Probably the stuff in the water.

Thank you! I don’t need the modern equivalent of laugh tracks to tell me whether or not a social media post is funny.

The fact that it’s named after a Maple Leaf badge still doesn’t fully explain it though, because why should the fact that it’s named after a badge change expected “leaves” to “leafs”?

One potential explanation for this phenomenon comes to us from morphology, the branch of linguistics dealing with the internal structure of words and how they are created. As we’ll see, you’re exactly right that it’s because “maple leaf” refers to a badge instead of a leaf, but why will require a little bit of theory.

First we have to introduce the idea of a “compound” and prove that “maple leaf” is actually a single noun compound even though it looks like two words. A compound is any single word that contains (at least) two roots, that is, two “basic meaning-chunks” (that’s not a perfect definition, but it serves our purposes here). There are three usual dimensions of tests to show whether something is two words or a compound:

1. Phonological. In English specifically, compounds often get initial stress. For example, I can build my house with a black BOARD, but I write on a BLACKboard. (Note that this is not exceptionless, even in English, so this test should only be used to support the next two tests).

2. Semantic. A second test is “semantic distance”, that is, once a compound has formed, the meaning of the compound may drift from the meanings of the original components. For “blackboard”, many of us have seen blackboards that were green, not black, passing the semantic distance test. This test is also not foolproof, however, since not all compounds show significant semantic distance yet, so you can use this test to show that something is a compound, but not that something isn’t a compound.

3. Syntactic. The best test is “modification”. The “head” of a compound (the part of the compound that tells you what kind of word it is and how it behaves) is the only part that can be targeted for modification (by adverbs, adjectives, etc.). So, for “blackboard”, you can’t say *“That’s a very blackboard” to mean “That blackboard is very black”. That is, once “black” has become part of the compound, it can’t be modified.

So, putting all of this together, the string “maple leaf”, as in “There’s a maple leaf on that tree” a) has initial stress, so it passes the compound stress test, b) hasn’t changed meaning, so it fails the semantic distance test, but c) can’t be modified (“That’s a big maple leaf” can’t mean “That’s a leaf from a big maple”), so it passes the modification test.

Our interim conclusion is that, whether we write it with a space between it or not (which doesn’t matter at all as far as language is concerned), “maple leaf” is a single compound noun in English.

Ok, so where do we go from here?

Well, the next useful categorization is the distinction between “endocentric” and “exocentric” compounds. Endocentric compounds have the head inside the compound, which is just a fancy way of saying that the compound is a type of that thing. For example, a “doghouse” is a type of house, and a “maple leaf” is a type of leaf.

Exocentric compounds, as you might expect, are compounds that have their head outside the compound, which, again, is just a fancy way of saying that the compound is not a type of that thing. For example, “bigfoot” is not a foot, it’s a creature with a big foot. “Blackbeard” is not a beard, but a person possessing a black beard. A “Toronto Maple Leaf” is not a leaf, but a person (or a badge, as I just learned today!) associated with a leaf. In short, this type of compound refers to something else. That’s the “outside” part.

As it turns out, this “inside”/“outside” distinction is a useful theoretical construct that finally helps us explain “Maple Leafs”.

What differences do you note in the compound pairs below?

bigfoot : *bigfeet : bigfoots
saber tooth : *saber teeth : saber tooths (when referring to the animal)

field mouse : field mice : *field mouses
salesman : salesmen : *salesmans

We get the expected irregular plurals when we have endocentric compounds, but unexpected regular plurals when we have exocentric compounds.

This is where the “outside” comes in handy theoretically. Many morphologists think that the “external” referential head on exocentric compounds takes up extra space in the structure of the word (even though we don’t actually pronounce it) and consequently blocks plural morphology from reaching the irregular root due to the intervening external head, resulting in default, regular plural morphology instead (seen in the default (“productive”) English -s plural endings above).

