Is it inhumane to call aliens men?

A fairly common source of lexical awkwardness in scifi and fantasy is the inhumane disregard of the fact that appealing to the humanity of a non-human or simply referring to them as man is probably rather offensive.
The worst offender is probably Star Trek: Cpt Picard loved appealing to someone's humanity. The show may have produced the quote that "the federation is no more than a Homo sapiens only club", but that is no justification for sloppy language.

Firstly, what is a better word for humanity?
Humanity has four meanings:

• the collective term for humans. Synonym: mankind.
• the quality of being human. No synonym as manly means masculine.
• the abstract noun of humane (not human). Synonyms: compassion, benevolence, kindness, magnanimity.
• the arts. Also from humane.

So basically the use of the words humane, inhumane and humanity are signs of sloppy writing as compassionate, cruel and compassion would do nicely.

Secondly, what is the collective term for certain races?

There are very few examples to work off and they are not consistent.
The suffix -kind is an Old English suffix present in mankind, it is better than the Latin suffix -ity as the latter is added to adjectives to also make abstract nouns (mens, mentis (mind) noun > mental adj. > mentality abs. noun). Hence the fact why humanity means both mankind and mannishness.

Technically, mankind is a one off combination in the dictionary. Another one that was lost is Angelcynn (Anglekin). Note that it is from the noun angel (Angle), not the adjective ænglisc (English, pertaining to the Angles) similarly to mankind and not mannishkind. Somewhere along the way the words elvenkind and dwarvenkind appeared, which are both of which are from the adjective.

Parenthetically, the adjectives of non-human races are absent in many cases, so adding -ish or -ic makes the word sound unusual in the first place —as -ish isn't constructive, while -ic sounds odd on words that don't stem from Latin/Greek.
Tolkien made a curious distinction between elven/dwarven and elvish/dwarvish in that the former adjectives mean "pertaining to x", while the latter mean "made by x". Orcish doesn't have a similar division (Orcadian is someone from Orkney). Orckind has more google hits than orcishkind and follows the pattern of mankind. Similarly, goblinkind and trollkind are less convoluted than having to make up an adjective: goblin is from Old French (gobelinic?), while troll is a Swedish recent loanword (trollisk?).
What about Latinate words? Gnomes > gnomic and dragons > draconic. Gnomekind vs. gnomickind?
The former sounds better again due to the lack of the c'k cluster. The alternative, following humanity is gnomicity and draconity, but they do sound like the quality of being a gnome/dragon.
On the flipside, when there is a consonant clash like elfkind or dwarfkind the adjective sounds better Similarly Scottishkind sounds better than Scottkind and felinekind sounds better than catkind —although felinekind and felininty might have some ablaut change kicking in (/fi:lɑjn/ > /fəlɪnəti:/).
So in conclusion, there does not seem to be a strict rule to adding -kind.

Secondly, is a man human only? And what about the suffix -man?
Well, yes and no. The word man generally refers to male humans only, but derived terms generally don't.
The word man itself is weird in that it used to mean both genders, with woman and hipman as the gender specific ones. That is why the word mankind is the collective noun for all humans.
Irrespective of etymology, nowadays there are many case where the -man suffix is replaced with person, when a woman has that task, e.g. chairperson. However it sounds so weird that probably taking the etymological standpoint for the suffix -man is the best bet. Vulcan crewperson sounds like one is trying hard to be polically correct, while Vulcan crewman sounds fine.
In Star Trek The Original Series Spock calls himself, and is called, a man on many occasions… but then again he is a Vulcan who speaks Vulcan and is from Vulcan, a planet orbiting the star Vulcan (40 Eridani).
In Star wars Legacy John Ostrander adds colour to the dialogue by adding Huttese or Mandalorian swearwords or terms of endearment. One cool thing is the use of the word sentient instead of man or person and it works really well. By extension, sentiency would be the collective term for all sentients.

In conclusion, sentient and compassion work really well to replace the words man and humanity, while the suffix kind does not have any clear rules.

Postultimate

It is here!

This product is not the same as its previous dozen predecessors.

…It is the Ultimate version.

