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.