So, [[field mouse] + PLURAL] straightforwardly gives “field mice”, but [[[big foot] + (of animal)] + PLURAL] gives “Bigfoots” due to “PLURAL” not being able to directly reach “foot” to produce the irregular plural “feet”.

At last we can explain “maple leaves” vs. “Maple Leafs”. Because a maple leaf is an endocentric compound that refers to a type of leaf, the construction looks like this: [[maple leaf] + PLURAL], which simply gives “maple leaves”, with the irregular “v”. (This “v” is called a “morphophonemic alternation”, by the way. Let me know if you’re interested in hearing more about them!)

For “Maple Leafs”, on the other hand, we have [[[maple leaf] + (of person, or of badge)] + PLURAL], which gives “Maple Leafs”, with default “-s” plural because the PLURAL feature can’t see the normally irregular root “leaf” due to the added referential structure of the intervening external head.

Edit: Also, Tolkien is like 50% of why I became a linguist.

Sterling is the coiner of the term “chungus”. The Big Chungus meme specifically is from years later.

I’ve had “To Faraway Times”, Chrono Trigger’s credits theme, stuck in my head for a few months now, but honestly I’m pretty ok with it.

We do mostly move in two dimensions - our third dimensional movement is usually limited to just a few feet, compared to practically unlimited 2D movement along the ground.

This is also how I read it for some reason!

Already addressed. But, in the name of randomly bolding and repeating things:

I speak the language using the grammar I acquired as an infant, which, again, is my entire point.

… because I’m arguing with you?

No, because you’ve been weirdly aggressive about it for no reason that I can see in a way that I didn’t really expect from you. I guess you just seem a lot nicer when you’re making informative posts or answering factual questions, and I was expecting a less heated discussion. But maybe I do the same thing in my comments about linguistics, so I dunno. Or maybe this discussion is too far outside the context of history. It’s on me either way, and I’ll be appropriately more circumspect/prepared when drawing you into discussion in the future.

At this point my battery is a bit drained, so I think I’ll bow out. Thanks for the conversation - you’ve made a lot of good points.

How is that relevant

Because different things are different, in specific ways specifically detailed by my comment above.

… you do realize this is already a problem with the current inconsistent system of nomenclature, right?

And I promise you that making everyone remember a bajillion different names for the same thing in languages that they don’t speak will INCREASE the confusion, not decrease it. Where’s that efficiency you were playing up a minute ago?

No, but if the USA requested that international organizations use “USA” instead of other acronyms, it would be normal for the international organizations to acquiesce, and it would be intuitive for other uses to follow for standardization purposes.

Strange, I didn’t know you were an international organization, and if not, then I don’t see why the random Weibo users should be exempt from following your example. Also, I’d chalk this up to the hyper-nationalistic Turkish government long before I’d think that any actual Turks gave a damn about what their country is called in English.

Since we’re bolding and repeating things for no reason apparently:

I speak the language using the grammar I acquired as an infant, which, again, is my entire point.

Should we insert ourselves into that random Weibo chat to ask that they kindly mispronounce “USA” or “America” instead of “Beiguo”?

Did I do it right?

Edit: Not that it’s particularly relevant or matters in any way, but I used to really respect you Pug, and was looking forward to having this conversation with you, but your behavior in this thread has really changed my mind.

Also, im in favor of using people’s preferred names

Me too, but Turkey isn’t a person; it’s an abstract concept. This is like saying you are in favor of using “cognition”'s preferred name.

I would argue that making up your name is a stranger and more arbitrary than just using their own name.

And you’d be right if that were what were happening here. “Turkey” has been a word of English for over 1500 years, and so it’s more akin to someone asking you to say boeuf instead of beef because the word happened to be borrowed a thousand years ago instead of last week.

This request is utterly ridiculous on Turkey’s part, and I’d put it up to their hyper-nationalist government long before I’d say that it’s something that actual Turks actually gave a damn about.

Edit: Also, exonyms aren’t any more “made-up” than any other word of a language, and they’re often historical borrowings from the location in question. That is to say, we already did this for Turkey 1500 years ago when we adopted their name for the place in the first place.