The word ultimate is generally solely used for exaggerations: it means that there is nothing after it, so if a new product truly is ultimate it would mean either the manufacturers will go bust or there will be a catastrophic societal collapse where the manufacturing technologies will be lost. However, doomsday never comes, instead the version afterwards gets a new name… this would make it a “postultimate” version, which is quite paradoxical.

However, it is fully understandable concept and it turns out to be great for making ridiculously nerdy hyperbolae. Eg. "That new Justin Beber album is the postultimate in awesomeness." See?

millionennium and the ennium suffix

Yahoo Answers is probably the only think Yahoo! has going for itself, yet the system is far from perfect. Many answers are wrong or retarded, but once the time has finished the Q/A are fixed and no new answers can be added. I stumbled across one that was wrong and here is the correct answer.

I was curious to see if a word for a set number of years beyond millennium existed, but it doesn't.
However, it does not mean new words cannot be made: the Latin word for year, annus, possess a suffix form -ennium for exactly this purpose. Actually, in Italian -enne is a commonly used as a suffix (on Italian numbers) to say "years old", eg. an undicenne is a 11-yo.

• Year
• biennium
• triennium
• quadriennium
• lustrum
• decade
• century
• millenium
• "decamillennium"
• "centimillennium"
• "millionennium"
• "billionennium"
• etc.

The catch is that all the -illion numbers do not exist in Latin and that their usage only was standardised recently whereas before there were two conflicting systems, called the long and short scale. We now solely use the latter, whereas remnants of the former are still present in some languages, in Italian, for example, billion is called miliardo (trillion is trilione). The word million is actually of Late Latin/early Italian origin and is the word thousand (mille) with the augmentative suffix -one (in Anglish they came up with the cool sounding "micklered", instead of calquing and getting "overthousand"), whereas the Romans and other folk simply would say a thousand thousand. It is rather weird to think that people used get along just fine without having the need to deal with large numbers... or possibly their denial of such need is the reason why the Roman empire's economy was a disaster.

The correct octopus plural

The whole octopuses/octopi/octopoda/octopodes issue is hilariously tragic.
There is no black and white solution as three languages are involved.

Octopus is from the taxonomic Neolatin word octopūs and zoologically all -pūs words are 3rd declension Latin and generally masculine (genitive -podis and  plural nominative -podes), because they decided so. The Romans called octopuses polypus, a masculine second declension word (plural polypi), where the pus root is the same. In other words, English pedants would have told the Romans off for not getting their Greek right —ironic given that they are fluent at it as opposed to knowing less than a smattering of rules and words.

So if problem does not lies with the Romans, does it lie with the Greeks?

Maybe… Greek was continually changing and has different periods, the Greek in Greece now speak modern Greek, whereas under the Roman empire it was Koine Greek, before that a mix of dialects which waxing and waining prestige.

An archaic dialect was Doric were the word for foot was πός (pous, genitive που, pou, plural nominative ποί, poi), a second declension, whereas in others such Ionic, the early classic one of Homer, or Attic, the classic one from Athens, it was πούς (pous, genitive ποδος, podos, and plural nominative ποδες, podes). The Romans borrowed polypus from the Doric speakers, so their plural was polypi. A similar muddle happened with the Latin letters and transliterations from Greek.

So to recap in order of decreasing idiocy:

• Octopoda.
• Pro: Yes, octopus may be a masculine not neuter, but the order is called octopoda and Stephen Fry said so on QI.
• Contra: Octopoda is for consistency and Saint Stephen does make mistakes (he got his Greek wrong on The liar by writing patrochles)
• Octopi.
• Pro: Octopus was based on polypus and that zoologists have no right to decide and ruin the purity of Latin historical continuity.
• Contra: The word was coined by zoologists, the Roman's borrowed polypi right before they went out of style, anyway, and there is no such thing as continuity with Neolatin, just anachronism.
• Octopodes.
• Pro: The correct Neolatin plural.
• Contra: Rather hard to pronounce.
• Octopuses.
• Pro: it is not the end of the world.
• Contra. But it is fun.

It is curious how the word pedantry has the Latin pedes as a root…

Fossilised participles

What do nature and furniture have to do with the future?

