Three More Word Origins

 Nostril is from the Old English nos for 'nose' plus thirl 'hole'; thus, pretty logically, 'nose hole'.

Werewolf reflects an Old English word for 'man'.

I realized recently that acorn reflects the Old English ac, meaning 'oak tree'--although the second half of the word has been connected on since early times and I'm not sure where it comes from.

Two Things That Have Led People to Spell Wrong

First, people sometimes spell plurals with an apostrophe. The only plurals that are correctly spelled with apostrophes are some plurals of letters. Examples: mind your p's and q's, PhD's (although this one can be spelled without the apostrophe, I think).

I believe that the reason people might be confused about this is just one word: Levi's. People take that to be a plural but it is actually a possessive.

Second: Since we have--evidently acceptable--spellings such as Grammys, Emmys, etc. People forget the old rule for spelling words ending in y which I was taught in school: Change y to i and add -es. Thus pastries, not, as we see sometimes, pastrys (etc.).

 

 

Vowel Change Series

Some languages have series of words that are related (related in meaning and perhaps differing in part of speech) and form a sort of series in which there is, for example, a vowel change from one word to the next.

This is known in linguistic circles by the German term Ablaut or Ablautsreihe (Ablaut series), and perhaps the best examples are found in German: Koch ('cook'), Küche ('kitchen'), Kuchen ('cake').

I have been trying to collect examples of Ablautsreihe in English and believe I have found a few.

• sing sang sung song
• hot heat
• feed food
• tell tale
• drip drop
• strike stroke
• hear heard
  
• knit knot
• sit seat
• cat kitten
• two twin twain 
• drip drop

And maybe these (these are less clear):

• wood weed
• pick pack peck
• step steep
• dine dinner

 

Two More Word Origins (and one not)

Berserk comes from Old English (and ultimately Norse) berserkr, meaning 'bear shirt'--i.e., presumably, a shirt made of a bear skin. Or it could be 'bare shirt', meaning of course no shirt at all, bare-chested. Nobody knows which it is.

Jerusalem artichoke (nowadays commonly sold as a "sunchoke"). These are not artichokes nor do they  have anything to do with Jerusalem. The word is related to Italian girasole, meaning 'sunflower'. (The Italian word comes from words meaning 'turn' and 'sun'.) 

The ac- in the word acorn is the Old English word for 'oak'. 'Oak tree' was ac treo.

Pen, before it meant a writing instrument, meant 'feather'. In French (plume) and German (Feder), the word for 'pen' is still the same as 'feather'.

This is not a word origin but another case where we don't know the correct interpretation, There is in the Old English (or Anglo-Saxon) literature the phrase dæþ se bytere. We don't know if that means 'death the biter' or death the bitter (one). They didn't mark long vowels.

The (Sometimes) Oddities of Prefixes

We are all very familiar with prefixes. Many times there seem to be a pair of two opposite prefixes such as pro- and con-; in- and ex-.

Often times the two prefixes that seem to be paired seem to be opposite in meaning. In- and ex- can suggest inside and outside, as in interior and exterior. However, this is one example where you can't push this too far and make it truly general: Intrude and extrude are by no means opposite.

One perhaps amusing if (hopefully) not almost sacrilegious pair might be pro-stitution and con-stitution. Hopefully that example shows that prefixes might sometimes be opposite in meaning but are not always!

The Chaos of English Spelling (More Examples)

The sound /oo/ (I dearly wish I could use a phonetic or phonemic alphabet) can be spelled, in English, in an almost incredible number of ways:

Blue, blew, shoe, lose, cool, fuse, through. Oo is common: loose, booze, choose, moose, goose, noose. Also uCe (where C stands for consonant): accuse, abuse, infuse, allude, intrude, etc.

There is actually some regularity in English spelling--despite all you hear to contrary, here and elsewhere. That was the thread, the principle, in the Spelling textbooks on which I worked in one of my first jobs.

