Chaos? Nah, just a vowel shift

Dearest creature in creation,
Study English pronunciation.
I will teach you in my verse
Sounds like corpse, corps, horse, and worse.
I will keep you, Suzy, busy,
Make your head with heat grow dizzy.
Tear in eye, your dress will tear.
So shall I!  Oh hear my prayer.
Pray, console your loving poet,
Make my coat look new, dear, sew it!

 

Just compare heart, beard, and heard,
Dies and diet, lord and word,
Sword and sward, retain and Britain.
(Mind the latter, how it’s written.)
Now I surely will not plague you
With such words as plaque and ague.
But be careful how you speak:
Say break and steak, but bleak and streak;
Cloven, oven, how and low,
Script, receipt, show, poem, and toe.

Finally, which rhymes with enough —
Though, through, plough, or dough, or cough?
Hiccough has the sound of cup.
My advice is to give up!!!

1

Gosh, English pronunciation can be really tricky at times, can’t it? Interested in knowing why?

Well, of course you are! Let’s dive into it together!

As the excerpt above clearly shows, English spelling is often considered a bit ’off’, poorly corresponding to the written word. That’s true, it often doesn’t. But why is that?

Well, while it is not the only reason behind this tricky correspondence between the spoken and written word, today’s topic does explain a lot: the ‘Great’ English Vowel Shift (let’s stick to calling it the GVS from now on) came along and messed things up quite a bit.

Some of you will probably have heard about the GVS before; it was a significant sound change that occurred primarily during the Middle Ages. This sound change affected the long vowels of Middle English, causing them to shift like so:

 

2

Great, so… we done here? You now know everything there is to know about the GVS, right?

Nah, not really.

First, the GVS is actually considered by a lot of linguists to be a process of at least two phases3:

The first phase is considered to have lasted up until approximately the year 1500. During this phase, the long high Middle English vowels /i:/ and /u:/, pronounced similar to the vowels in Modern English meet [mi:t] and lute [lu:t], diphthongised and eventually became the modern English diphthongs /aɪ/ and /aʊ/, the pronunciations you find in mice [maɪs] and mouse [maʊs]. The vowels immediately below them, that is /e:/ and /o:/4, raised one position, falling into the slots previously held by /i:/ and /u:/.

In the second phase, often considered to have been active between the late 16th to mid-17th centuries, the remaining vowels, that is /ᴐ:, a:, ɛ:/, raised one position in height.

What we eventually wind up with is a system of vowels completely changed from its predecessor.

Now, why would that happen?

As with a good number of things in historical linguistics, we don’t exactly know. However, there are two leading hypotheses out there.

The first is the so-called push-chain theory, which was introduced by the great German philologer Karl Luick as early as 1896. Luick argued that the GVS must have been initiated by the movement of the lower vowels /e:/ and /o:/. The two vowels, for some mysterious reason of their own, started to move toward the high vowels /i:/ and /u:/. As they drew nearer, /i:/ and /u:/ started panicking because, it is sometimes argued, they couldn’t raise any higher and remain vowels (instead becoming yucky consonants, bläch).

Well, can’t have that, can we? In pure desperation, /i:/ and /u:/ look for a way out. And they find one—move in (or out, if you will). So, that is precisely what they do, they move in: they become diphthongs, lower and, suddenly, Middle English /i:/ and /u:/ become modern English /əɪ/ and /əʊ/, eventually becoming /aɪ/ and /aʊ/. Tadaa, we have the first steps to a modern English vowel system.

Luick’s hypothesis is actually quite elegant in a way because it successfully explains the lack of diphthongisation of /u:/ in the northern dialects of British English. In these dialects, the vowel /o:/ had previously fronted, becoming /ø:/. The northern dialects therefore didn’t have a vowel /o:/ to push /u:/ out of its place, and the diphthongisation never happened there (pretty neat, huh?).

The second of our hypotheses, the drag-chain theory, was introduced by Otto Jespersen in 1909. Now, Jespersen argued that it was equally likely that the diphthongisation of the high vowels initiated the shift. Basically, Jespersen’s reasoning was like this:

The high vowels, i.e. /i:, u:/, shifted and became diphthongs. That left a ‘gap’ in the vowel system. Horrified, the lower vowels scrambled to move up the ladder to fill the gaps. All of the sudden, Middle English /a:/ became early Modern English /ɛ:/, Middle English /ɛ:/ became early Modern English /e:/ and so on (the back vowels tagged along, too), and so, harmony was restored.

Now, the (to me, at least) flaw of this hypothesis is that it doesn’t account for the non-diphthongisation of northern /u:/, but then again, Luick’s hypothesis claiming that the high vowels couldn’t raise any higher has been noted to be somewhat limited—the high vowels could have done several other things to avoid becoming consonants5. But that’s a different discussion.