Participles are adjectives formed from a verb, in English there are two flavours, the active present participle (in -ing) and the passive past participle (in -ed).

In English, there are a great deal of fossilised Latin participles, which are hiding…

In Latin there were four, the active present participle in -ans or -ens (-ant or -ent in English), the passive participle in -atus or -itus (-ate or -ite in English), the active future participle in -aturus or -iturus (-ature or -iture in English) and the passive future participle (actually called a gerundive) -andus or -endus.

It is rather cool thing to know as they are easy to spot.

For example,

Expectant means expecting, dependant means depending on, constant means standing with.

Separate means sperated, ingrate means that has not been graced, passionate means that has been given passion.

Agenda means that will be done, graduand means that will be graduated, memorandum means that will be remembered.

And finally, nature means that will beget (nascent is the present participle equivalent), furniture means that will furnish and future means that will be.

What the logic was for nature and furniture to be future participles is a different matter entirely…

Viking Manbags

It is amazing where spirals of procrastination lead to. Reading something blatantly non-work-related I came across the word "douchebaggery", which made me amused and bemused. To me the word sounds awkward, but I do see the need for an abstract noun for this fun American common noun which differs slightly from the British "wanker" and "wankiness". Having thought that something a bit smoother than "douchebaggery" must be possible, I checked the expanding universe of cyberspace, but found nothing.

The word sounds etymologically slightly weird, so I checked where "bag" came from. I assumed it would be French as the word baggage sounds it and as it is easy to picture the French inventing something so frivolous like a bag. But I was wrong and identity of the first bag-bearers blew my mind: the Vikings. Yes, bag comes from Old Norse, meaning it was not poncey Frenchmen that invaded England armed with handbags, but the fearsome Vikings did. Just to blow all stereotypes, the Vikings even gave the French the word baggage.
A manbag, therefore,being a gift from the manly Vikings, is the most manly accessory one could sport apart from a horned helmet, a claymore or double-axe.


Damn, that means that being a "douchebag" is a bit manly after all.
It means that if one wanted to go for etymological faux-authenticity "douchebaggery" would be out of the question. The two suffices of Norse origin that make adjectives, verbs or common nouns into abstract nouns are -lock (wedlock) and -red (kindred), but they both sound terrible with douchebag ("douchebaglock" and "douchebagred").
So the best bet is to go with good old Old English ones. Bagginess is a real word, but it is a bit too removed semantically from bag to make "douchebagginess" not awkward sounding. In a similar vein, "douchebagging" is also awkward as "to bag" means to gain possession and who would want to gain possession of a douche? 
The established suffix is ery, which is -er + y, and generally represents a place or an office (bakery), which when used on douchebag makes it sound the official role of a douchebag, so "douchebagship", "douchebaghood" and "douchebagdom" could be alternatives. On second thought, I think I quite like the word "douchebaggery" after all...

The -meal suffix

An Old English suffix that has been unjustly forgotten is the -meal suffix.
If something is done gradually the phrase that is normally used is x by x, in archaic English -meal suffix can do the same thing, similarly to the Latin -atim. It is not constructive anymore, but several examples are present in the OED:

• piecemeal: piece by piece —only one not obsolete
• stickmeal (styccemǣlum): bit by bit
• yearmeal (gēarmǣlum): year after year
• sheafmeal (scēafmǣlum): sheaf by sheaf, although the later pagemeal works better
• stemmeal (stemmǣlum): turn by turn, alternately
• stepmeal (stæpmǣlum): step by step, gradually
• namemeal (nammǣlum): name by name
• dropmeal: drop by drop
• flockmeal: group by group
• footmeal: foot by foot
• heapmeal: heap by heap
• limbmeal: limb by limb
• stoundmeal: hour by hour
• cupmeal: cup by cup
• gobbetmeal: fragment by fragment
• littlemeal: little by little
• parcelmeal: parcel by parcel
• pennymeal: penny by penny
• piecemeal: piece by piece
• poundmeal: pound by pound
• ravishmeal: rapidly (a Latinisms  by Wyclif from raptim)
• tablemeal: iPad tablet by iPad tablet (from tabulatim)
• fitmeal: jitter by jitter
• inchmeal: inch by inch
• jointmeal: joint by joint
• lumpmeal: lump by lumb
• pagemeal: page by page

Unfortunately, converting the imperial units to metric, sounds terrible, eg. millimetremeal, so they'll have to stay imperial.

