Reading: The Ten-Cent Plague
Music: Todd Rundgren's Wizard: A True Star
TV/Movie: George Carlin: It's Bad For Ya
Link o' the Day: Linguistics Society of America



Welcome back to Rumor Tuesday, your one-stop site for interesting factoids--or stuff that sounds like factoids. This week's edition looks at language--a course of study I was once very devoted to back in my kollege daze. I still enjoy paging through books on the development of language. I heartily recommend Bill Bryson's The Mother Tongue (July 1990) for an entertaining little book on the histories and vagaries of the English language.

Anyway, on to today's "facts":

The term "mano a mano" does not mean "man to man," but rather "hand to hand" from the Latin word manu-, meaning hand.

Likewise, the phrase "to man a table" is not an inherently sexist term as it also has its roots in Latin from the verb manus(manere) meaning to handle.

It is commonly believed that the Inuit have over a hundred words for "snow." In actuality they have very few words for snow, but many modifying additives to the base word forming over a hundred different compound words. The more sensationalist belief stems from an attempt by anthropologists to underscore how environment links to language.

The most common word on Earth is "a" and can mean anything from an indefinite article in English to a shade of blue-green in the Ainu language.

Tobogan has four different systems of writing depending on who the writer is: man, woman, priest, or merchant.

There are more tribal dialects known and spoken in the Amazon region of South America than there are currently existing tribes.

"Twin-speak," the phenomenon in which twins grow up speaking a secret language, has elements (usually in adverb form) that are common among different sets of twins, even twins who have been raised in widely different parts of the world and among widely different base language groups. Some tests have found that twins raised in Scotland can communicate, limitedly, with twins raised in Burma.

The English language has exported more words to other languages than it has imported. 99% of all exported words came into existence within the past one hundred years and are technology-related. 90% of all imported words are either food, clothing or farming-related. Only a tenth of those were introduced within the past hundred years.

Languages that have no word for "zero" often also do not have a word for "white."

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In keeping with the above theme, today's link takes you to the Linguistics Society of America. If you're an academic or a professional in the language field, it looks like a decent organization to belong to. If you're an armchair enthusiast like myself, you'll at least enjoy browsing some of the publications and links.

Cheers!