Regardless of which of these hypotheses you want to consider more likely, this is the ‘Great’ English Vowel Shift: a huuuuge chain shift that took centuries to complete and affected all long vowels of Middle English. That’s a pretty big deal.

Now, you might be wondering what this has to do with spelling, right? Well, you see, the thing is that English spelling started to become standardized during the ongoing GVS. What this means is that we have a bunch of words where the written form corresponds to a pronunciation that is centuries old. So, basically, meet and meat, both pronounced [mi:t] in British English, are spelled differently because, when those high and mighty people speaking Middle English decided that there was a correct way to spell those words, they did have distinct pronunciations!

So, next time you get annoyed by having to look up how you spell something, just stop and consider that you’re actually spelling the word the way it was pronounced about 600 years ago. Pretty cool, huh?

 

 

 

 

Oh, oh! I almost forgot! Have you been asking yourself why I keep using ‘’ around ‘Great’? No? Well, I’m going to tell you anyway!

The ‘Great’ was introduced by Jespersen and, frankly, while the GVS did indeed have a huge effect on the English language, vowel shifts happen all the time. So, take the ‘Great’ with a pinch of salt and a shot of tequila and we might get on the right track of things.

 

 

 

 

Side notes

1.   There is nothing to say that either of these hypotheses is an accurate description on the initial process of the GVS. Long before I took my first bumbling steps into academia (actually, about a year before I was even born), Donka Minkova and Robert Stockwell noted that it may just be the desire to see a systematic aspect of language and discount its random quirks. So, don’t take it too seriously.

2.     If you’d like to read more about the GVS and other hypotheses, please take a look at Gjertrud Flermoen Stenbrenden’s dissertation work The Chronology and regional spread of long-vowel changes in English from 2010. It’s a really interesting read and introduces a lot more on the subject than I could possibly cover here.

Sources

1 This is an excerpt of the excellent poem The Chaos by Dr. Gerard Nolst Trenité (Netherlands, 1870-1946). Translated by Pete Zakel.

2 This is one of the common ways to depict the GVS, a similar one can be found in most textbooks on the subject. See, for example, Historical Linguistics by Theodora Bynon (1977: 82)

3 See for example The Cambridge History of the English Language (2008) in which Roger Lass writes about this division into two phases. A similar explanation can be found in most textbooks on linguistics that deal, in some way, with historical linguistics (though I really recommend reading Lass’ explanation if you wish to know more about this).

4 Really, I would like to give you examples of these sounds, but I can’t. They’ve basically disappeared from modern English, though they can, most likely, be found in some dialects of English today. Examples can be found of /e:/ in some variants of Scottish English, for example in mate [me:t], but other than that, I can’t seem to find enough examples. If you do find them, though, please let us know! We would love to know more!

5 See, for example the critique by Charles Jones in A History of English Phonology (1989).

Fun Etymology Tuesday – Iron

Hello, followers! It’s Tuesday, and that means a shining new Fun Etymology is here for you!

Today’s word is “iron”.

It can be safely said that history changed forever when humanity discovered a way to smelt iron, an achievement comparable to the rise of agriculture or the industrial revolution. But iron was much more than that: for the peoples of Northern Europe, this metal possessed sacred and magical powers. It was thought to be able to chase away or even kill spirits and to be able to store spells.

This belief can be seen in the etymology of the word: the word “iron” comes from Old English “isern”, through a process called ‘rhotacism’ in which an ‘s’ sound becomes an ‘r’ sound between vowels. This word comes from Proto-Germanic “isarnan”, itself a loanword from proto-Celtic “isarnon” (whose descendants include Welsh “haiarn”, for example).
The Celtic word itself is thought to come from a PIE root *is(e)ro-, meaning “holy” or “powerful”, the same root from which the Greek word “hieros” (‘priest’) descends.
The original meaning would therefore had been “holy metal” or “powerful metal”.

Today’s post is brought to you by the letter G

It’s time for the HLC with our very special guest, Proto-Germanic! Yaaay!

Ah, English spelling. That prickly, convoluted briar patch that, like an obscure Lewis Carroll poem, often falls just a little too shy of making sense. Or does it?

It wasn’t always like this. English spelling actually used to be pretty phonetic. People would just write down what they heard or said.1 Then, the printing press was introduced. Books and pamphlets began to be mass produced, literacy levels rose, and spelling began to be standardized. At the same time, English continued to move through some fairly dramatic shifts in pronunciation. The language moved on as the spellings froze.