Verbatim et letteratim is an expression that means word by word and letter by letter, in other words, with insane thoroughness. It is a rather cool, so with the above it would be wordmeal and lettermeal.

The only problem is that, even knowing the meaning, the words wholemeal, wheatmeal and oatmeal spring to mind…

Gender-less pronouns

Most folk agree that writing he/she is a pain, however, nobody agrees on what is the best substitute.
Singular they is the most commonly used and it appears in the king James's bible, so when Jehovah speaks English he/she uses singular they (ref). That last sentence shows that it has a glaring problem: singular they is used as a plural and the closeted prescriptivistic pedant (†)  in all of us screams out upon hearing a grammatical number mismatch (e.g. "Someone has made a mess again, I wish they'd tidy up once in a while"). "They is" is too revolutionary to be anything but jarringly awkward sounding.
Impersonal one (from the French homme curiously) is used differently, so is not a gender-less pronoun.


Wikipedia has a hodgepodge collection of attempted pronouns (link), some of them badly put together.
I thought I'd make up my own.


What did the vikings ever do for us? They gave us useful words!
They in English is not of Old English origin, but of Norse.
The third person personal pronouns in Old English are: (in the order subject, possessive, direct and indirect object)
M: he, his, hine (=him), him
F: heo or hie (=she. eo is read ee), hire (=her), heo or hie (=her), hire (=her)
N: hit (=it), his (=its), hit (=it), him (=it)
Pl: hie (=they), hira (=their), hie  (=them), him or heom (=them)


As you can see, not only some forms are repeated within a gender as in in English (her can be possessive or object), but also between (him can mean to it or to him). Therefore the Norse they makes life so much less confusing. 
Humorously, hie could be they or she, which would make gender-neutral pronoun advocates happy.


Search the Old English 3rd prs. plural pronouns gives me:
hie became hi or hy, which was last used in 1400.
hera gave us her.
heom became hem and then 'em.

So one version of a gender-neutral pronoun could be:
hy, her or heer (modernised hiera), hem or heem (modernised  heom).
Hy sounds a lot like I, though.

Alternatively, Old Norse could be the source of the sought pronouns.
The thon pronoun set which someone proposed is not based on the singular form in Norse as only the neuter begins with þ (thorn, th-group) and it is the same as the demonstrative pronoun that.
The feminine set is: hon, hennar, hana, henni
They have no derivatives in the OED, so hon, hennar and henne could be another set, but they do not sound English.
Those Old Norse pronouns became hon, hennes and henne in Swedish, which has a made up gender-neutral pronoun, hen, which would not work in English for obvious reasons.


Taking a step back, I think I'll adopt hon, heer and heem.
Example: Someone e-mail: hon said to call heem or heer secretary.
Maybe I'll stick with he/she.


†) Prescriptivism may suffocate the natural evolution of a language and has the sole purpose of linguistic snootiness, Descriptivism is a tad hypocritical to say the least. Descriptivistic snootiness at prescriptivistic snootiness at grammatic butchery...

Time traveler's grammar

Douglas Adams wrote in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy that the biggest problem with time travel was the grammar. He was right.

However, the solution presented in that superb book is obviously a joke as it takes the matter to its utmost complication. In reality, more straightforward —or, more correctly, loopforward— less awkward and grammatically sensible solutions exist, albeit not as funny and a bit too academically dry…

So. There are two grammatically paradoxical scenarios:

• The traveller will do an action in the past.
• The traveller has done an action in the future.

These two sentence show that the whole time travel grammar business is not really that much of a problem. After all, when letters are written the tenses used refer to those of the writer and not of the future reader, e.g. "by the time you will read this, I will have fled to Antarctica to join a nunnery" and not "as you read this now, I have already fled to Antarctica". Grumble grumble.

