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Thanks to a semester's worth of historical linguistics in professor Grover Hudson's class at Michigan State University, I now know the difference between a "voiced obstruent" and a "sonorant consonant." I think. But in addition to a mouthful of linguistics terminology, I also picked up some interesting trivia:

- Peas in a pod. The word peas is older than the word "pea." The Middle English "pease" meant both a single seed in a pod and more than one. When adding "s" came to be the most common way to make a plural in English, people started to assume that the "s" of "pease" marked a plural, and that "pea" was the singular form. The new word stuck.

This is called "back-formation," and it happens all the time. A more recent example is "self-destruct" from "self-destruction"; ordinarily, we don't use the word "destruct."

- Norman numbers. In Old English, "an and twentig" ("one-and-twenty") was the way to say "twenty-one" (as "ein und zwanzig" still is in German). But when the French-speaking Normans invaded England in 1066, they brought their way of saying numbers with them. Their word order -- "vingt et un," "vingt-deux," which translate as "twenty and one," "twenty-two"-- crept into English usage.

- We "nativize." The word "karaoke" is a Japanese word that literally means "empty orchestra" (a karaoke singer has no live accompaniment). In English, we don't follow that "ah" sound in the second syllable with "oh," the way the Japanese do when they say "karaoke." We changed the "ah" to "ee" -- "kar-ee-oh-kee" -- just to make it easier to say in English. Linguists call this "nativization."

- Except when we don't. When we borrow a word from another language, sometimes we nativize it to a more familiar pronunciation, and sometimes we keep the original pronunciation. But we don't use either strategy consistently.

Take the word "entourage." We borrowed it from French and kept a French-like pronunciation of "on-tor-ahj," with the last syllable matching the ending of "barrage." But when we borrowed "encourage" -- which differs from "entourage" by only one letter -- we completely changed the pronunciation to a more English-friendly "en-cur-edge."

There's no logical reason to pronounce the words two different ways. In this case, the only difference seems to be that we borrowed "encourage" back in the 1400s -- about four centuries before we nabbed "entourage" -- giving us much more time to alter the pronunciation.

- Zipf's law. The shorter the word, the more frequently it occurs in a language. George Zipf published a study in the 1930s that found in a 10-million-word sample of German words, about 41 percent of all words were one syllable, 29 percent two syllables, and so on down to one half of one percent for words of six syllables or more. (German seems like a tricky test case, since German words can pile up syllables by stacking short words together, but the general principle holds true for the world's languages.)

- Ozark English. A dialect of English spoken in the Ozark mountains of Missouri and Arkansas uses the so-called "get'-passive" differently than most other English dialects. Usually, the sentences "He was hit by a truck" and "He got hit by a truck" mean the same thing in English -- a helpless victim was struck; it was the driver's fault. But in Ozark English, "got hit" is different from "was hit." "Got hit" means "got himself hit"; the victim was to blame for his carelessness.

- Word order. English generally uses subject-verb-object order ("she saw him"). It seems natural to us to start with who is doing the action in the sentence ("she"), then what she is doing ("saw"), and finally who was the recipient of the action ("him"). But it turns out that only about one-third of the world's languages use this word order. About 44 percent use subject-object-verb ("she him saw") as their normal word order, and about 19 percent use verb-subject-object ("saw she him").

- Language changes. Linguists made this rule: Take any two groups of speakers of the same language, separate them, and after 10,000 years their speech will be unrecognizable to each other. This is why it's really hard to study the relationship between languages more than 10,000 years ago. And it's why complaining about language change is like complaining about soil erosion. It just happens.

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Contact Nathan Bierma at onlanguage@gmail.com.

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