81
The answer to this is.... complicated.
The letter J is, as you mentioned, relatively recent, and originated as a variant of the letter I. Why that happens is a little complicated, and requires unpacking some assumptions in your question.
In the original languages (Latin, Greek, Hebrew) which provide us with the names Jesus, Joseph, Justinian, etc., the ...
66
It probably has to do with the phonetic and metrical properties of "ladies and gentlemen" versus "gentlemen and ladies." Say them both out loud and see which one sounds better to you, intuitively.
The metrical pattern of "ladies and gentlemen" consists of (arguably) two dactyls. A dactyl is a group of three syllables where the first is stressed and the ...
51
According to Wiktionary, Galician, Catalan and Occitan have a word fada "fairy" and Italian has fata with the same meaning, which seems like a clear confirmation of a Vulgar Latin form *fata meaning "fairy". (And as tchrist points out, Spanish has hada, because it had a historical change of /f/ to /h/ in many contexts.) I don't know if there are any ...
48
Short answer:It's a contraction.
These are modified in pronunciation beyond the more normal form's simple truncation, but they are the same thing, fundamentally.
Essentially, it's a form of contraction that has been informally promoted to a word.
(yes, that's a neologism as mentioned in the comments)
Support:
Oxford calls it contraction.
Definition ...
37
The word you want is pleonasm:
Pleonasm (/ˈpliːənæzəm/; from Greek πλεονασμός (pleonasmós), from πλέον (pleon), meaning "more, too much") is the use of more words or parts of words than are necessary or sufficient for clear expression: examples are black darkness, burning fire. Such redundancy is, by traditional rhetorical criteria, a ...
33
In the spoken language, these examples are strings of words where the realisation of the strings in speech is quite different from the citation forms of the individual words. A citation form is the phonetic form of the word when we mention the word without using it in its normal sense. So for example we might say:
This is the word "can".
Here the ...
answered Dec 27 '15 at 21:09
Araucaria - Not here any more.
41.4k12 gold badges88 silver badges170 bronze badges
27
English doesn't have vowel harmony.
"Vowel harmony" refers to situations where there is some process that changes vowels to be in the same class as other vowels in the word, and/or there is a constraint against having vowels of different classes in a word.
You can see examples of vowel harmony processes in Turkish on e.g. this web page: Vowel Harmony (some ...
24
Wikipedia says:
Haplology (from Greek ἁπλόος haplóos "simple" and λόγος lógos, "speech") is defined as the elimination of a syllable when two identical or similar syllables occur consecutively. The phenomenon was identified by American philologist Maurice Bloomfield in the 20th century. Linguists sometimes jokingly refer to the ...
22
"Prisencolinensinainciusol" is a song by the Italian singer/comedian Adriano Celentano with nonsense lyrics that are intended to sound like American-accented English. As it happens, I played it for my wife two nights ago and asked her to guess what language it was sung in; she eventually guessed English, though she couldn't understand the words. So if it's ...
22
Tautology - Unnecessary repetition, usually in close proximity, of the same word, phrase, idea, argument, etc. The saying of the same thing twice in different words generally considered to be a fault of style (OED) although it can be used as a literary device.
Consider PIN...
"PIN number" is tautologous - it repeats "number" next to the ...
17
I absolutely loved this question. Of course, we can all think of a handful of words like thingy, that simply act as a stand-in word for the word we are thinking of but cannot, at present, grasp.
The 1960 Dictionary of American slang uses the term kadigin for placeholder words, defining it as a synonym for thingamajig.
Dr. Richard Nordquist, Professor ...
17
Rhotic English is a term to describes varieties of English in which orthographic R is usually pronounced, even at the end of a syllable. In non-rhotic varieties of English - such as Southern Standard British English - orthographic R is only pronounced if followed by a vowel. It doesn't matter if there is a double R or not in the orthography:
car / ka:
car ...
answered Jan 10 '16 at 13:49
Araucaria - Not here any more.
41.4k12 gold badges88 silver badges170 bronze badges
15
They are eye-dialect spellings designed to make the ordinary way these phrases are spoken appear careless or substandard.
15
Translation is a difficult task. Cultures are different, situations are different, histories are different.
English is interesting because it has a mixed heritage for many medical terms. For many medical situations there is a basic English term, and there is a Latin technical term, and there might possibly be a Greek or even another Latin term. Part of a ...
