The 12th Day of Christmas (a linguist's version)

On the twelfth day of Christmas, 
my true love gave to me 
Twelve dialects humming, 
Eleven parsers parsing, 
Ten words aligning, 
Nine lemmas leading, 
Eight memes a-morphing, 
Seven sounds a-switching,
Six /i/s a-lowering, 
Five right-branchings, 
Four helping verbs, 
Three French phones, 
Two purple wugs, 
And a sentence as a parse tree!

False Cognates

False cognates are pairs of words in the same or different languages that are similar in form and meaning but have different roots. That is, they appear to be, or are sometimes considered, cognates, when in fact they are not.

pepper (n.) Old English pipor, from an early West Germanic borrowing of Latin piper "pepper," from Greek piperi, probably (via Persian) from Middle Indic pippari, from Sanskrit pippali "long pepper." The Latin word is the source of German Pfeffer, Italian pepe, French poivre, Old Church Slavonic pipru, Lithuanian pipiras, Old Irish piobhar, Welsh pybyr, etc. Application to fruits of the capsicum family (unrelated, originally native of tropical America) is 16c. pepper (v.) "to sprinkle as with pepper," 1610s, from pepper (n.). Old English had gepipera. Meaning "to pelt with shot, etc." is from 1640s. Related: Peppered; peppering.

Definition via Online Etymology Dictionary 
Comic via Wondermark

Pairs Well With Hexads

pair
v. paired, pair·ing, pairs v.tr. 1. To arrange in sets of two; couple. 2. To join in a pair; mate. 3. To provide a partner for.
v. pair - bring two objects, ideas, or people together

Unless the definition of the verb pair has changed recently, shouldn't the copy on this bag of lettuce read "Hexads well with ... "

I do believe I can make out at least six different ingredient suggestions on the bag and they are listed with an and not an or.

hex·ad
 n. A group or series of six

Definitions via freedictionary.com
Image from a Facebook photo

A Wonderfully Illustrated Definition

pre·cur·sor 
n. 1. One that precedes and indicates, suggests, or announces someone or something to come: Colonial opposition to unfair taxation by the British was a precursor of the Revolution.
2. One that precedes another; a forerunner or predecessor: The new principal's precursor was an eminent educator.
3. A biochemical substance, such as an intermediate compound in a chain of enzymatic reactions, from which a more stable or definitive product is formed: a precursor of insulin.
[Middle English precursoure, from Old French precurseur, from Latin praecursor, from praecursus, past participle of praecurrere, to run before : prae-, pre- + currere, to run; see kers- in Indo-European roots.]
Via thefreedictionary.com

Thanks for the laugh, Wrong Hands.

Notable Words - Yurtmeister

Spotted in The Week magazine, December 14, 2012.

yurt (yûrt)
n. A circular, domed, portable tent used by nomadic peoples of central Asia. [Russian yurta, of Turkic origin.]

Meister means master in German (as in master craftsman or as an honorific title, such as Meister Eckhart). It is akin to maestro. Meister has been borrowed into English slang, where it is used in compound nouns. Such compounds denote a person's expertise in a specified art, skill, or profession. A person referred to as blank meister is one that has extensive theoretical knowledge and practical skills in their profession, business concerns and training. Typically the blank is filled in with a word that describes the particular skill set the person in question is an expert in, (for example, a puzzle meister would be someone aptly skilled at completing puzzles). These neologisms sometimes have a sarcastic intent (for example, "stubblemeister" for someone with a short, neat beard (heard on BBC TV or "criermeister" for someone who often cries (American slang).

According to The Week, Jackson Hole Mountain Resort has yurts available as an alternative to traditional lodging. These yurts come with yurtmeisters who plan menus, cook and clean.

Great idea ... except for those who like to be meisters of their own herrschaftsgebiet.

Definitions via thefreedictionary.com

Wine, Texting and Acronyms

Does drinking wine turn texting abbreviations into acronyms?

This is what I saw as I turned the corner at the grocery store the other day - 

Even if I had been drinking, I am not sure I could have pronounced "GR8RW" as an acronym. Sure, "GR8" is a texting abbreviation (semiotics included) for "great" and "RW" is an initialization for "red wine", but an acronym these two do not make.

Of course I had to look up this new wine when I returned home. 

What I found left me even more confused (and I still hadn't had a drink).

From the ad copy: "...created without taking any shortcuts." "No abbreviations necessary."

DARE - Michigan

Speaking of the Dictionary of American Regional English (as I did here recently and here), their website has a state-by-state index that allows users to look up commonly used regional synonyms by state. My favorite part of this feature is that each state's page begins with a paragraph that includes examples of some of the regionally-distinctive words in use.

Here is Michigan's:

A lawyer doesn’t have to be someone who wears a suit and goes to court. For that matter, a long john isn’t underwear and a sewing needle can fly. If you’re headed to a covered-dish meal, consider making pasties with hamburg for hot dish. Up in Norway pine-country, you may see some people headlighting or trying to shining deer, which doesn’t seem too fair for the deer.

To see the definitions of these Michigan synonyms and to look up other state's synonyms, here is a link to DARE: State-By-State. Have fun.

All's I Want is to Know

Looking at this photo, I can almost hear Robert Irvine saying, "all's I want is..."

The use of this contraction has never jumped out at me as much as it has while watching Restaurant Impossible. Which got me to wondering what exactly is being elided because the contraction is not found in any dialect with which I am familiar. Initially, I thought Irvine was combining "all" with "is" (even though they are not adjacent) and then repeating "is".

Good thing I looked it up. The New York Times article by Ben Zimmer titled "All's I Know" reminded me that I should have checked the Dictionary of American Regional English for unusual usages. There I would have learned that what is being combined is "all" and "as" with "as" being used as a relative pronoun similar to "that".

All that I wanted was a syntactic clarification. All that I know is I got it. Thank you Ben Zimmer and DARE.

Photo credit