Words like “doctor”, “inhaler”, etc. have likely had far, far more negative outcomes than getting country names confused has. So, while I do think it makes sense to add the name of your country to the list of important words to know in your destination’s language when going abroad, I certainly don’t think it’s reasonable to recommend that people learn lists like these in all of the world’s most-spoken languages as a general rule just in case.

It would be more like insisting to every Juan you meet that their name is actually ‘John’.

I disagree. An individual is a person, and a country isn’t. By this same argument (“proper nouns should be borrowed instead of translated”), organization names like “Japan Autoworker’s Union” would quickly become unmanageable, because all of them would have to be memorized as one-off unanalyzable sound chunks rather than as strings of interpretable words in the relevant language.

Not only that, but there is a long history of countries asking to be recognized by a more native name by the international community. Unless you still insistently call Iran Persia?

I speak the language using the grammar I acquired as an infant, which, again, is my entire point.

Should we insert ourselves into that random Weibo chat to ask that they kindly mispronounce “USA” or “America” instead of “Beiguo”?

(Also, note my edit in my previous comment. I’m not trying to police your language here - just commenting my thoughts on the broader “selective endonym push” in general.)

It doesn’t matter if it’s inefficient - these are completely different linguistic systems, used in completely different countries, with completely different sets of speakers. It’s no more inefficient than having to learn “table” for English and “mesa” for Spanish.

There’s no more reason for English speakers to adopt the Turkish word for Turkey than there is for English speakers to adopt the Turkish word for table.

Since English is effectively the international language, I think it would make sense for people learning to speak “international English” for specifically international relations to adopt names like Turkiye, etc. to try to reduce the inevitable cultural baggage of English, but for random native English speakers speaking on a mostly English-language forum on a tiny corner of the internet, again, there’s no more reason to say “Turkiye” than there is for random Chinese people on Weibo to say “USA” instead of “Beiguo”.

Edit: I just wanted to make it clear that I’m not trying to police your speech or anything here - I was curious about your reasoning and am just commenting in general. I’m a huge fan of San using thorn, for example, so I’m all in on people speaking however they want to.

Summit ate the long comment I was writing when I switched apps to find a Ferdinand de Saussure quote, but the brief gist was that:

-All words in all human languages are the result of historical accident, not just place names. That’s an inevitability of how language works. Given enough time these new place names will diverge further and further from the speakers of those other countries as well, and will have to undergo an endonym treadmill just to keep them at the targeted arbitrary level of inaccuracy.

-Even after a full generation of misunderstandings between generations and classes of English-speakers to allow the new name (or names, if we want to include other countries as well) to enter new speakers’ grammars, English speakers still won’t be saying the same name that native speakers will.

-This whole thing feels unnecessarily useless and performative, which to be fair is spot-on for the UN.

That seems so strange and arbitrary though, especially since most English speakers can’t pronounce Türkiye (which seems to be what the UN has actually switched to).

Also, where do we draw the endonym/exonym line then? Like, dropping “the” from Ukraine made perfect sense for sovereignty reasons, but are we really calling for English speakers to start butchering the pronunciations of places like Suomi, or, heaven forbid, Zhōngguó?

“I’m planning to go to Krung Thep Mahanakhon Amon Rattanakosin Mahinthara Ayuthaya Mahadilok Phop Noppharat Ratchathani Burirom Udomratchaniwet Mahasathan Amon Piman Awatan Sathit Sakkathattiya Witsanukam Prasit for vacation this year.”

Why Turkiye and not just Turkey?

What a crazy misleading headline (as usual).

The actual story from the article is that farmers are having to turn to visas to get enough workers, which is expensive for them. That’s all.

Thank GOD! Talk about dodging a bullet.

Depending on how you measure it, this isn’t necessarily true. Since the entrance to Mount Doom is on the eastern side of the mountain, Sam is technically getting closer to the Shire with every step westward inside the mountain.

Me too

*Deep-seated