A couple of months back, I learned that task arose as a variant of tax, with the /s/ and /k/ metathesized. This change apparently happened in French before the word was borrowed into English. That is, French had the word taxa, which came from Latin, and then the variant form tasca arose and evolved into […]
With the recent release of the new Hobbit movie, The Desolation of Smaug, a lot of people have been talking about the pronunciation of the titular dragon’s name. The inclination for English speakers is to pronounce it like smog, but Tolkien made clear in his appendixes to The Lord of the Rings that the combination […]
If you’ve ever had to learn a foreign language, you may have struggled to memorize plural forms of nouns. German, for example, has about a half a dozen ways of forming plurals, and it’s a chore to remember which kind of plural each noun takes. English, by comparison, is ridiculously easy. Here’s how it works […]
