Linguistics Trivia and Discussion

General Off-Topic Discussion
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Now, I do not know this, I could be totally wrong, but I like thinking about this. It could have evolved along the lines of “right is good and pure, left is evil and bad”. “Sinister”=left is a thing that exists in some languages still. So “right” evolved as “rectitude”, “proper”, “correct”, in parallel with “the right-hand side”.

…I don’t know. I’m just doing my Ace Ventura impersonation and talking outta my-

EDIT - And I forgot to say this explicitly, but it seems like the concept may have evolved this way regardless of langauge; so it’s not so much the word “right” but the concept of “right” which grew to acquire both meanings.

There are probably many interesting discussions on the associations of “left” and “evil”. This is only one of them.

EDIT 2 - Oh, actually that flat-out asserts what I speculated about right=rectitude and so on, and evolving along those lines. How serendipitous.

(ok, I managed to use the word “serenditpitous” in a sentence, cross that off of my bucket list…)

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Pretty much that, yeah! There was a Proto-Indo-European root *h₃reǵ- meaning something like “straighten out”, which has a lot of descendants:

  • English “right”, in all its meanings (“correct”, “opposite of left”, “straight up and down”, “90 degrees”, “freedom guaranteed by law”)
  • The Latin root reg-, with many forms:
    • regō “rule (be in charge of)”
    • rex “ruler (king)”
    • rēgula “ruler (tool)”
    • rectus “straightened out” > “straight, proper, correct”
  • Descendants of regō/rex, like anything with “reg” in English (region, regal, reign)
  • Descendants of rectus, like anything with “rect” in English (correction, director, rectangle, rectum (straight part of the digestive tract), recto (upright side of a document)), or -rech- in Spanish (derecho/a), or -rett- in Italian, etc
  • Greek orégō “stretch out in a straight line”, which wasn’t a very prominent word but gave the technical term órexis “appetite, desire” (originally “yearning, reaching out for something”)

So the original meaning seems to be “straighten, set straight”, first literally, then metaphorically. A ruler (tool) is what you use to make straight lines, a ruler (person) straightens out their subjects, you can right a capsized boat (make it upright) or right a wrong, and so on. Once something has been righted, it’s now right (correct), and this state of affairs is righteous, and a right (like the right to food) is the righteous thing that laws should be protecting instead of violating.

(Several of these meanings seem to have started in Romance, then English-speakers started using “right” as a conventional translation of French droit (< Latin directus), so the English word took on all the extra meanings of the French word. But there was a lot of back-and-forth exchange, so it’s not entirely clear where things started versus where they went later.)

As part of that, 90% of the population is a lot better at using one hand than the other, so that’s clearly the right hand, and the other one is left. (The original meaning of “left (hand)” is “useless”, no relation to the things left behind once you leave them.) Anyone who does the opposite is clearly evil, since they do the opposite of what is right.

This correct~rightward connection is found in Finnish, Korean, and various Semitic languages, but interestingly not in Latin—the Latin words for “right” and “left” were dexter (hence “dexterity”, how good you are with your right hand, and “ambidextrous”, when both hands are right) and sinister (hence, well, “sinister”, when you’re left-handed so you must be in league with Satan). So it seems to have independently developed many different times.

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Hey, that’s where “goodbye” comes from too (“God be with you”, getting progressively more mush-mouthed over the centuries).

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Oh! I remember trying to look it up, but not finding it. I guess I was having a bad search-fu day?

Many thanks for clearing that one up for me! ;-D

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This one I happened to just know because it’s a popular bit of linguistic trivia (inasmuch as you can call any linguistic trivia “popular”), but I like etymonline.com for my English etymology lookup needs.

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The above rant on variant spellings reminded me… I’m not always sure when a word is supposed to end in -ize versus -ise or -nce versus -nse… Doesn’t help that if I’m not mistaken, some words in these categories have one preferred spelling in British English and the other spelling preferred in American English.

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When in doubt, that’s the criteria I take into account. Works most of the time, I feel. And spellings that end in -er vs -re, as centre/center and theater/theatre.