What chaos there is can partly be blamed on Norman scribes who, after the Norman conquest, put some effort into fixing or straightening out English spelling--and only made things worse with their band-aid approach and their frequent failure to properly understand that which they were tampering with.

"Ossified Words"

I wrote elsewhere about what might be called ossified words, that is, words that are used in one particular phrase or expression but cannot be found anywhere else in Modern English. Two examples I have mentioned were the groom part of bridegroom (from an Old English word for 'man'). and tide in the saying time and tide wait for no man (and in yuletide and one or two other words).

Here are some more I'd like to submit: spic and span (maybe not used very much anymore but once the name of a household cleaning product). I understand it's related to brand as in brand new; hence we might say spic and span new.

How about in the nick of time? Nick apparently means something like an 'exact moment'.

How about quick? I think the quick and the dead might be a biblical phrase. Elsewhere the word survives in quicksand, quicklime, and quicksilver, a term for mercury (the Romans called mercury argentum vivum, that is, 'living silver' or, of course, 'quicksilver'.

Cobweb. From an old word coppe meaning 'spider'.

Specialization (A Process of Change in Word Meaning)

A common linguistic process is called specialization. This is when, with time, the meaning of a word becomes more narrow. (Why? Don't ask me why. As with many linguistic processes, I don't think anyone knows why they occur. They are just the sum of what many speakers, for some reason, start to do at about the same time.)

Here are some examples (and, once again, I am going to reference German for comparisons).

Starve originally meant 'to die' rather than having today's specialized meaning of 'to die from hunger'. (Compare German sterben).

Meat originally meant 'food' rather than specifically what would have been called flesh (compare German Fleisch meaning 'meat').

Deer (the Old English form would have been deor) meant any animal, not specifically what we call deer today (compare German Thier).

A dog, in Old or Middle English, was called hound--rather than that term meaning a specific sort of dog (compare German Hund).

 

Doublets

"Doublets" are a pair of words that have ultimately the same origin but today have different forms because they have taken different paths to Modern English.

Some examples:

skirt, shirt. Skirt is the Scandinavian form of the same word (the relationship of England, and English, to Scandinavian languages would be too much of a digression at this point).

pyre, fire. Pyre comes more directly from Greek and was borrowed into English more recently.

wake, watch. These deserve to be the subject of their own blog post.

lemon, lime. These two words are doublets because they originally were one word.

Chef, chief.

Background II

 I should have made this an earlier post; but I thought I ought to explain an idea or term used frequently in this blog: cognate. Cognate words are related words, because they come from related languages. Related languages are considered related because they descend from a common ancestor.

Thus, English and German are related and are both considered Germanic languages. The Scandinavian languages are related, but a little less closely: English and German and considered West Germanic languages, and the Scandinavian languages are North Germanic.

Scholars (usually considered linguists nowadays but at one time called philologists) conclude that two languages are related when they find that they share cognate words. Thus:

father (Engl), Vater (German), pater (Latin), piter (Greek)

There is a rule (or "law") to explain or describe the correspondence of an f- in the Germanic languages with a p- in Latin or Greek.

In reading my blog it may often be helpful if you're acquainted with German. (Unfortunately I think that not too many Americans learn German, possibly due to the hostility to German and Germany that resulted from World War II.)

Some More Etymologies (Word Origins)

As I mentioned elsewhere, the expression time and tide preserves a word (tide) which has pretty much gone out of use, except for being "frozen" in this one expression. A somewhat similar situation can be found in a few more words.

First, bridegroom preserves a vestige of the Old English word guma, meaning 'man' (if you're interested, this is cognate with all the words for 'man' that begin with h- in related languages: homme, hombre, homo, etc.).

The Old English word bana meant 'murderer', We still have this word in a couple plant names, henbane and wolfsbane, plus of course in the expression--no longer meaning something as drastic as 'murderer'--the bane of my existence.

Now another interesting etymology not quite of the same sort. Nickname comes from eke, meaning 'also' plus of course name. Thus, a nickname is an also name. Isn't that cute?