Throughout the years, people have occasionally called for reforms in English spelling. Like that time in the early 20th century when Andrew Carnegie, Melvil Dewey, Mark Twain, Theodore Roosevelt, et. al. colluded to “improve” some of the more confusing orthographic practices of English. Personally, this linguist is glad such efforts have by and large failed.

Sure, you could look at English spellings and tear at your hair at the monumental insanity of it all. But I like to think of our spellings more as fossils preserving the dinosaur footprints of earlier pronunciations. Granted, sometimes the footprints are from five different species, all overlapping, and there’s, like, a leaf thrown in.

Where are they all going?!

Let’s take, for example, the letter <g>2 and its many possible pronunciations.

First on the menu is the classic [g], a sturdy stop found in words like grow, good gravy, and GIF. This dish originates in the Proto-Germanic (PGmc) voiced velar fricative /ɣ/3. (Refresh your memory on our phonological mumbo-jumbo here.) This velar fricative had a bit of an identity crisis during Old English (OE)4, spurred on by hanging out with sounds all over the mouth.

“But what we found out is that each one of us is a front vowel…and a back vowel…and a palatal approximant…an affricate…and a voiced velar stop…Does that answer your question?”

Around front vowels (such bad influences—triggering umlaut wasn’t enough for them?), it became [j], as in year, from OE ġēar. Between back vowels (the big bullies), it became [w], as in to draw, from OE dragan5. At the end of words, it lost its voicing and became [x] (the sound in loch), as in our own dear Edinburgh (whose pronunciation has since changed again). Ah, but before back vowels, and when backed up by sonorants like [ɹ], it held its ground a little better and became our trusty [g].

As you may have noticed, a lot of the sounds that came from /ɣ/ are no longer spelled with <g>. Alas. We’ll come back to how Edinburgh wound up with an <h> in a minute.

But first, there was another sound that came from PGmc /ɣ/. Old English had something going on called gemination. Sometimes, it would take a consonant and double its pronunciation. Like the <kk> in bookkeeper. Bookkeeper is just fun to say, but these long consonants were actually important back in OE. The wheretos and whyfors of gemination are another story, but just like how /ɣ/ became [j], the geminate /ɣɣ/ was pulled forward and dressed in new clothes as the affricate [d͡ʒ], like in bridge and edge, from OE bryċg and eċg.

Gemination didn’t get around much. It was pretty much restricted to the middle of words. When mushy, unstressed endings began to fall off, the leftovers of gemination found themselves at the end of words, but a little nudge was needed before [d͡ʒ] found its way to the prime word-initial position. Later on in Middle English, the language ran around borrowing far more than a cup of sugar from its neighbor across the Channel. As English stuffed its pockets with French vocabulary, it found a few French sounds slipped down in among the lint. One of those was Old French’s own [d͡ʒ], which on the Continent was simplifying to [ʒ]6 (the <s> sound in measure). This [ʒ] sound didn’t exist in English yet. Our forefathers looked at it, said “nope,” and went on pronouncing it [d͡ʒ]. Thus we get words like juice, paving the way for later words like giraffe and GIF.

This is a GIF. Or is it a GIF? I mock you with my scholarly neutrality.

It was only later, after the end of Middle English, that /ʒ/ was added to the English phoneme inventory, retaining its identity in loanwords like garage and prestige. It’s worth noting, however, that these words also have accepted pronunciations with [d͡ʒ].

Alright, so what about the <gh> in Edinburgh? It turns out there’s another sound responsible for the unpaid overtime of the letter <g>. Meet the sound /h/. In Middle English, Anglo-Norman scribes from France introduced a lot of new spellings, including <gh> for /h/. The <h> part of the <gh> digraph was probably a diacritic meant to indicate a fricative sound. Remember that by this time, the old <g> didn’t really represent a fricative anymore. In words like Edinburgh, the [x] from /ɣ/ had merged with the [x] version of /h/, so it is from /h/ that we get our <gh> spellings. Over time, these [h] and [x] pronunciations weakened and disappeared completely, bequeathing us their spelling to baffle future spelling bee contestants. We have them to thank for bright starry nights, the wind blowing in the high boughs of the trees. But before these sounds went, they left us one last piece to complete our <g> puzzle: after back vowels, sometimes [x] was reanalyzed as [f]. We’ve all been there, right? Your parents say something one way, but you completely mishear them and spend the rest of your life pronouncing it a different way. I mean, did you know the line in the Christmas song is actually colly7 birds, not calling birds? Now imagine that on a language-wide scale. I’m glad for the [f]s. They make laughing more fun, although sometimes convincing your phone not to mis-autocorrect these words can be rough. Had enough? Okay, I’ll stop.