In essence, adding in the past or in the future, which act as temporal delimitators actually make the sentence sound. Curiously, the words past, present and future are actually fossils of Latin participles, namely past is from passatus, the past participle of passare (to pass), present is from præsens, the present participle of præesse (to preside), while future is from futurus, the future participle of esse (to be). This means that the two time-travel examples do have a slight (hidden) verbal muddle —and verbal muddle is what I want.

But can the muddledom be increased without breaking regular grammatical structure?

Germanic languages ‚a family which includes English, have no dedicated future tense. To wit, a word ending to make the tense (cf. "I will receive" with "je recevrai"). This gives us "the traveller will did/had done an action" or simply "the traveller will done an action", which possess the time travelling awkwardness I am after all.

Although it is a bit of silly as the construct formed by a modal verb plus past participle, simple past or past perfect is wrong. This is unavoidable as will plus present perfect is a future perfect ("the traveller will have done an action").

A further loophole is with would. Will is a modal verb that has a present indicative form (will) and a præterite (=past) subjunctive (would) and in Old English willan was a bog-standard verb (meaning to will/intend). Therefore, "the traveller would/willed do an action" should fit the bill of an action to be done in the past, but it just sounds like a conditional clause.

An alternative would be to introduce a present perfect of will: "the travelled has would/willed do/done/doing an action", which is relatively nicer.

After all that work, there is the problem that the two forms could work either way round.

• the traveller will had done an action
• the travelled has would do an action

Okay, the will verb was a good jail-breaker, what happens if it was not used and the time travelling grammar was to be tried on a Romance language?

In that case participles might do the trick, albeit badly. There are three issues, though, that make it a mess.

Firstly, the present participle (e.g. "the eating dog") is active and progressive while the past (e.g. "the eaten dog") is passive and perfect, but the inverse constructs could be made ("the has-eaten dog" and "the being eaten dog"). Parenthetically, Greek grammar has a much better fix, but Greek grammar has little to do with English, so it will have to do.

Secondly, Latin (and Greek) had a future participle but French and English do not, so it needs to be introduced. The Latin (first conjugation) suffix for the future participle is -aturus, which could be anglicised to -ature (/-eɪtʃər/ like nature) —okay, the -at- part is the same as -ed, but that is hair-splitting. So "the dog that will have eaten" could be "eatature (or eatenure) dog".

Lastly, decoupling tense of the participle from the verb and coupling the verb-y bit with the time-frame of the traveller and the participle with the time-frame of the action would allow:

• The traveller will (had) done an anction (action done in the past that the traveller will do).
• The traveller had doature an action (action doature that has not yet occurred that the traveller has done)

The latter is hideously horrible and doature sounds like douche. Which I think means that time travelling is for douchebags as is writing drivel about its grammar. I am a double douchebag and will stop here.

My experience with Anglish

English is an unusual language due its hybrid nature, but what would it be if it were not?

Before 1066, the Angles and the Saxons spoke Old English, a Germanic language like German and Swedish.
Old English contained only a handful of words that where of Latin origin, mainly church-related. In the north of England, specifically in Danelaw, the viking occupied land, several Old Norse words (the language that evolved into Swedish) were seeping into the vocabulary. However, when the Normans conquered England in 1066 (by cheating in true french style) Old French was the official language and a multitude of words entered the vocabulary to the point that 1/3 of English words nowadays are of Old French origin. But this was not the only hybridization event: several centuries later, the usage of Latin and Greek words was seen as sophisticated resulting in another inflow of words that did not descend from Old English. Today, Greek and Latin words are seen as poncy, so the inflow has changed to a more cosmopolitan medley of sources.

This raises the question of what would English sound like if it lacked this hybrid nature and this is were the Anglish Moot comes in. The Anglish Moot is an online community that experiments with this concept by writing in "Anglish". It is a curious language that sounds like Shakespearian English (early modern English), namely it is clearly English, but with some benighted (obscure) bits. I found it so enthralling I was quickly sucked it.

However, it became slowly shire (clear) that the goalwork (project) is a banefall (disaster). Even the grounder (founder) forlore (abandoned) it years ago having become unbewitched (disenchanted) with it. I lost westumscat (interest, from wæstmsceatt: literally fruit treasure) in it for three frumes (reasons).