14
In light of Auracaria's and your comments below, consider calling these linguistic reductions.
Linguistic reductions are lost sounds in words. This happens in spoken
English. For instance, "going to" changes to "gonna". The most widely
known reductions are contractions. Most contractions are reductions of
'not'. For instance, "...
14
Perhaps you mean the process of attaching suffixes and/or prefixes to a root word to make a whole family of related words, like hand, handy, handiness, unhand, unhanded, and so on. The name for that is agglutination and languages that rely on this kind of word growth for their grammar are called agglutinative. The word itself is an example of Latin ...
14
Consider phonetic spelling.
Phonetic spelling constitutes an alteration of ordinary spelling that better represents the spoken language, that employs only characters of the regular alphabet, and that is used in a context of conventional spelling.
- dictionary.com
The above article calls IPA an example of phonetic orthography, with the label phonetic ...
13
It is called semantic change (also semantic shift, semantic progression or semantic drift).
13
Voiceless vowels are quite possible, and occur in one way or another in many languages.
After all, all vowels and all consonants that are whispered are ipso facto voiceless.
Whisper [a] and you have pronounced a voiceless vowel.
However, the overwhelming majority of vowel sounds in speech are voiced, since vowel formants are modifications of a voiced ...
13
It can be described as a relaxed pronunciation type of elision.
13
It comes from "My Lords, Ladies and Gentlemen". Titled men come first (My Lords); then their spouses [My] Ladies; Ladies also include non-titled ladies; and finally, untitled men (Gentlemen). Debretts, Preamble Precedents
The following list gives the form in which important guests should be
included in a preamble in order of precedence:
Your ...
12
Other answers seem to have overlooked the fact that you are requesting a term from linguistics. I don't think axiomatic is what you're after.
I believe the term you are looking for is categorematic.
Categorematic words are "words that designate self-sufficient entities (i.e. nouns or adjectives)" (here) or words "that are capable of being employed alone as ...
11
Your first three examples are of terms of endearment.
The fourth is simply a description, rather than a name, although "Solid" alone could be used as a nickname, based on physical characteristics.
What you called your friend is possibly in the category of being a nickname, based on habit or personality. Unfortunately, when spoken, your chosen term of "...
10
I'll bite. But it's going to be a long answer.
English is a moderately inflected language. The more inflected a language is, the less flexibility there is in it, and. vs versa, the less inflected a language is, the "looser" or more flexible it is.
The most heavily inflected language I know is Ancient Latin. They didn't have articles, and often didn't use ...
10
As @Laure mentions, this really belongs to the Linguistics group as this is a wider question pertinent to Latin and all/most Latin-influenced European languages.
Classical Latin did not have a distinct J sound (the J as we know in English.) When I was followed by another vowel, it usually sounded similar to English /Y/. Thus we had Iulius which was as if ...
10
You seem to be talking about placeholder names
Placeholder names are words that can refer to objects or people whose names are temporarily forgotten, irrelevant, or unknown in the context in which they are being discussed.
Quoting from the wikipedia article:
These placeholders typically function grammatically as nouns and can be used for people (e.g., ...
10
We went swimming later in the afternoon, Jack and I
This sentence has been done something to.
It's an example of the syntactic rule of Right-Dislocation.
The sentence it's transformed from is Jack and I went swimming later in the afternoon.
The rule copies an emphasized Noun Phrase (which may be subject, object, or oblique)
in a sentence, and repeats it, ...
10
The simple answer is no. Ice cream and nitrate are not homophonous with I scream and night rate.
If you go by tchrist’s comment above, it appears that some dialects of English pronounce the initial vowel in I scream [ɑɪ] and ice cream [ʌɪ] differently, but this is not universally applicable, and I would venture that this split is limited to a minority of ...
10
I think kangaroo word is the closest term for this.
A playful term for a word that carries within it a synonym of itself--such as regulate (rule), indolent (idle), and encourage (urge).
It's generally believed that the synonym (called a joey) should be the same part of speech as the kangaroo word and its letters should appear in order.
http://...
10
It is an example of a filler phrase, in this case a parenthetical filler phrase since it is located in the middle of a sentence. Perhaps the most infamous filler in BrE is innit (isn't it?):
"I'm going down the shops, innit"
Dear reader, please avoid.
Collins English Dictionary: you know
Oxford Living Dictionaries: innit
Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible
