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.