The Anglo Saxons Had Bagels and Lox!

 

First, let's be sure we understand what cognate means. Two words that are cognate words, or simply cognates, are similar words because they are related; they come from related languages. Thus English father, German Vater, and Latin pater are all cognates because those three languages are all cognate, or related, languages.

Now: In Old English (or Anglo-Saxon, spoken from about 450 to 1100 AD), there was a word beag. It referred to strips of gold--perhaps like gold wire--that a chieftain would award to his followers and then they were wrapped around the wrist like a bracelet. This word is cognate with bagel, and you can see the resemblance between the objects denoted.

The Old English for salmon is lachs--pronounced with a guttural like the ch in German ich. This is very similar to lox, meaning smoked salmon, which was originally a Yiddish word.

Thus bagel and lox are both words with cognates in Old English, which is not at all surprising because Old English and Yiddish are cognate languages. They are both in the Germanic language family.

Redundancies

We all use phrases and expressions that are actually redundant if you stop and think about it. The thing is, we normally don't think about it. It might be unfair to thus target them but I find people of a certain profession possibly are more prone to this sort of thing; e.g., "alleged suspect".

Some examples: 

Close proximity (proximity means close-ness)

Gather together. This is actually multiply redundant because, etymologically, together means 'gathered together'.

Surrounding environment. Just think about it for a second.

Fellow colleagues, classmates, co-workers, etc. I'm going to assume this does not require explanation.

And this one, possibly (we hear this all the time): I thought to myself. How else can you think?

And this one I heard today, maybe the king of them all: iconic symbol of the thing (he may not have said "thing" but if it was a different word, I've forgotten what it was).

Some of these, like close proximity, have become so common, so standard, that we use them with no sense whatsoever that there's any redundancy. Still, some of the things that come out of the mouths of some people I think are a symptom of sloppy thinking.

A particular type of redundancy, and one we certainly never think about as being redundant, occurs with words of foreign origin. We use the foreign word and then append what is basically a translation. Example: pita bread. I am pretty sure that pita means 'bread'.

Lots of these occur with Japanese words: daikon radish, taiko drumming, matcha green tea, sumo wrestling, washi paper. (Confession: I've gotten these by watching NHK, the Japanese TV network that can be viewed in English in the US.)

Some of these occur when the speaker or writer does not know the source language, e.g. salsa sauce. Many of us in the US are aware that salsa is Spanish for 'sauce', so we would not do or say this one.

The prize example of this phenomenon was something I saw once on a restaurant menu: "with au jus gravy." Uttered, or written, in blissful ignorance of the fact that au jus in French means 'with juice [or gravy]'.

(Some of) The Irregularities of English Spelling

 

It has often been said that English spelling is chaotic and difficult for non-native (and even native) speakers to learn. It is true that you can look and quite a few sounds and see that they can be spelled in various ways--with little if any way to predict, from the aural sound, what the spelling should be. Here is an example, for the vowel sound in the word ear, represented by the phonetic symbol \ɚ\.

One common spelling of \iɚ\	Another, approximately as common	Rarer spelling of this sound
fear	beer	weir
tear	cheer	mere
clear	leer
hear	deer
near	peer
rear	steer
year	veer
sear
smear

There have been many calls for the reform of English spelling. There are as many reasons why no significant spelling reform has taken place. (The probably only notable exception is the reforms of Noah Webster--those which have made American spelling different from English spelling; e.g. color rather than colour, center rather than centre.)

I have often thought that there are small, isolated areas that could be made more regularized; but then I realize that a piecemeal effort at spelling reform is a bad idea.

 

 

A Couple Interesting English Word Origins (More to Come)

Nostril

The first syllable descends from the word for 'nose' (not too surprisingly), and then the second syllable comes from Old English þril (the þ character, which came ultimately from the Norse runic alphabet, had a th sound), meaning 'hole'. Hence, 'nose hole'. Eminently sensible!

Wilderness

This comes from wild (then just as now) plus deor, meaning 'animal' (cognate with the German Thier, for anyone who knows German). Hence 'wild-animal-place'.

