A late Tuesday FunEty for you, friends! Today’s word is “disaster”!
This word can refer to any unfortunate or ruinous event, and it’s origins is a bit all over the map (not really, but it does have multiple origins).
Partly, it’s a borrowing from French “desastre”, from Italian “disastro”, which in turn is modelled on an Occitan lexical item. For those of you who are, like i was before this post, somewhat unfamiliar with the Occitan language, it is a Romance language, spoken in southern France, Italy’s Occitan Valleys, Monaco and Spain’s Val d’Aran. Some also consider Catalan to be included. However, the unity of the Occitan language is a bit disputed, and some consider it a macrolanguage, that is, a language with widely varying dialects.
Anyway, back to “disaster”. So, Italian “disastro” can here be split into two: the prefix “dis-“, equivalent to English “mis-“ meaning ill, and “astro” from Latin “astrum”, meaning star. So, disaster could be translated, literally, to “ill-star(red)”.
So what about Occitan? Well, in Old Occitan, we find “desastre”, which is probably from Old Occitan “dezastruc”, which also meant “ill-starred” from late 12th century.
I hope you enjoyed that little trip, I know I did! Now, excuse me while I go read up some more on the Occitan language!
Today’s word is “mortgage”. Few of us wish to have one, a non-wish reflected in its etymology!
Coming to English during the 14th century, this word comes from Old French “morgage”, a compound from “mort gage”, ultimately from post-classical Latin mortuum vadium, literally meaning “dead pledge”!
The term stems from the fact that a deal dies when the debt is paid (or, in worst case scenario, when payment fails). In English, it was actually borrowed straight off as “morgage”, the <t> being restored in modern English on the basis of Latin mortuum.
So let those debts die (in the good way, that is), ladies and gents, and see you next week for more Fun Etymology!
It being the first weekend of a new month, time for another lovely little introduction to an influential linguist, whose work has had great impact on meaning.
Ladies and gents, let us introduce you to Paul Grice!
Professor Grice was born in Harborne, nowadays a suburb of Birmingham, in the UK. First attending school at Clifton College, he later attended Corpus Christ College, Oxford, and a bit later still, went back to Oxford, this time to St. John’s College, where he imparted his knowledge to students until 1967. After that, he moved to the States to take up a professorship at the University of California, Berkeley, where he taught until his passing in 1988.
In the field of linguistics, Grice’s work greatly impacted the field of semantics (that is, meaning). What most budding linguists may think about when they think of Grice is his famous “Maxims”. Generally known simply as “Grice’s Maxims”, these belong to a broader principle that Grice named “the Cooperative principle”, which Grice meant that all speakers in a conversation generally follow.
But what does that mean?? Let’s quote the author: “Make your contribution such as it is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged.” (Grice 1989: 26). To this principle, Grice added his Maxims that basically say: 1. The Maxim of information – make your contribution to the conversation as informative as possible but not more than what is necessary. 2. The Maxim of Quality – Basically: don’t lie. To be more specific: don’t say things you believe to be false, or things for which you lack adequate evidence. 3. The Maxim of relation – Be relevant, won’t you? 4. Maxim of Manner – avoid being unclear, ambiguous, overly chatty (be brief) and be orderly.
Obviously, these aren’t the only Maxims used in conversations, but they are the ones traditionally recognised as Grice’s Maxims. Also, obviously, not everyone plays by these rules – people lie, they say stuff that’s completely irrelevant to the conversation, and so on. BUT, according to Grice, conversational implicatures (that is, an implicit speech act: what is meant by the speaker rather than what is explicitly said) are possible because we all assume that the person we are talking to is actually obeying these Maxims: we assume that they’re telling the truth (mostly) and that what they’re saying is informative, relevant and clear (again, mostly). And when they don’t, like when they purposely say untrue things (think “Yeah, and I’m a monkey’s uncle”)? Well, you, and they, rely on these Maxims to reach an appropriate conclusion: you’re ignoring what the speaker is actually saying and instead infer the speaker’s meaning!
