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Fun Etymology Tuesday – Sandwich

It’s Tuesday again! You know what that means!

Today’s word is “sandwich” and it’s a little different from the stories we usually tell here. No “it comes from PIE …” today! Instead, this word is actually said to come from an English title: the Earl of Sandwich. Specifically, it’s said that a ”sandwich” is named after the 4th Earl, John Montagu (1718-1792), an inveterate gambler. Why mention gambling? Well, supposedly, good old John once spent twenty-four hours (!) at the gaming-table, forgoing proper meals and instead had slices of cold beef placed between slices of toast, thus “creating” the sandwich! This account is given by Grosley in his book “Londres”, from 1770, in which he speaks of the word as recently coming into use (according to the OED – we have unfortunately not been able to access the original source).

As for the family name “Sandwich”, it is from Old English Sandwicæ (meaning literally “sandy harbour”), and is a place-name, referring to the historic town Sandwich in the county of Kent in south-east England.

So next time you grab a sandwich, spare a moment to thank the gambling Earl, and don’t forget to join us next week for another Fun Etymology Tuesday!

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Early Germanic Dialects: The Gothic language

friaþwa usbeisneiga ist, sels ist:
friaþwa ni aljanoþ;
friaþwa ni flauteiþ, ni ufblesada,

Recognise that? No? What if I told you that a (somewhat modified) version of this exact thing is very popular to quote during wedding ceremonies (in fact, my husband and I had it read during ours). Still nothing? How about this:

Charity suffereth long, and is kind;
charity envieth not;
charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up,

Yes? Marvellous! This is 1 Corinthians 13:4, though nowadays, we usually say ‘love’ rather than ‘charity’ (yes, even the Bible changes throughout the centuries). But what is that weird little language we started out with? Well, that’s Gothic, our topic of the week!

Being the only East Germanic language (that we know of), it differs a bit from the rest of the Germanic languages, and in this post, I hope to highlight some of these differences and tell you a bit about the history of the language and the people who spoke it.

Let’s start there actually. Sit back, have a nice cup of tea, and let me tell you the story of the Goths.

Though less famous than the Vikings, the Goths also hailed from a Scandinavian country, the native country of half the HLC actually: Sweden! We see their influence in the names of two mainland counties: Västergötland, Östergötland, and the island Gotland! The mainland appears to be the most likely point of origin, though by the time we are first told something about the Goths, Roman and Greek sources place them along the Vistula River during the first and second century. The sixth-century historian Jordanes says that they originally came from across the sea, though, which would point to the Swedish mainland.

Why, exactly, they decided to move away from Sweden is a bit unclear, but it is sometimes suggested that it was due to population pressure. Regardless, we know that around the year A.D. 170, the Goths settled between the Don and Dniester Rivers (an area north of the Black Sea).

Perhaps unsurprisingly for a Scandinavian people who moved around a lot, the Goths were a warlike people and, now, they were at the borders of the Roman Empire. Don’t think they didn’t do anything about that—in fact, they managed to force the Romans to abandon the province of Dacia, in present-day Romania, around the year 270.

From around the time of Dacia, the Goths split into two groups, the Visigoths and the Ostrogoths, and they pretty much became separate, independent groups thereafter. The Ostrogoths continued to consolidate power, while the Visigoths were moving around on the edges of the Roman Empire, sometimes fighting together with their Roman allies, and sometimes fighting against them.

The Visigoths eventually became Christianized, largely thanks to the Gothic bishop Wulfila, one of the most famous Goths in history thanks to his tireless efforts to convert the Goths and also for one of the results of those efforts: the Gothic Bible. I actually talked about this in my post on Proto-Germanic as well, but what I didn’t say is that the Gothic Bible is a marvellous witness to a very different language. In fact, it is one of the major sources of our knowledge of the Gothic language and it was written primarily by Wulfila—or at least it is attributed to him. In order to translate the Bible into Gothic, though, Wulfila first had to pretty much invent a Gothic alphabet! Until this point, the Goths had written primarily in runes, like many other of the Germanic tribes, but Wulfila’s alphabet was based on the Greek one, though some Latin and Runic symbols can be seen as well:

(From Omniglot)

The two letters without any information under them were adopted for their numeric value only  and supposedly borrowed from the Greek alphabet, according to Ancient Scripts (though, I’ll admit I’m somewhat confounded myself about ᛏ, as it closely resembles the rune Tyr or Tiwaz, and so I’m more inclined to see a runic origin for this letter. That’s just a personal opinion though, and I’m not familiar enough with the ancient Greek, or the Gothic, alphabet to say anything further on the subject).

Anyway, the Gothic Bible—or the Wulfila Bible as it is sometimes called—became a primary source for our knowledge of the Gothic language. On that note, let’s look at some of the features that distinguish Gothic from the other Germanic languages!

First, let’s look at a rather characteristic feature: a large number of words in Gothic show  long [eː] where most other Germanic languages show an [aː] or [oː]. The Gothic vowel is assumed to come from Proto-Germanic, probably with the phonetic value [æː]. For example:

Old High GermanGothic
manodmenoþ

So if you’re looking at a text and you keep seeing <e>, where you would expect an <a> or <o>, you might be looking at Gothic. But that’s hardly enough to be sure, so let’s look at some other features!

