Name: 言語学者だけど「英語」について質問ある？| Tech Support | WIRED Japan
Uploaded: 2025-11-13T18:17:16.000Z
Duration: 25 min 46 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Hi, I'm Stephen Turton, and this is Etymology Support.

First question, Samuel M. 800-56720 asks.

I have a semi serious question for etymologists.

If feet is the plural for foot, why is beet not the plural of boot?

Foot belongs to a category of words that derive from Old English in which to make the plural, you change the vowel in the word.

So other words in this category, tooth, teeth, and

goose, key, mouse, mice, book also used to be in this category in Old English, but

later on we regularized the spelling, so it's book books.

If we kept the Old English pattern, it would now be one book, two beach.

The word boot, on the other hand, is not from Old English.

It was borrowed from French into Middle English, which is why it just gets the default plural S.

There are lots of different ways of pluralizing nouns in Old English, so you might form the plural by changing the vowel in the base word, or you might form the plural by adding a suffix, which could be.

In the Middle English period, most of these ways of forming the plural fell out of use and the s plural came to predominate.

So it basically replaced the old plurals for a lot of English words just because it was easier.

When and why did whoops, oops become the default sound made when making a mistake?

So whoops is actually more recent than you might think.

The earliest evidence we have of whoops being used in writing dates to to the 19th century.

It actually seems to have been derived from upsidaisi, which we have slightly earlier evidence for.

Upsidaisi might have been a kind of whimsical alteration of alack, a daisy, which is in turn a whimsical alteration of alack, a day, which is in turn a whimsical alteration of alack, which is a very old way of saying, oh no.

This is from the Finding Fen's Gold subreddit.

Origin of the word clue Clue originally meant a ball of thread.

Then during Middle English, it came to be associated with the Greek myth of Theseus, who used a ball of thread to find his way in and out of the Minotaur's labyrinth by unspooling it on the way in and then following it back out.

From this, a clue came to mean something that helped lead you to a solution to a problem.

And that is now the only meaning which is common in English today.

RonaldBK asks, Silent letters in words don't make any sense.

How about you just don't add the letter in the word.

So there are a couple of reasons that silent letters exist in English.

One is that the pronunciation of the language has changed and the spelling system just hasn't kept up with it.

For example, the gh in words like through and thought and night, the gh exists there because that sound used to be pronounced in Old English and Middle English, that was the velar figurative.

Eventually, because that's quite a difficult sound to pronounce, it dropped out of the language.

But we continue to spell words with the gh through a process of sheer inertia.

There have been calls for spelling reform in English for literally centuries.

In the 19th century, one author complained that the word fish might as well be spelled G, H, O T, I, G, H as in the f at the end of rough, o, o as in the in women, and

Now, in reality, no one would actually spell fish this way because we know that there are implicit rules to where letter combinations can go in words.

So we know that gh can stand for the sound f, but

only at the end of a word, as in rough enough, tough.

There was also a moment in time where a word like mention would have been pronounced men, tian, or something like that.

But the tion in English, if you say it enough times, over and over it tian, tian, tian, qian, qian, qin, shin, it just becomes a lot easier to say.

Ease of articulation is a common trigger for sound change in English and other languages.

Why do question words, why, who, where, when, etc.

So this goes all the way back to proto Indo European, which is the earliest ancestor of the English language and many other European and Asian languages that etymologists have been able to reconstruct.

Proto Indo European had an interrogative stem, an element of a word that would go into building other words that looked something like cui.

And this and its variants were used to coin question words.

And this cui survives into many modern languages.

So, for example, in French and Spanish as qu, as in qui que cuando quel?

And the resemblance is easy to see once you know that the original spelling and pronunciation in English was hwa.

If you listen to older speakers today who still pronounce the h in these question words, you will hear that they put the h before the w.

Why, when Pkmurphy asks, wonder where the word salary originated?

So the word salary comes from Latin salarium, which ultimately comes from sal, meaning salt.

In ancient Rome, a salarium was a wage paid to someone somebody so that they could buy salt and other household goods.

The word salad ultimately derives from the same root, sal, because a salad was a cold dish that was seasoned with salt.

Why does it pluralize into children rather than child?

Child goes all the way back to Old English, which had multiple methods of forming a plural.

One of the plurals for the word child in Old English was childru.

During Middle English, this became childre.

However, at a later moment in time, for some reason, people decided that this didn't look like a plural, so they added a second plural ending en, as in ox oxen, to create the word children.

So it actually has two plural endings stacked on top of each other.

Delarosajl24 asks, why do we call it deadline for when something is due?

What does death have to do with finishing projects on time?

During the American Civil War, a deadline was a literal boundary around a prison that prisoners were not allowed to cross without being in danger of being shot.

From that, a deadline came to be used metaphorically to mean a point of no return.

And that's where we get the sense of a date on which something is viewed.

Jbird3570 asks, why are there multiple words that mean the same thing?

There are actually very few true synonyms in English or in other languages.

You know, words that have exactly the same meaning in all contexts.

Even if two words appear to have exactly the same meaning, they will tend to be used in somewhat different contexts.

You could say that you have big ideas, you're a big spender, but

However, no one would say that they have large ideas, they're a large spender, or they end up in large trouble.

And that's because we're very comfortable using the word big in literal and figurative contexts.

But we prefer to use the word large only with its literal meaning.

Sometimes multiple synonyms exist because of language borrowing.

For example, in English, we have the words kingly, royal, and regal.

But kingly comes from English king royal comes from French roi, meaning king, and

regal comes from Latin rex, also meaning king.

Dworkphone asks, is there any reason for the Alphabet being in the order it's in?

The word Alphabet comes from alpha, beta, which are the first two letters of the Greek Alphabet, and

Exactly how the letters ended up in this order, A B, C or alpha, beta, gamma or B K or B K is not known.

It might have been random to an extent, but

it's also worth noting that a lot of these sounds are the first sounds that human babies make when they first start babbling.

The Latin Alphabet ultimately derives from the Greek Alphabet, which in turn ultimately derives from the Phoenician Alphabet.

And in all of these alphabets, the letter order starts out in the same way, although the sounds attached to those letters aren't exactly the same.

When the Latin Alphabet spread to other languages in Europe and beyond, they tended to keep the same order of letters.

Subtitles ListPlay Video

言語学者だけど「英語」について質問ある？| Tech Support | WIRED Japan

literally

ultimately

eventually

pronunciation