Isn’t that fun? If you want to know more about Professor Grice’s amazing work (‘cause obviously, there is so much more that it’s ridiculous), check it out by following this link. In the meantime, next time you have a conversation, try to think of what Maxim you’re relying on and send a thankful thought to Professor Grice for his long hard work that helped us understand so much more about what’s going on in every single conversation.
I’m obsessed with looking up etymologies, you know, that’s why I’m here every Tuesday! So, I figured it was appropriate that today’s word should be “obsess”!
From Latin “obsessus”, the past participle of “obsidere”, meaning to watch closely, besiege, occupy; stay, remain or abide.
The Latin word can actually be split in two: “ob”, meaning against, and “sedere”, meaning to sit, so the Latin word literally means “sit opposite to”.
When it came to English, around the year 1500, it had come to mean something like “to besiege”, and from around 1530, we get the “ghost” sense of being obsessed by an evil spirit.
The most common meaning today, though, may be the psychological one, that is “I am obsessed with FunEty!”, but that is a late sense of the word that didn’t develop until the 20th century.
Well, you’ve certainly have had fun without me, haven’t you? It’s been four weeks since you heard anything new about the Early Germanic dialects, but I can see that Lisa has had a word with you about contact situations and language influence (and exposed the HLC’s horrifying lies about language change!), and our great guest posts, by Sarah and Claire, must have kept you plenty entertained!
Now we’re getting back at it, though, and today, we’ll have a look at a little language that was part of the foundation of the Anglo-Saxon community in England: Old Saxon!
Let’s do what we usually do and start with a bit of a general history lesson, shall we?
The Saxons–surprise surprise!–were a somewhat warlike people. So much so, in fact, that their very name is a reference to a sword: a short sword characteristic of the Saxon people, known as the sahs (we still find its derivation in the second part of the German word for ‘knife’ (Messer)).
The Saxons were first mentioned during the middle of the 2nd century A.D. by the Greek geographer Ptolemy in his chapter Magna Germanica (in the book Geographia), in which Ptolemy places the Saxons in the area around the North Sea coast and to the east of the lower Elbe, an area that is now Holstein in the county of Schleswig-Holstein, the northernmost state of Germany (just south of Denmark)–and if you’re wondering why all the warlike people seem to be coming from the northernmost areas of the world: it’s the cold. Definitely the cold.
In the following centuries, the Saxons show up prominently in a bunch of bloody battle accounts and struggles; they were fighting with their neighbours, with their allies, with their enemies… with pretty much everyone and anyone. But mostly, they fought with their neighbours, the Franks.
Despite this, they must have had a reasonably amicable relationship with their neighbours to the southwest around the year 531, when they joined together to destroy the kingdom of Thuringia:
1
However, the new Saxon kings of Thuringia were forced to pay a yearly tribute to the Frankish kingdom, which did not sit well with the Saxons. So, naturally, for about 200 years, there is an on-again-off-again war between the Saxons and the Franks.
Then, in 715, the western Saxons invaded the lower Rhenish areas. They were pushed back by Charles Martel in 718, who had to enter western Saxony twice–and was not happy about it (which he brutally took out on the local population). Yet, the Saxons were nothing if not stubborn and revolted again in 753, with the same expected results. One would think they had enough by now, right? Yeah, not so much. The scenario was repeated again, with the same results, in 758 (have you ever heard that “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results.”2?).
Eventually, we reach the fatal year 772–the beginning of the end for the Saxons as an independent state. In that year, the Imperial council officially declared war on the Saxons. Enter, stage right: Charlemagne.
Charlemagne completed the Frank’s annexation of Saxon territory in 782, but the final battles between the Saxons and the Franks weren’t fought for another 12 years, when finally, we see the end of the Saxons as an independent state.
That isn’t the last we’ll hear about the Saxons, of course, but I’ll deal with their history in England in the chapter on Old English rather than here (it’ll make sense to you soon enough, I promise).
