Use the terms log in and sign up — It is best practice to use the terms ‘log in’ and ‘sign up’ instead of the terms ‘sign in’ and ‘sign up’ because people can easily mix up the terms, especially for people whose home language is not English. Some well-known companies, such as PayPal, follow this best practice.

How Linguistics Can Help Us — So you want to become a polyglot? Even after knowing the time, effort, and embarrassment needed? Very well, then at least know some general linguistic guidelines to help you on your journey. The majority of languages are either subject-object-verb (SOV) or subject-verb-object (SVO) languages. If you manage to wrap your head around how the constituent* order works in SOV and SVO languages…

Pandora’s Box, Let Them Eat Cake — There are various mistranslations that have been passed down through centuries of history, and some are now heavily embedded in popular culture. Are you aware of the mistranslations regarding the phrases ‘Pandora’s box’ and ‘Let them eat cake’? Pandora’s Box The original phrase is in Greek, and Pandora’s ‘box’ is actually Pandora’s…

The Origin of the Romance Future Tense — Have you ever wondered why in Romance languages, the simple future tense often resembles like the combination of an infinitive and the present tense conjugation of the respective verb ‘to have’? It’s not a coincidence. During the period of late Vulgar Latin, people used the structure ‘infinitive + habere’ to…

Origin of the Modern Romance Language Suffix — In Romance languages, the -ment(e) suffix, which is used to form adverbs, is etymologically derived from Latin. People who spoke Vulgar Latin used to say words like clara mente (with a clear mind, i.e., clearly) etc. to form adverbs. The Latin word mente is the singular ablative case of the…

A Meaning of the Circumflex — In French orthography, there are diacritics, such as the acute accent, the grave accent, and the circumflex. A function of the circumflex accent in French is to denote letters, usually the letter s, that used to be in the spelling of words but no longer. Let us see what happens…

In modern Japanese, while the use of kanji facilitates reading due to compression of meaning within a writing space, it also obfuscates etymology in the language, as compared to languages with a written alphabet. For example, take the Japanese word for eyeglasses, which is 眼鏡, read as めがね (megane). The…

Makings of a more regular language — In The Loom of Language: An Approach to the Mastery of Many Languages, the author, Frederick Bodmer, argues that the third-person present indicative conjugation (of regular verbs) in English serves no purpose and that it should be eliminated for the hypothetical aim of making English into a more logical and…