The word deor originally meant 'animal' and then became specialized to mean only one kind of animal. We see this "specialization" also with some other words like the word for meat, which originally meant 'food' (think of the phrase "meat and drink").

 Neighbor

This is from Old English words nehe meaning 'near' and burg or burgh meaning something like 'house', 'castle', 'fortress' (if  you know German, think of the hymn Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott, A Mighty Fortress Is Our God). Thus, your neighbor is the near house (or castle).

Things Gotten Wrong (in Shakespeare) and a Couple Interesting Etymologies

Have you ever noticed that the weather forecasts on television always show us the "futurecast"? Whoever coined that term futurecast either did not know, or did not think about, the fact that the fore- in forecast means 'future'.

Everybody knows the famous quotation from Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet: "Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?" Most people seem to think that wherefore means 'where'--and actresses play the line as if this were the case.

Well, wherefore does not mean 'where', it means 'why'. Think of the old phrase "the whys and wherefores." Anyone who goes on to read that passage from Romeo and Juliet can see that the sense of it is, "Romeo, why must you be Romeo, and a Montague, and therefore a member of a family that is enemies with my family?" And note, no comma after "thou," in accordance with what I am saying is the correct sense.

Another misunderstanding from Shakespeare: early on in the play Hamlet (sorry, I was too lazy to dig out my volume of Shakespeare, so this is simply from memory), Hamlet and his buddies are talking about the custom of late-night carousing, and Hamlet says he never does that, "though I am to the manner born." Note, "to the manner"--that is, the custom--and not "to the manor."

 

This is not Shakespeare, but another common misunderstanding, due to a word having become obsolete: In the expression "Time and tide wait for no man," tide here does not mean the surging of the ocean in and out; it means 'season', as in Yuletide, Easter tide, Whitsuntide, etc.

Note: If you have read, or are going to read,  my post on interesting word origins, stop reading right here because this is going to be repetitive.

Okay, now some real etymology: The holes in your nose are called nostrils, right? That's from Old English (Anglo-Saxon) for nose; okay, that's the first syllable. And then, there was an Old English word thirl, meaning 'hole'. So nostril is, literally, simply, and reasonably enough, 'nose hole'.

Now another cute O.E. etymology: the word neighbor. The first  part means 'near' (if you know German, think of nahe). The second part--again, if you know German, think of the word Burg (as in the hymn Ein Feste Burg ist unser Gott, in English A Mighty Fortress is Our God. So the word, in German at least, means 'castle', 'fortress', 'fortification'. So your neighbor is the next or nearest fortress--or house, more commonly.

More to come.

Copyright © 2020

First, a Little Background

This may, to some extent, be my view of this and not necessarily in agreement with anyone else's take, or even the mainstream.

Many people may be aware that English has many words that were in some way derived or borrowed from Latin or Greek. I'd like to explain why that is.

First, many scientific words, including medical terms, were coined from Latin and Greek roots. These terms are going to be very similar across many languages (an exception is German, which stubbornly insisted on coining new technical and scientific terms from native roots. For example, hydrogen may be that or something quite similar in many languages, but in German 'hydrogen' is Wasserstoff (the "stuff" water is made of) and 'television' is Fernseh ("far seeing").

Medical terms tend to be Latin. This may be because at one time Latin was the international language of learning, scholarship, and science. (If you want to be a bit paranoid, then you may believe that doctors use Latin terms to keep the patient from understanding, particularly when one doctor talks to another doctor.)

But here's the scoop on why we have so many Latin and Greek words outside of the scientific, medical, and technical vocabulary. In England, particularly around the 17th century, writers and scholars complained that the vocabulary of English was impoverished, that it did not have words for many intellectual concepts. So they were coining new words at a great pace. Usually any leaned person who knew Greek and particularly Latin could understand those new words because he could see and understood the classical roots they were formed from. (Latin was part of any person's advanced education and was, and still is, used in the great universities of Oxford and Cambridge.)