The point of all this isn’t really about the spellings. Just look at all these beautiful sound changes! And this barely scratches the surface. A lot of the big sound changes that warrant fancy names seem to be all about vowels, but as <g> can attest, consonants have fun, too.8 Speaking of big, fancy vowel changes, get your tickets now because next week, Sabina’s going to talk about one of the most famous and most dramatically named: the Great English Vowel Shift.

Notes

1 It wasn’t a perfect system, though. Sometimes, a single scribe would spell the same word several different ways in the same document. Was this reflecting variations in utterances? An inability to decide which letter represented which sound? Transmission errors through copying down someone else’s writing? Who knows.
2 As far as the letter itself goes, the Anglo-Saxons actually used a slightly different symbol known as the insular g. The letter we use today was borrowed from the French during Middle English and is known as the Carolingian g.
3 It’s the voiced version of the sound at the end of Scottish loch. It can be heard today in the Dutch pronunciation of wagon.
4 Refresh yourself on the periods of English here.
5 Actually, draw, drag, and draught/draft are cognates. Knowledge, am I right?
6 This is actually one of my favorite phones. I’m a linguist. I’m allowed to have favorite phones.
7 Because they’re black like coal. And my heart.
8 Admittedly debatable and unnecessarily anthropomorphizing, but we’re already in this thing pretty deep.

Fun Etymology Tuesday – Chocolate

Well met, people! Didn’t think we’d forget about our beautiful followers on Fun Etymology day, did you? Let’s get right to it!
Today, we’re going back to the origins of Fun Etymologies by bringing you another word from Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs.
Today’s word is “chocolate”!

This beloved food is made from the seeds of the evergreen tropical plant Theobroma Cacao (“Theobroma” means “food of the gods” in Greek, and who could disagree?), a relative of cotton native of Central America, and enjoys undying popularity in every corner of the planet due to its amazing taste and incredible versatility.

The etymology of its name is pretty straightforward: it comes to English through Spanish from a Nahuatl compound “xocolatl” (where “x” is pronounced “sh”), literally meaning “bitter water”, in reference to the drink the Aztecs used to make from cocoa seeds. The funny thing about this etymology, however, is that no Aztec ever used the word “xocolatl”! It can’t be found in any Aztec document dating to before the Spanish conquest, where the drink was simply referred to as “cacahuatl” (which is where our word “cocoa” comes from, incidentally. The Aztec word was itself a loanword from Olmec “kakawa”. Triple language chain!). Where did this word come from then? Nobody knows for sure!
A leading hypothesis is that it was coined by the Spanish themselves to avoid the similarity between “cacahuatl” and the Spanish word “caca”, meaning, well… “animal and/or human waste”, an association which would also be brought to mind by the… ahem… suggestive colour of the drink.

Hope I haven’t ruined your snack.

Let’s get Laut! 2

Welcome back, fearless blog readers!

If you remember last week’s post, or if you speak English at all, you’ll remember that sometimes English words can behave… bizarrely.

Last time, we explored the reason why some plurals (like mice or geese) can be totally out of control. Today, it’s time to look at their far more complicated cousins, the so-called “irregular” past tense verbs. These are really part of a wider Germanic phenomenon called strong verbs, but their roots sink much, much further in the past. If you’re a native English speaker, maybe you’ve wondered from time to time why some verbs change so drastically in their past tenses; if you are or have been an English learner, you probably remember memorising those frustrating tables in school.

But why? Why are they like this? Why can’t they just be like everyone else?

Remember the two German siblings we introduced last week?

No, not the fairy tale ones. The anthropomorphised linguistic abstraction ones.

They look pretty good for having no discernible physical form at all. Also they like Spätzle and Bratvwürst. Yummy!

We already thoroughly acquainted you with umlaut, and today we’re going to introduce his big sister, ablaut.

Hold on tight, this is going to be a wild ride!

The humble e

If you thought umlaut was old, get a load of this: his older sister ablaut goes back to Proto-Indo-European!

Her name literally means “sound gradation” in German, and she was given a name by none other than our old friend Jacob Grimm.

He (and other linguists during his time) noticed that in some Germanic verbs vowels alternated according to a predictable set of patterns. You might know these patterns as the so-called “irregular” verbs of English, such as swim/swam/swum.

Such patterns exist in all Germanic languages, but our linguist friends noticed that similar phenomena could be seen in other Indo-European languages, and not only in verbs. Ancient Greek, for example, exhibits similar patterns in nouns as well as verbs, and ancient Indian grammarians such as Panini had noticed it happening in Sanskrit millennia before, giving the different vowel grades fancy names such as guna and vrddhi.

From this evidence, our fearless heroes deduced that this system of vowel changes must go much further in the past than the birth of Germanic languages.

Today’s leading hypothesis is that all these changes spark from the same little source: the humble PIE vowel /e/.