Our knowledge about the Saxon language comes from two major surviving texts: the epic poem Heliand and a copy of Genesis which runs to just 330 lines, so it’s quite short–though it is argued that the original was likely quite long. The Heliand is quite interesting for a multitude of reasons: an alliterative poem of some 6000 long lines, it recounts the story of Jesus in a way that combines the contributions of all four Gospels in a single narrative. The poem not only translates the story into a Germanic verse form, but changes the setting of the story–the tale of Jesus is told not in some far-away Holy Land but on the plains and marshes of northern Germany, and the shepherds who are told of Jesus’s birth are not tending sheep, but horses.
Now that we’ve looked quite a bit at the history of the Saxons and their surviving texts, let’s have a look at the language that they spoke! It is why we are here after all.
Most of the time, the letters used in Old Saxon texts correspond quite well to what one, as an English-speaker, would expect–p, t, k, for example, are pronounced just as in modern English–but there are a couple of surprises:
In word-final position, the letter g corresponds to [x] (the sound in Scots loch or German nacht), so a word like dag ‘day’ would be pronounced something like dach, except if it was preceded by n. In these cases, g was pronounced like [k], so g in words like lang ‘long’ would be pronounced [k], i.e. lank.
Another surprise concerns the letters b and d. In general, these are pronounced as in Modern English, but in word-final position and before voiceless consonants (like t or s), they were probably pronounced [p] and [t]. So:
bi
'by'
[b] > [b]
dôan
‘do’
[d] > [d]
lamb
‘lamb’
[b] > [p]
flôd
‘flood’
[d] > [t]
Another difference is found in the voiceless fricative /f/: when between vowels, it becomes voiced, /v/, as does /θ/ and /s/ which become [ð] and [z] respectively. The difference between /f/ and the other letters that get voiced, is that the change in /f/ is faithfully reflected in writing! When /f/ became [v], it was consistently spelt ⟨ƀ⟩ and ⟨u⟩, so if you see those letters in between vowels, you can start to suspect that you’re looking at Old Saxon.
Let’s look at some other indicators that you’re looking at Old Saxon.
Unlike Gothic and Old Norse, Old Saxon shows a development of the older diphthongs /ai/ and /au/ to the monophthongs [e:] and [o:]. Other early Germanic dialects do this, too, but it is a conditional change, meaning that certain conditions must be fulfilled before the change can happen. In Old Saxon, though, we would call it an unconditional change, meaning that this change occurs virtually without exception–let’s look at stone as an example:
Old Saxon
stên
Gothic
stains
Old Norse
steinn
Old High German
stein
So if you’re seeing <e> where in comparable texts you see a diphthong, you might suspect that you’re looking at Old Saxon–like we said, though, this is not bulletproof evidence, so let’s look at some more stuff that Old Saxon does!
When we were talking about Old Norse, we briefly touched upon a process called gemination. What this means is that the consonants g and k doubled to gg and kk after a short vowel and before j (and sometimes w). This process has far greater scope in Old Saxon than in Old Norse; in Old Saxon, all consonants can be doubled except r and the doubling takes place before not just j and w but also quite frequently before r and l, and sometimes before m and n. Another unique feature of Old Saxon among the West Germanic languages (remember our tree?) is that it usually still shows the conditioning <j>:
Old Saxon
Old English
Modern English
biddian
biddan
‘ask’
huggian
hycgan
‘think’
Two more things before we wrap up:
In Old Saxon, as in all the languages that we will look at following this post (but not the ones that precede it), we find that the verbal infinitive has developed into something approaching a true noun, what we would today call the gerund. The gerund may function as the subject of a sentence:
Eating people is wrong
or the object of a verb:
The hardest thing about learning English is understanding the gerund.
And finally:
Unlike in Gothic and Old Norse, the masculine nominative singular ending of Proto-Germanic, *-az, has disappeared completely in Old Saxon. In Old Norse, we find -r in its place, e.g. dagr ‘day’, while in Gothic, we find –s, e.g. gôþs ‘good’. In Old Saxon, though, we find dag and gôd for these words – the ending has completely disappeared!