Gothic also underwent a change called sharpening. While this change is also found in Old Norse, it is otherwise fairly unique to Gothic. What it means is that some instances of <gg> represent a long [gg] sound, rather than [ŋg], which we would expect in English. These sharpened sounds always show up before the consonant <w> and represent a development from Proto-Germanic <ww>. The sharpening also happens in the Proto-Germanic sequence <jj>, which becomes <ddj> in Gothic. For example:

Old High GermanGothicEnglish
(gi)triuwitriggws 'true'
zweiiotwaddje'of two'

The last of the distinctive phonological features we’ll look at is a process called rhotacism. Rhotacism is a change, which affected all the Germanic languages except Gothic, in which the Proto-Germanic z became r. What this means is that if you find a <z> where you would otherwise expect an <r>, it is starting to become very likely that you’re looking at Gothic.

Aside from phonological features, Gothic also has a couple of other distinctive features. Specifically, I want to say a little something about the verbs of Gothic, as Gothic makes use of a process that is not used in the other Germanic languages. Traditionally, the strong verb conjugation in Germanic languages is said to have seven subclasses. I won’t go through this in detail because it quickly gets a bit complicated, but the first six use some kind of vowel alternation to show tense (e.g. PDE sing-sang-sung). This is also true for the seventh subclass in most Germanic languages. But not in Gothic.

Instead, Gothic uses something known as reduplication. What this means is that the past tense of the verbs in the seventh subclass is formed by repeating the first consonant, or consonant cluster, and adding <ai> after it – that is,  háit- (meaning to call, name, order, command, invite) becomes, in its past tense, haihait!

So, if you were to study a text without knowing what language you’re looking at and you keep seeing these features—well, then, you can be quite sure that you’re looking at Gothic (also, if you were to happen to stumble across something, please tell us because we can really never have enough textual evidence… Please?).

That’s just a little bit about Gothic! I hope you enjoyed this little trip, and do check in with us again next week when we’ll continue our journey through the early Germanic dialects by taking a look at Old Norse!

See you then!

References

This post relies primarily on Orrin W. Robinson’s (1992) book Old English and its closest relatives. The examples used here come from this excellent resource, as well as a lot of the information.

Other resources we’ve used for this post are:

The Wulfila Project – where you can find the Gothic text of Corinthians quoted above.
The Oxford English Dictionary
The English-Old Norse Dictionary, compiled by Ross G. Arthur (2002)
Ancient Scripts – an online resource, used here for the Gothic alphabet
Glossary from Joseph Wright’s Grammar of the Gothic Language
Omniglot – where you can find some more information on the Gothic alphabet

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Fun Etymology Tuesday – Wine

We’ve come to yet another Tuesday and, as always (though a bit late), here’s your Fun Etymology!

Today’s word is “wine”!

In Old English, we find the word “win”, from Proto-Germanic *winam, an early borrowing of Latin “vinum”, from PIE *woin-o, which is related to Greek “oinos”, as well as the Armenian, Hittite, non-Indo-European Georgian and West Semitic (Arabic “wain”, Hebrew yayin).

Because all of these languages appear to share this word, some scholars have suggested that it may have been borrowed from a Mediterranean language that has since been lost to us. Others, however, suggest that the immediate origin for the Greek, Latin, and Albanian word is primitive Armenian *woiniyo (Armenian gini). However, that explanation does not quite cover why the word shows up in many Indo-European languages and, ultimately, like so many things in historical linguistics, the origin of “wine” remains somewhat obscure.

See you next week!

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Adam J. Aitken – Patron Saint of April, 2019

A is for April and also for Adam J. Aitken – coincidentally, this month’s Patron Saint!
A.J. Aitken (1921-1998) is known for his scholarship on the Scots Language and his work as Editor on the Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue (DOST). He is perhaps not as widely known in linguistics as the previous Patron Saints we’ve presented, but as a Scots scholar, and an alumni of the HLCs alma mater the University of Edinburgh, he is one of particular importance to us.

Aitken graduated from the University of Edinburgh in 1947 with an MA in English Language, and shortly after took up work as assistant to the editor of DOST. He took over the editor position in 1956, meaning that his contribution can be noticed from the letter J (or, volume III). During his time as editor, he developed a new reading programme which diversified and nearly doubled the source material for DOST. He was also early to explore computer methods for the dictionary work, and set up the Older Scots Textual Archive (also called the DOST corpus); a digital archive of the DOST source material, which makes one of few digitised text data sources for research on Older Scots.

During his time at DOST, Aitken also worked as Lecturer and Reader for the department of English Language at the University of Edinburgh. There, he essentially created ‘Scots Language’ as a university subject – something this particular HLC writer is still reaping the harvest from, as a PhD student researching the Scots Language. Apart from producing teaching materials on Scots, which to this day constitute some of the more comprehensive descriptions of Scots grammar, vocabulary and sound system, Aitken also formulated the Scottish Vowel Length Rule (also called Aitken’s Law), which describes a pattern of meaningful vowel length alternation in Scots and Scottish English, and he created a numbering system for the Scottish Vowels so that they more easily could be described and studied.