This little vowel was PIE’s most important vowel. In fact, according to some theories, it might even have been its only vowel at some very early stage! How did the other vowels come about? Well, /a/ probably originated from a neighbouring consonant’s effect on /e/, while /i/ and /u/ probably arose out of the semivowels /j/ and /w/ respectively. The vowel /o/, on the other hand, came about because of ablaut.

You see, PIE /e/ was pronounced (or not pronounced, see below) in various, different ways depending on its position and the position of the main stress in the word. We call these different ways of pronouncing this most basic of vowels grades. Unfortunately, nobody has ever been able to figure out why this happened exactly, but we’re working on it, we promise.

In total, there were three basic grades and two lengthened grades. Let’s take a look at these changes using various forms of the PIE word *ph2ter-, ‘father’, as examples.[1] In these, the acute accent (é) indicates stress.

The three basic grades were the e-grade, which occurred when the stress was on the concerned vowel, as in

*ph2térm̥ (“father”, accusative)[2]

The o-grade, which turned the /e/ into /o/, and occurred when the stress came before the vowel, as in

*n̥péh2torm̥ (“fatherless”, accusative)[3]

And the zero-grade, where the /e/ just disappeared, which occured when the stress came after the vowel, as in

*ph2trés (“father’s”, genitive)

When the e- and o-grades were found in the last syllable of a word, they became long vowels, giving rise to the lengthened grades (a line on the vowel, called a macron, indicates length), as in

*ph2tḗr (“father”, nominative)

and

*n̥péh2tōr (“fatherless”, nominative)

Thousands of years of sound change in English have erased the effects of ablaut in nouns, but they can be seen in Ancient Greek. Using our examples above, here’s how they evolved in the language of Socrates:

*ph2térm̥ > patéra

*n̥péh2torm̥ > apátora

*ph2trés > patrós

*ph2tḗr > patḗr

*n̥péh2tōr > apátōr

Pretty similar, aren’t they?

This system of changes also applied to verbs, and, believe it or not, in early PIE all verbs behaved like the English irregular verbs! What a nightmare, eh?

Don’t commiserate the poor Indo-Europeans, though. At the time, these changes were perfectly predictable and regular.

Ten thousand years of sound change tend to wreck even the most clockwork-like of systems, however, and by the time Proto-Germanic made its entrance on the stage, the simple e/o/nothing system of Indo-European had been scrambled into a complex mess of vowels.

Proto-Germanic strong verbs are divided into seven classes, depending on the path that humble PIE /e/ took in its evolution into all the vowels we know and love today.

The… messy evolution of vowels in English certainly didn’t help, and while today these seven classes of verbs still technically exist, they’re very hard to tell apart. The strong verbs of English have become for all intents and purposes irregular, which is what they’re called in school grammars everywhere.

What about regular verbs (also called weak verbs) then? Well, some of them were once strong verbs which became weak somewhere along their history (such as show/showed, which was once show/shew), but most of them were not originally verbs at all! Proto-Germanic weak verbs come from other words (mostly nouns) which got turned into verbs through derivation.

So here’s the plot twist: irregular verbs are not rebels at all! They’re old fogeys, shaking their heads and tutting at the young and hip regular verbs staring at their mobile phones all day.

You millennials are so lazy. Back in MY day we took the trouble of changing our vowels in our past tenses!

Life is full of surprises.

  1. That “h2” thing is one of the consonants from which /a/ arose, incidentally.
  2. That dot under the “m” shows that it’s a separate syllable. In PIE, m, n, l, and r could behave like vowels!
  3. Bonus points if you noticed the e-grade in the first syllable!

Fun Etymology Tuesday – Hearse

Hello, splendid followers!
Let me ask you a question: how do you go from a wolf to a car model specifically designed to transport coffins?
No clue? Well, you’re in luck, because today’s Fun Etymology is about one of the English words with the most byzantine history of semantic shifts: “hearse”.

The original roots of the word are thought to be found in the Oscan word “hirpus”, meaning “wolf”. Oscan was a sister language to Latin, spoken during the time of the Roman Empire. This word would have gone extinct if some Oscan farmer hadn’t noticed how the tool he used to break up soil on his farm kinda looked like the fangs of a wolf, and decided to call it so. This word was quickly borrowed into Latin as “hirpex” and went on to describe this agricultural implement (what in modern English is called a harrow) for centuries. Then, at some point during the Middle Ages, someone noticed how certain kinds of chandelier used in churches kinda looked similar to these harrows, so they figured why not extend the meaning of this word to indicate those as well?
By this time, the word looked like “hercia”, and that’s how it was borrowed into Old English. Only guess what that particular kind of chandelier was used for in England? That’s right, it was hung above coffins during funerals! So someone thought: “What’s the harm in having this word mean “coffin” as well? It’s not like you talk about chandeliers every day, is it?”
Well, in for a penny, in for a pound, and soon the word was further extend to indicate the carriage on which the coffin was transported to the church prior to the funeral, then those carriages got replaced by cars, and here we are!

