has traveled among the Navajo and senses a deep connection between her native Hungarian language and culture and that of the indigenous people she encountered. She says that 30 years ago, at a Navajo rodeo:

When the MC started to speak, introducing the upcoming events, it gave me a jolt! The language, Diné, sounded so much like Hungarian! I had the feeling that I should understand this! The sound, the rhythm, the intonation of the language was exactly as Hungarian.

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This week, our listener Nick Burns writes:

“I’d like an episode on the ergative-absolutive language alignment if possible, because my understanding of it is weak! There’s also a lot of cool languages that use this alignment, such as Basque.”

Nick, I don’t think I could get a tasty episode out of ergativity alone, but it’s important for language folks to understand it. The truth is, the way it’s presented outside of academia, if at all, tends to assume that laypeople find the same aspects of it interesting as linguists do, which is not necessarily the case.

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This week, inquiring minds, such as that of April Redford Eby, want to know about things such as:

For the past couple of years I’ve noticed that some people are saying “important” differently, but I can’t pin it down to a specific geographical area. It always strikes me when I hear it, and I turn it over and over in my mouth. The other day I broached this with my (79-year-old) dad, who was immediately electrified with fervor (haha!) and I was so thrilled that someone else had noticed this! But we still don’t know why.

She included a recording, and what she means is people saying “impordant” rather than “important”:

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Matthew Jedras asks:

I’m learning Russian now, and one of things that has struck me is how, when you would use an adjective in English to say “Wonderful!” or “Terrible!,” in Russian you use an adverb — “Otlichno!” means “Wonderfully!” and “Uzhasno!” means “Terribly!”

That got me thinking about English. A lot of times I hear “Hold on tight” or “I pack light.” These sound right to me, but then I think that it should really be “Hold on tightly” and “I pack lightly.” Am I wrong to draw this throughline between Russian and English?

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