Firstly, all the adighters (editors) did their own thing, sometimes pulling in gainstanding (opposing) wardings (directions), without betwixtdoing (interacting) with each other, therefore edframing (reinventing) words or not telling each other of their findings. This offled (resulted) in an utter lack of suchness hold (quality control) and of an bestriding (overarching) underwrap (theme), a flutter (mess) in other words.

Twithly (Secondly), it did not have any rootfast (fixed) standards (okay, I give up) or guidelines: some editors wanted to replace words that entered after 1066, others all non-germanic words regardless of date of entry, while others replaced words with little rational justification. How replacement words were found changed from editor to editor, when a fully equivalent synonym of Old English origin was absent, some editors simply used less specific similar words, others would look for an obsolete synonym and if none existed would revive an Old English words by modernising the spelling and ending, while others would combine two words regardlessly. This last approach is the only way for modern concepts, but different methods were employed even for this, some looked at German or Icelandish equivalents, while others translated the Graeco-latinate word bit by bit.

The main criticism on the internet is that Anglish is a kind of etymological xenophobia. This is actually a misunderstanding as the drive is not to forspill (eradicate) outlandish (foreign) words but to ross (explore) the "what if" frayn (question) of a more Germanic English language. However, after a while all words not of Old English origin started to seem tainted to me, so etymological xenophobia is a side-effect, which is probably worse.

I must, however, say I learnt a lot of interesting things and words, such as elfsheen (ethereally beautiful) and hagship (hag-like ugliness). Unfortunately, I have not yet had the chance to use these words, but I am hopeful...

Mysapolecophobia and plyteolecophobia

They say that there is a word for a phobia for everything, but googling the fear of dirty dishes or fear of doing the dishes results in a void of a term.


The adjective dirty in Greek is μυσαρός (mysapos), while a dish, pot or pan is λέκος (lecos) (ref. LSJ).
Mysophobia is the fear of dirt and μύσος is a noun, which has been used as an adjective only in Hesychius' dictionary of obscure words. 
Regarding the word for dish, there are many words to choose from: earthernware, Lydian etc., but I think lecos is the most vague and quite common so fits the bill.
So the word for the fear of dirty dishes is mysapolecophobia!


The word for "fear of having to do the dishes" is a quite a bit more complicated. To do the dishes is hard to translate as the verb to do is often a magical verb that fills a hole. Washing-up does not given anything in Perseus, so the trick of using modern Greek, which has a richer presence on the internet gives "πλένω τα πιάτα", πιάτα being an obvious import (cf. Italian piatto and English plate) and πλένω being to wash in modern. The Attic equivalent being πλύνω. When someone says Greek is easy, they are a clueless braggart or a genius as Greek verbs (v. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Greek_verbs) are a product of a culture that spent too much time walking under the heat of the sun naked while talking about the meaning of the universe. Skipping the grammar discussion, I get the verbal adjective πλυτέος (masculine) or πλυτέον (neuter). So the fear of having to do the dishes is plyteolecophobia (literally, the fear of the dishes needing a wash).


So if one just fears washing the dishes which are dirty, one could be said to be plyteomysapolecophobic. That word is a tad hippopotomonstrosesquippedalian...

Callicolpia, the rude word that never was

In the Oxford English Dictionary the word "callicolpian" is absent, why is that?
I have never heard the word uttered or see it printed as I just simply joined two Greek words together.
Google tells me that I am not the first to make the word up, but why is it not an OED word, whereas bathycolpian and callipygian are, I do not know.
I must confess the title is a tad misleading as the words are not rude words, just sexual in nature.
The word callicolpian means "pertaning/having nice breasts", bathycolpian means "pertaning/having big breasts" and callipygian means "pertaning/having a nice bottom". The latter is, in my opinion, so much nicer than "bootylicious", but is not used metaphorically (ie. a phone may be bootylicious, but it cannot be callipygian).
I struggle to believe that bathycolpia is callicolpia, but the commonplace of mammary implants makes me think that I may be in minority...