Let’s Get Laut! (Part 1)

Mouse. Goose. Man. Swim. Drive. Bite.

These are some words students of English everywhere have learned to fear. Why? Because they’re rebel words: they won’t bow to the rules which would make English grammar so much simpler.

“Mouses”? That’s what the system wants, man! Go “mice”!

“Swimmed”? Pshaw! It’s “swam” or death!

Rise, Товарищ, smash the imperialist suffixes!

But why is it like that? Why can’t these words just behave and spare English students all the grief? Why do their vowels have to jump around like rocket-powered rabbits in a carrot field?

Well, turns out they have two very good reasons to do that, and those reasons are two lovely German siblings called umlaut and ablaut.

Aren’t they cute?

Let’s talk about the first of these for a bit.

Umlaut

Umlaut is the younger sibling: he’s just a little over 1000 years old!

His name literally means “sound alteration” in German, and he is a kind of assimilation or vowel harmony that appeared in two out of the three main branches of the Germanic family, leaving poor East Germanic behind.

Lots of sad goths out there.
Photo by Bryan Ledgard

Vowel harmony is a process in which the vowels of a word shift their sound to become more similar to another vowel, bringing all them roughly in the same part of the mouth (and therefore making it simpler to pronounce them in sequence).

In some languages, such as Finnish or Turkish, this process happens all the time, and vowels on suffixes must be “adapted” to the vowels of the word they are to be attached to to be grammatically sound. For example, the vowels “a” and “ö” cannot be together in any native Finnish word: if you want to add an “a” to a word with “ö” sounds, you have to turn it into “ä” first.

Umlaut is a rather more limited form of vowel harmony, because it usually only extends one syllable to the left in languages in which it appears.

In Germanic, it only happened in the past, and only involved the vowels /a/, /u/ and, most importantly, /i/. In this post, we’re going to concentrate on the umlaut involving the vowel /i/, because it’s the one that most influenced modern English.

If Germanic words were American high-schools (or Japanese ones, depending on your tastes in entertainment), then /i/ would have been the cool kid. Everyone wants to be like /i/: he’s smart, athletic and almost sinfully handsome.

Notice me, senpai!

Whenever he’s around, the back vowels /a/, /o/ and /u/ try to look like him, hoping to attract his attention. They never succeed entirely, no-one can be like /i/, but they come as close as they can. Only /e/ remains aloofː he’s a bookish geek, and doesn’t care about these status games.[1] Also, he’s already pretty similar to /i/, because he possesses the thing that makes /i/ so coolː frontness.

In the classroom of the mouth, /i/ and /e/ always sit in the front rows, near the teeth, while /a/, /o/ and /u/ are confined to the back, near the squishy soft palate. Ew.

When /i/ appears, everyone shuffles their desks forward to be near him. However, they can’t be too conspicuous, or they’ll appear desperate. That’s why they only move forwards if they are within one syllable to his left.

Suppose one of these words looks like this:

*mūs

Here’s /u/, happily minding its own business. But when the word is plural, it looks like thisː

*mūsiz

Well look who appeared on the sceneǃ It’s good ol’ /i/, and he’s right in the next syllableǃ /u/ almost panicsː this is his chance to be seen with the cool kidǃ He shuffles his desk forward and becomes /y/.

*mȳsiz

Time passes, /i/ and /z/ graduate from the school of language change and disappear from the word. /y/ is behind on a few exams and remains where he is.

mȳs

He’s really important nowː if he moved his desk back and became /uː/ again, the speakers of the school’s language would not be able to tell the plural of the word from the singularǃ

Eventually, through hard study and the unrounding of front vowels in the passage between Old and Middle English, /y/ finally lives the dreamː he becomes /i/ǃ Now he’s the cool kidǃ

mīs

He’s hardly finished celebrating when the Great Vowel Shift sweeps the language like a storm, sending vowels flying all over the place. Now the singular form sounds like /maʊs/, and the plural like /maɪs/. Our words have now becomeː

mouse and mice

And that’s how they’ve looked ever sinceǃ To summarise, /u/’s path when near /i/ was /u/ > /y/ > /i/ > /aɪ/.

The other back vowels also had similar pathsː /o/ > /ø/ > /e/ > /i/ gave rise to words such as goose/geese, and /a/ > /æ/ > /ɛ/ gave rise to the word man/men.

What did the words that make their plural with regular -s have that set them apart from these? Well, it’s simpleː their plurals didn’t involve /i/. Instead, they had some boring other vowel. Usually /a/.