Now: Were these 17th century men correct in believing English needed to have its vocabulary improved and enriched with new word coinages? Here is what happened:

First, some terminology: The English language, historically, is classified into three periods: Old English, or Anglo-Saxon (and just to clarify, since many people do not have sound knowledge of this: Old English does not mean "Ye Olde Tea Shoppe," but is a nearly completely foreign and unintelligible language to Modern English speakers), spoken from about 450 AD to about 1100 (the Normal Conquest of 1066 was a factor, but not the sole cause, of the evolution of English from Old English to Middle English); Middle English, going up to maybe 1550 or so; and Modern English. (Shakespeare would be--no, not Old English but Early Modern English.)

 

Here is a specimen of Old English, or Anglo-Saxon. This is "Caedmon's Hymn," considered the earliest Old English text.

 

Nū scylun hergan     hefaenrīcaes Uard,
metudæs maecti     end his mōdgidanc,
uerc Uuldurfadur,     suē hē uundra gihuaes,
ēci dryctin     ōr āstelidæ
hē ǣrist scōp     aelda barnum
heben til hrōfe,     hāleg scepen.
Thā middungeard     moncynnæs Uard,
eci Dryctin,     æfter tīadæ
fīrum foldu,     Frēa allmectig.

Now: For some time after the Normal Conquest--maybe about 300 years--the English language had sort of gone underground. The rulers and nobles--all the people of power, position, wealth, etc.--were French-speaking Normans or their descendants. It was the language of government, and, believe it or not, some Norman French is still used in the British Parliament:

Acts of Parliment [sic] are confirmed in Norman French. A literal translation of La Reyne le veult is ‘The Queen wishes it’.

The House of Lords has been an English speaking chamber since the 1400s; [punctuation emended] however, Norman French is still used on formal occasions.

When a bill has passed its third reading in the House of Commons, it goes to the House of Lords for their approval. Written at the start of the bill are the words: ‘Soit baillé aux Seigneurs’, meaning ‘Let it be sent to the Lords’.

When the bill is returned to the Commons, it reads ‘A ceste bille [avecque des amendmens] les Seigneurs sont assentus’ meaning ‘To this bill [with amendments] the Lords have assented.’

When amendments are accepted, the bill reads ‘A ces amendmens [avecque une amendment] les Communes sont assentus’ meaning ‘To these amendments [with an amendment] the Commons have assented.’

Whereas La Reyne le veult is used on most occasions when bills are passed, occasionally a much longer portion of Norman French is used.

When approving finance bills for Royal Assent, the Clerk says: “La Reyne, remerciant Ses bons Subjects, accepte leur Benevolence, et ainsi le veult.”

This means: “The Queen, thanking her good subjects, accepts their benevolence, and so wills it.”

                                    --htpps//royalcentral.co.uk/interests/state/la-reyne-le-veult-why-are-acts-of-parliament-confirmed-in-norman-french-rather-than-english-81184/

[The seemingly haphazard use of italics is in the original. I have, however, regularized the use the single quotation marks.]

So, getting back to my main point, French was used in government and by the nobles and those in power (for a depiction of the relative power between the Normans and Anglo-Saxons, see Sir Walter Scott's novel Ivanhoe). And, the other side of the coin, English was the language of those on the periphery, both geographically and socially--the rustics, peasants, and those living far from London, the seat of power.

Thus, whereas Old English had words for intellectual and theological concepts, those words had fallen out of use and out of the language. A couple of examples: Old English used the word thrinness (actually, a special character, no longer used in English, was used for the th), meaning 'trinity'. Inwit meant 'conscience'. So, those words dropped out and, once their lack was appreciated, new words for those meanings were coined from Latin.

A number of writers were quite diligent in coining new words to add to the English vocabulary. I believe Shakespeare gets credit for a number of new words. A 17th century writer and physician named Sir Thomas Browne coined many, many words, some of which did not "catch on," so to speak, but many of which successfully entered English usage.