So, there you have it, features to look for in Old Saxon. Let’s wrap this up with a bit of an example, from the Eucharist, with a translation from Murphy3:
Eucharist
Translation
tho sagda he that her scoldi cumin en wiscuning
mari endi mahtig an thesan middelgard
bezton giburdies; quad that it scoldi wesan barn godes,
quad that he thesero weroldes waldan scoldi
gio te ewandaga, erdun endi himiles.
He quad that an them selbon daga, the ina salingna
an thesan middilgard modar gidrogi
so quad he that ostana en scoldi skinan
huit, sulic so wi her ne habdin er
undartuisc erda endi himil odar huerigin
ne sulic barn ne sulic bocan
Then he spoke and said
there would come a wise king,
magnificent and mighty,
to this middle realm;
he would be of the best birth;
he said that he would
be the Son of God,
he said that he would rule this world, earth and sky, always and forevermore.
he said that on the same day on which the mother gave
birth to the Blessed One in this middle
realm, in the East,
he said, there would
shine forth a brilliant light in the sky, one
such as we never had before between
heaven and earth nor anywhere
else, never such a baby and never such a beacon.
Sources
As always in our EGD-series, our main source is Robinson’s Old English and its closest relatives (1992).
For this post, we have also taken a look at:
Robert Flierman. 2017. Saxon Identities, AD 150-900. London, Oxford, New York, New Delhi, Sydney: Bloomsbury Academic.
Tuesdays! Isn’t it just a great day? I mean, yes, it’s a long way until the weekend, but there’s a new FunEty!
Let’s take a look at something one should never do: today’s word is “ostracise”!
This word shows up in English in the late 16th century, originally coming from Middle French “ostracisme”. The French word came from either Latin “ostracismus” or directly from Greek “ostrakismos”, which in turn cake from the Greek word “ostrakon”, meaning a tile or potsherd. The PIE-root, *ost-, meant bone, which is also the source of Modern German’s “Estrich”, meaning pavement.
Now to the good stuff: how did a Greek word, referring to a tile or potsherd, come to mean something like excluding someone?
Well, the word itself was actually a name of a particular public practice in Ancient Athens! People would gather around and write the name of a person that they thought was dangerous to the state on a potsherd or a tile. If someone’s name showed up one too many times, that person was banished from Athens for a period of 10 years! A couple of centuries later, we thus find the word “ostracise”, with its current meaning, in English!
However, we could have gotten a word more like “petalise” (or something), if the word had been borrowed from the people of Ancient Syracuse instead as a similar practice, though somewhat more lenient with a banishment of only 5 years, was performed there. Instead of writing on tiles or potsherds, though, the people of Syracuse wrote on olive leaves, and the practice was thus called “petalismos”.
It’s (one of) our favourite day(s) again – time for some FunEty!
Today’s word is “genuine”!
As you may have guessed, this word comes to English from the Latin word “genuinus”, meaning native, natural or innate. This Latin form comes from the root “gignere”, meaning to beget or produce, which in turn comes from the PIE root *gene-, meaning to give birth or beget. It may, perhaps, have been influenced by the contrasting form “adulterinus”, meaning spurious.
Coming to English in the sense of natural or not acquired in the 1590s, it isn’t recorded with the meaning of “really proceeding from its reputed source” until the 1660s.
Here’s the twist to today’s FunEty, though: rather than the origin outlined above, an alternative etymology has been suggested! In this origin-story, it is suggested that the Latin root is actually “genu”, meaning knee, from a supposed ancient custom of acknowledging paternity of a babe by the father placing the child on his knee!
Today’s word is “palace”. From Old French “palais”, meaning a palace or court, this word entered the English language around the early 13th century and used to refer to the official residence of an emperor, king, archbishop, and so on. Eventually, around the late 14th century, it had undergone semantic broadening and had come to mean something like a splendid dwelling place.
