Asking questions to share knowledge on twitter

Anyway, back to linguistics after all the disquisitions on the state of HE. Susie Dent posted a nice fun fact about the word two on twitter.

Wordy fact of the day for kids: the number ‘two’ may have a silent ‘w’, but it’s part of the same ancient family that gave us ‘twin’, ‘twice’, ‘between’, ‘tweezers’, ‘twenty’, and ‘twelve’: all of them have something to do with that number 2. #homeschooling

— Susie Dent (@susie_dent) April 20, 2020

The first reply was best: it said simply 'Twix'. But the other replies were really interesting to someone who has recent experience of doing linguistics in public and aspirations to do more of it.

There are lots that are comments, reactions, unrelated replies, of course. The ones I'm interested in fall into two groups: questions, and related facts. Both of them fulfil the same locutionary role: to show that the tweeter has some knowledge of language, to convey enthusiasm, and something else slightly undefinable about interacting with celebrities that you don't know personally on twitter.

The related facts, first. Let's give these gentlemen the benefit of the doubt and assume that they were not mansplaining Susie (i.e. assuming that they, as non-experts in this field, can educate her about her literal field of expertise). So they're doing something else – the fact is to add to the original one, give more detail, add more context, and it's for the benefit of other readers of the original tweet. This is not how 'replying' works in normal conversations, but it's how it often works on twitter.

German has the same root but the "w" is still pronounced in Zwei (Two) and we also get Zwilling (Twin), zweimal (Twice), zwischen (between), zwanzig (twenty) and zwölf (twelve) although tweezers are usually "Pinzetten" which shares a root with pincers.

— Rod Maxwell (@RodericMaxwell) April 20, 2020

And in Dutch ‘twee’ with the W pronounced and the ‘ee’ pronounced as ‘ay’. All the same root. Love how the histories of different languages are intertwined.

— Xander Mol (@Xander_Mol) April 20, 2020

My wife who speaks Scots pronounces it tway.

— James Beaton (@jjb3621) April 20, 2020

Then there's the questions. Some of them are simply information seeking – the fact prompted the asker to seek more information about something that occurred to them. But many of them also have a secondary purpose of showing off a bit, being a bit clever, making an observation and wanting to share it but also doing that in a deferential, face-saving way, to indicate that they are aware that Susie Dent is an expert and already knows this (a question implies that the asker believes the answerer knows the answer).

Does that mean the 'tw' would have had a twə sound originally, rather than pronounced to? So literally two (twoo).

— Zoe Defoe (@ZoeDefoe1) April 20, 2020

(This one is also cute and interesting because they don't mean that the /tw/ would be pronounced /twə/ in the word two, but to say the sound /tw/ on its own you would say /twə/, with an unstressed vowel at the end to make it pronounceable, and I like this a lot.)

This one is a perfect example of the 'question as knowledge-sharing' tactic (though I think in this case the answer is no):

Is the 'in' from 'twin' related to the 'en' plural ending, like in children or brethren or eyen a few hundred years ago?

— John Moynes (@JohnMoynes) April 20, 2020