It’s important to note that this process only took place in native Germanic words. That’s why it’s goose/geese, but not moose/meeseː the word “moose” is not Germanic at allǃ It comes from an Algonquian language of Canada, and therefore never went through the umlaut process.

Finally, many words which once formed their plural through umlaut were later regularised to form it with -s. If this hadn’t happened, the plural of cow would be kye, and the plural of book would be… beech.

A veritable library.

So there you have it: that’s why some words in English have crazy plurals. What about the verbs with the crazy past tenses? Well, you’ll have to wait for a future post, when we’ll examine umlaut’s older sister, ablaut.

In the meantime, stay tuned for next week, when Rebekah will start us on a journey on why English spelling looks so bafflingly insane.

  1. Be like /e/, guys.

Fun Etymology Tuesday – Person

Hello, good people!
We heard your cries of despair yesterday, when the Fun Etymology failed to appear. But fear not! We haven’t forgotten about you. We only have horrid social media management skills.

Yesterday’s word was “person”!

This very common word might seem boring, but its etymological meaning is very intriguing (and, dare I say, philosophically stimulating), and its roots sink into one of the most mysterious languages of Europe.

The word “person”, like so many other words, comes to English through Old French from Ancient Rome, specifically from Latin “persōna”, which originally meant “exterior appearance, face”. Where the Latin word comes from, though, is the really interesting part.

One etymology of that word is per (through) + a form of the verb sonare (to sound, make noise). So “that through which you make noise”. This would make sense, except that nobody has been able to make sense of the long ō in persōna, which by all accounts shouldn’t be there.

A far more intriguing etymology is that the word is ultimately a loanword from the Etruscan “phersu”, meaning “mask”.

Etruscan was the language of the greatest civilisation extant in Italy before the arrival of the Romans, and it was still spoken during the time of the Roman Empire. It is not related to any other known language, and unfortunately we know very little about it. The last known speaker, Emperor Claudius, is said to have written a grammar and even a dictionary, but sadly these were lost to us.
The Etruscans were great architects and possessed a vast and famous culture. They are thought to have brought the alphabet to Rome and even to the Vikings!

So is a person just a mask? Do we really show our true selves to others?
Some questions to ponder.

Once upon a time…

Once upon a time, there were two brothers who very much enjoyed stories. They travelled their country looking for folk tales, each one darker and grimmer than the last… There was no happily ever after in sight and, though their stories have changed much since, the original tales are still found out there for those brave enough to seek them…

Prepare yourselves, my dears, because this… this is the story of the brothers Grimm.

*

Or not! Actually, it is the story of one of the brothers: Jacob Grimm. And it won’t be grim in the least but full of fun linguistic facts!

Today, we’ll be talking about what is known as the First Germanic Sound Shift, Rask’s Rule or, most commonly, Grimm’s Law.

Riccardo touched upon this topic in last week’s post on the comparative method, a method that was pretty much born with this particular observation. The first to notice the correspondence that would eventually become Grimm’s Law was Friedrich Schlegel, a German philologist, in 1806. Rasmus Rask, a Danish philologist, extended the ‘rule’ to to other PIE languages in 1818 and, eventually, Grimm included German in his book Deutsche Grammatik, published in 1822.

Now, they noticed a regular sound change that affected certain Proto-Indo-European (PIE) consonants. They also noticed that this particular sound change only affected the Germanic languages, e.g. German, Dutch, English, Swedish, etc.

But what is it?

Well, Grimm’s Law describes how certain PIE consonants developed in Proto-Germanic, particularly early Germanic stops and fricatives. Now, you might want to refresh your memory on phonological terminology before continuing, but there can be said to be three parts of the chain shift that is Grimm’s law:

  1. PIE voiceless stops became voiceless fricatives
  2. PIE voiced stops became voiceless stops
  3. PIE voiced aspirated stops became voiced stops or fricatives.

That might be a bit abstract but it basically works like this:

PIE PGmc¹ PIE PGmc PIE PGmc
p > f b > p bh > b
t > θ d > t dh > d
k > x g > k gh > g
> > ghʷ >

 

Consider these words in Latin, English and Swedish and compare them to their PIE root:

 

PIE² Latin English Swedish
*ped- pēs foot fot
*dwo- duo two två
*genu- genū knee³ knä

Now, why would English and Swedish have <f>, <t> and <k> where PIE and Latin have <p>, <d> and <g>?

Well, because English and Swedish, being Germanic languages, underwent Grimm’s Law and thus changed the PIE sound */p/, */d/ and */g/ to /f/, /t/ and /k/ respectively. Latin, on the other hand, is an Italic language and didn’t undergo this change, thus keeping the sounds of PIE (or at least approximately, though exactly how close these sounds are is a bit difficult to say with certainty).  