The Old French word, though, hails from Medieval Latin “palacium”, also meaning simply a palace, a word which is also the ancestor of Spanish “palacio” and Italian “palazzo”. However, the Latin word also comes from somewhere, in this case from the Latin word “palatium”, also “Mons Palatinus”, meaning the Palatine hill!
Why this specific hill, you wonder? Well, you see, the Palatine Hill was one of the seven hills of Ancient Rome, upon which we, if we were to travel back in time, would find the residence of one Augustus Caesar! A bit later in time, we might instead find the splendid residence of emperor Nero so this hill has certainly had some splendid palaces in its time!
And it doesn’t even end there! The name of the Palatine Hill may be traced back to the word “palus”, meaning something like stake but likely on the notion of enclosure. Another guess, though, is that it derives from Etruscan and is connected with the name Pales, an italic goddess of shepherds and cattle.
Another Tuesday comes our way – and with it comes another FunEty!
But first: We here at the HLC are thrilled to say that our readership is steadily growing – and we recently passed 200 likes here on FB! So, to all our followers, old and new, thank you for joining us on this trip, we hope that you’re enjoying it as much as we are! And – as per usual – if there’s anything you want to read about that we haven’t talked about yet, let us know!
But enough of that, you came here for FunEty! Today’s word is “hazard”.
It’s quite clear that this word was borrowed into English from Anglo-Norman “asard”, Middle French “hasard” or “hasart”, but before that, the etymology is a bit unclear.
It is possible that it was borrowed from the Spanish word “azar”, meaning an unfortunate card or throw at dice, which in turn is said to be from Arabic “as-zahr”, from “al-zahr”, meaning the (al-) die (-zahr). The problem with that, though, is that (1) our first attestations of Spanish “azar” is actually later than the first attestations of the French word and (2) the word is not attested in Classical Arabic, from which it was supposedly borrowed.
That’s tricky. Regarding the second issue, some scholars (Klein for example) have suggested the Arabic word “yasara”, meaning “he played at dice”, as the origin of Spanish “azar”, arguing that Arabic -s- regularly becomes Spanish -z-. The -d was, it is also argued, added when the word had been borrowed by French, through confusion with the native French suffix -ard. The first may perhaps be explained by loss of historical material (though, really, we don’t know).
The sense of the word also evolved in French, coming to mean “chances in gambling”, and then later “chances in life”. The sense of chance of loss or harm, or a risk of some kind, is first recorded in English during the 1540s.
A bit earlier than that, around 1500, we also see the emergence of this noun as a transitive verb (that is, a verb that takes an object).
So there you have it: an ultimately fairly unclear etymology, I’m afraid, but that’s the way of historical linguistics!
And so, another Tuesday has come our way and with it comes another Fun Etymology!
Today’s word is “clue”. While it’s ultimate origin is fairly straightforward – it being a native Germanic word – this little noun has undergone a rather interesting semantic shift.
You see, “clue”, meaning anything that guides or directs you in an intricate case, is actually a special use of a revised spelling of “clew”, meaning a ball of thread or yarn! The sense shift is originally seen in reference to the clew of thread given by Ariadne, the daughter of king Minos of Crete, to Theseus to use as a guide out of the Labyrinth in Greek mythology. Around 1620, the meaning of the word had adopted the figurative sense of “that which points the way”, without regard to labyrinths.
But what about the spelling? How did -ew(e) become -ue? Well, here, you can see some real French influence – you see, some words borrowed from French were spelt -ew in Middle English, but -ue or -eu in French. Eventually, this spelling spread and came to influence native forms too: you also see it in words like “hue” and “true”. In our case, the spelling “clue” is first attested around the mid-15th century.
A final side note: the sense that “clue” may indicate something which a bewildered person does not have is a late sense of the word and didn’t really occur until ca. 1948.
That’s it for today’s FunEty – now you have a clue! (Sorry, couldn’t resist).
Don’t forget to join us on Thursday when we welcome our very first guest blogger here at the HLC! See you then!
