history

Is there an historical thesaurus?

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Is there something like a thesaurus that offers terms more often used in the past? For instance, I beg you would, in Shakespearean times, be prithee, while chicks during the 1920s would be dolls. Meta: Seeing how the question on a thesaurus with archaic and obsolete words and several other thesaurus-related questions have been closed, … Read more

Were American, Australian, and New Zealand English dialects ever spoken in Britain before the colonization of these lands?

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Were American, Australian, and New Zealand English dialects ever spoken in Britain before the colonization of these lands? Answer Languages change. Otherwise, we’d still be speaking like Chaucer. The British settlement of America started in the 17th century; there has been lots of time since then for several different American dialects to develop. The British … Read more

Why is there “Black English” but not “White English”?

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African American Vernacular English is shortened to a less precise phrase “Black English”. Also, Black English is used in a broader sense: Black English is a term used for both dialects of English and English-based pidgins and creoles, and whose meaning depends considerably upon the context, and particularly the part of the world. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_English … Read more

Etymology of English “Achoo” relative to other sneezing onomatopoeiae

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So I was recently curious about the sound that people sneeze with in other languages and was surprised to notice the difference between the English onomatopoetic word "Achoo" and that of other languages in the same family. For example: German – hatschi Dutch – hatsjie However some of our sibling languages are closer: Icelandic – … Read more

Why doesn’t English have a separate word for “head hair”? (head hair vs. body hair)

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The answer can be “Because it doesn’t!” or “It wasn’t needed!” in short but there might be a historical or linguistic explanation behind this. (Of course, every language might be lacking a word that another language has and you can give the meaning in a context.) This question came up mainly because there are several … Read more

Differentiate and Integrate

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Further to my last question about the history of calculus terms, I am wondering about the etymology of differentiate the etymology of integrate why we speak of a “derivative”, but we “differentiate” instead of “derive” Please note that by “etymology” I mean the mathematical history of these terms. This may get answered en route, but … Read more