Why would this happen, you might wonder? What would make one sound shift to become another sound?

Well, we don’t really know exactly how it started or why. It might be what is called a ‘pull chain’, meaning that one sound shifts, leading to a ‘gap’ in the phonological values of the language. As a result, another sound shifts to fill that gap and a third sound shifts to fit the gap of the second one and so on and so forth.

But, it is also possible that it worked the other way around, meaning that one sound started to shift and basically pushed another sound out of its place, thereby leading to a chain shift. This is called a push chain.

But as to how such a chain started? Well, that part is still kind of shrouded in mystery. Perhaps two sounds became too similar to each other and became difficult to distinguish from each other, forcing a shift? We might never know.

What we do know, however, is that Grimm’s Law did affect all Germanic languages, leading to a distinction between that language family and its PIE-derived sisters.

But there are also a good number of exceptions from this rule. For example:

Why does PIE *bʰréh₂tēr (“brother”) become Proto-Germanic *brōþēr but PIE *ph₂tḗr (“father”) became Proto-Germanic *fadēr?

In ‘brother’, the development follows Grimm’s Law, i.e.  t > þ, but in ‘father’ it does not. Instead of the, by Grimm’s law, expected development, i.e. t > þ, the Proto-Germanic word developed t > d. Why is that?

Well, cue Karl Verner; a Danish linguist who in 1875 formulated what is now known as Verner’s Law, an addition, if you will, to Grimm’s Law. Verner’s Law explains such occurrences as ‘father’, showing that voiceless fricatives, e.g. *f, *s, *þ, when immediately following an unstressed syllable in the same word, underwent voicing and becomes fricatives, e.g. *β, *z,*ð

Now, you might be thinking that this is all very interesting but why is it important? ‘cause I can pretty much promise you, that if there is anything the budding historical linguist is aware of, it is Grimm’s Law.

Well, while it is fascinating in its own right, its discovery showed us something much greater than we had ever thought possible before: that sound change is a regular phenomenon, not a random process affecting only some words.

This discovery not only set historical phonology apart as its own field of study but also means that we can predict and understand phonological developments, a discovery that cleared the field for the comparative method.

And without the comparative method, of course, our field of inquiry would be so much poorer as we would largely be unable to properly understand the relationship between languages and the historical developments of those languages.

And wouldn’t we all be a lot poorer for that lack of understanding?

So, next time you watch Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood or Hansel and Gretel, remember that Jacob Grimm not only provided you with these stories but helped design the most used, and important, method in historical linguistics to this day. Not a bad contribution, right?

Join us next week when our awesome magician Riccardo is back! This time, he’ll be talking about the magic of umlaut and ablaut, so if you’ve ever wondered why it’s ‘mouse’ but ‘mice’ but not ‘house’ and ‘hice’ you definitely don’t want to miss it.

 

Notes and sources

¹ PGmc is a common abbreviation for Proto-Germanic

² All the PIE roots can be found by a simple google search. These are taken from the Online Etymology Dictionary found here: https://www.etymonline.com/. Have fun!

³ Remember now that while the <k> in modern English ‘knee’ is silent today, it was pronounced in earlier stages of English.

*The little pic is from http://tentcampinghq.com/camping-articles/how-to-tell-scary-campfire-stories-2/

**For those who wants to know more about Grimm’s Law, most (if not all) introductory textbooks on linguistics deals with the subject at least a little bit. This particular illustration is from Millward, C.M. A Biography of the English Language.  Ft. Worth: Harcourt, 1996. Pg. 63 but a similar one can be found in pretty much any textbook. Particularly recommended is Lyle Campbell’s Historical Linguistics (3rd ed., 2012) which deals with most things historical linguisticky with great attention to detail and plenty of examples (so it’s recommended generally, not only for this particular sound change). 

Fun Etymology Tuesday – Mayday

Hello splendid followers!
It’s Tuesday and it’s time for our usual Fun Etymology!
Today is not only Tuesday but also May Day, the last offspring of a long tradition of Spring festivals in Europe.
But you might have wondered one thing: why do aeroplane pilots scream the name of this particular occurrence when they are in distress?

Well, unsurprisingly, it turns out that the emergency signal “mayday” has absolutely zilch to do with the festival. What it is is an English interpretation (almost certainly influenced by the name of the day) of the French phrase “m’aider”, itself an abbreviated form of “venez m’aider”, i.e. “come help me!”

Feel free to quote this lovely bit of trivia to the pilot next time you’re involved in an emergency landing!*

*Please don’t bother the pilot during an emergency landing. THAT’S A REALLY BAD IDEA.