Linguistics Trivia

Some random linguistics trivia:

✩ ‘Saturday’ comes from the word ‘Saturn’

✩ Did you ever notice that the months ‘September’, ‘October’, ‘November’ and ‘December’ refer to the numbers 7, 8, 9 and 10 respectively, but are actually the 9th, 10th, 11th and 12th months?

✩ (not sure if this is a linguistic phenomenon or not because I haven’t tried this in other languages): If you ask someone to think of an odd number between 0 and 50, people most commonly choose 37

✩ In cultures across the world (& time), odd numbers are usually associated with ‘male’-ness and even numbers with ‘femininity’

✩ Words for colours in languages aren’t just ‘always there’, but in fact develop over time. Researchers have found that 80% of the world’s languages add colour terms in the SAME order:

Stage 1: only 2 colours exist: ‘white / light’ and ‘black / dark’ – all colour descriptions in the language are given one or the other term

Stage 2: the language develops a term for ‘red’

Stage 3: either ‘yellow’ or ‘green’ is added next, usually ‘yellow’

Stage 4: whichever of ‘yellow’ and ‘green’ has not yet been added

Stage 5: ‘blue’ is added