EDIT -

I was not under the impression I was ranting. I was under the impression I was talking, explaining, sharing, contextualizing, etc etc etc. I believed it was appropriate for a post of linguistics trivia and discussion. I apologise if I slipped into a rant. The linguists who insist on the nonsensical-but-in-the-dictionary spelling of the word “electrocução” certainly would wave it away, belittle it, demean it, as a rant, instead of taking the arguments on their merits and actually consider them for more than a second. I expected to hear that from them. I was a bit surprised to hear that here…

I shall be more careful in my future posts so as not to rant so.

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You can blame Noah Webster for basically all of those!

In the early 1800s, he decided to publish an American dictionary, one that would specifically not be an English one. (This was right around the time the United States was declaring independence from the UK.) He was also distinctly anti-French. So while he was compiling this dictionary, any time a French spelling differed from the Latin one (Latin -ize, French -ise; Latin -or, French -our; Latin -er, French -re; etc), he specifically chose the Latin one—even though the French one had previously been standard in English (English primarily got those words from French, not from Latin).

And thus, we Americans now say normalize, color, center, while pretty much everywhere else in the English-speaking world says normalise, colour, centre.

(I’m not sure if he’s to blame for things like defense~defence, because both French and Latin have an S there. I’ll need to look into that more. Those ones might have been a later change by the Brits.)

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It doesn’t help that in the US people who work with stage plays and similar tend to spell it theatre.

I tend to default to “people on stage = theatre and place that shows movies = theater”

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Theatre = the performance arts, theater = a venue for plays and movies is what was taught in my Theatre Appreciation course I took as part of a humanities trilogy in college(the other two parts being Art Appreciation, focused on the visual arts, and Music Appreciation).

Oh, another confusing across the pondism: Trapazoid and trapezium. In American English, a trapazoid is a quadrilateral with a single pair of parallel sides, and though rare, a trapezium is a quadrilateral with no parallel sides… In British English, their definitions are swapped. What I find interesting is that these are fairly technical terms you’re unlikely to hear outside of a geometry class or a gathering of math nerds, and while its not uncommon for words with very exact meanings in math and science to have much looser meanings in colloquial use(work, energy, and power come to mind), it feels a bit odd for technical language to have such a strong inconsistency between two dialects of the same language.

Figured good might have had origins as a corruption of god with how Christians insist their interpretation of God to be the source of all good(never mind all the atrocities the Bible credits to God or his agents), but I had no idea Goodbye came from God be with you… Does make one wonder how we ended up with hello as a greeting, though I’d be surprised if the similarity to hell isn’t coincidence.

Also makes me wonder of the origins of foreign terms for goodbye such as(and excuse any butchered spellings, I’m a humble English monoglot raised in a country that seems downright hostile to bilingualism) areba derchi, asta la vista, or sayonara.

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All feet are the same!

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‘“Flammable” being the same as “inflammable”’ is always an interesting one to spring on people who are unaware, and then watch them realise the contradiction.

“Arrivederci” (a rivederci) and “auf wiedersehen” both mean “see ya!”, or verbosely, “until we see each other again”. :wink: “Hasta la vista” is the same. But they are not quite goodbye, they are “see ya”. “Arrivederci” has its “addio”, “hasta la vista” has its “adios”. Interestingly, I don’t know how to say “goodbye” in german without it being “auf wiedersehen” - the word “goodbye” with all its inherent finality, as opposed to “we shall meet again”. Intriguing!

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“Sayonara” is more definite and final than the other two. Here’s some reading up on it. “Mata ne” would be our “arrivederci” and “hasta la vista” and stuff. Here is another one.

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“God” and “good” are actually unrelated—it’s a coincidence they ended up so similar. “Good” is instead related to “gather” and “together”.

Nobody knows! People have suggested a connection to “hey”, “hail”, or “holler”, among others, but it just kind of showed up out of nowhere, and the best we can do is speculate.

(A lot of sources claim Thomas Edison invented it, but like with most things Edison “invented”, he was just taking credit for something that already existed. “Hello” appears in print in the 1820s, decades before Edison was born.)

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75

There’s “Tschüss”. It’s less formal and more personal and friendly. It’s also regional (like everything in Germany). I have experienced people saying Tschüss instead of Auf Wiedersehen to express “I hope I will never see you again”, but only in certain situations.

Regarding God (God be with you, adios etc.) we have in Bavaria “Grüß Gott” as a replacement for Hello. It means “Greet God” (imperativ). It’s the normal Bavarian greeting, no matter if you believe in God or not.