In the spirit of the Year of Indigenous Languages, it feels especially appropriate to raise awareness of someone who has contributed so much to the recognition and awareness of Scots. Braw!

At the Dictionary of the Scots Language website, http://dsl.ac.uk/, you can find more info about DOST (and search it, of course), as well as an online text book about the origin and history of Scots which incorporates material written by Aitken – look under the “About Scots” tab.

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Aesces to ashes

I teach fifth-grade Latin, and recently we were discussing the pronunciation of the Latin digraph and diphthong <ae>. One of my bright young scholars asked if the Latin letter was written with “one of those connected a-e thingies.”

My Anglo-Saxonist heart soared. That “connected a-e thingy” is <æ>, a symbol called by the Anglo-Saxons aesc, like an ash tree. With the adoption of the Latin alphabet, <æ> inherited all the rights and responsibilities of ᚫ, a rune of the same name in the Old English fuþorc. It was pronounced [æ]1, like in, well, ‘ash’.

My Latin class and I had to plow ahead with the nominative plural, but in the back of my mind, I kept mulling it over: Where did my beloved aesc come from, and why isn’t it all over the Classic Latin texts I read?

As with so many questions linguistic, the answer lies in human laziness. Since man started putting pen to paper (stylus to papyrus, wax, clay, &c.2), we’ve been conjoining letters to cut corners and save time and space. Cursive is one thing, but typographic ligatures are little clumps of two or three letters written as a single symbol. An example of a well-known ligature that grew up to be a letter in its own right is <w>, which as the name implies, began life as a double <u>.

There are copious examples of ligatures dating all the way back to Sumerian, but we’re investigating <æ>, and for that we have to look to medieval scribes. It’s as simple as you might imagine: Whether for speed or aesthetics, medieval scribes took <a> and <e> and wrote them as one. In Latin, it made no nevermind whether you used the ligature or wrote <ae>.3 In fact, as Latin pronunciation changed throughout the Middle Ages, the spelling was sometimes reduced to merely <e>. (Thus, we modernly tend to write “medieval” rather than “mediæval”.)

Old English wasn’t the only language to promote this particular ligature to a letter. Today, it can still be found in languages like Icelandic and Norwegian.

In Modern English, aesc has been relegated to the status of relic. It gets trotted out when calligraphers and designers want to make something look fancy or antiquated, but otherwise, it’s just some letter that we used to know.4

Notes

1 It becomes fairly obvious where linguists found the symbol to represent this sound in IPA.
2 I would just like to share that the ampersand or “and sign” (&) began life as a ligature of <et>. “Et” is “and” in Latin. I can’t even.
3 As far as Classical Latin goes, the Romans themselves and modern editors use distinct <ae> much more often than not.
4 Alas for me! I suppose I’ll just have to stick to doodling aesc in various margins.

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Fun Etymology Tuesday – Whiskey

Time for some Tuesday fun!

Today’s word is “whiskey”! Coming to English around 1715, this name of an alcoholic beverage made from either malt (in Scotland and Ireland) or corn or rye (US), comes from the Gaelic word “uisge beatha”, literally meaning the water of life! The Gaelic word comes from Old Irish “uisce”, meaning “water”, from a compounded form of the PIE root *ud-skio-, a suffixed Form of the root *wed, meaning water or wet, and “bethu”, meaning life, from a suffixed form of the PIE root *gwei-, meaning to live.

The Gaelic is probably also a loan, this time from Medieval Latin’s “aqua vitae”, a name applied to intoxicating drinks since early 14th century.

There’s some spelling variation in the modern English word (in Scotch “whisky” and in Irish and American it’s “whiskey”), but that’s a 19th century innovation. Before that though, whiskey could be spelt in a good number of ways: in 1580, we find the spelling “iskie bae” and as late as 1706, we find the rather interesting variant: “usquebea”! How about that for spelling variation?

See you next week!

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WhanThatAprilleDay19!

Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote
And bathed every veyne in swich licour
Of which vertu engendred is the flour…

(The opening lines of The Canterbury Tales)

Welcome to April, dear readers!

Today, on this first day of April, we here at the HLC celebrate #WhanThatAprilleDay19, a day intended to celebrate all languages that has come before us or, as the creator of this lovely day says: “Ower mission ys to remynde folk of the beautye and grete lovelinesse of studyinge the wordes of the past.”

In honour of this mission, we have something special for you today: we have written a little something on one of our own favourite historical texts that may, for some reason, have been placed a bit in the shadows of history – so no Canterbury Tales for you today (though Sabina will tell you a bit about another Chaucerian work). Check out what makes us smile!

Aelfric’s Colloquoy of the Occupations
Lisa

An Old English text which always makes me smile is Aelfric’s Colloquoy of the Occupations. This text is written as a conversation (or, colloquoy) between a teacher and his pupils, where the pupils take on the roles of workers and craftsmen of different professions, such as hunter, fisher, baker, tanner, etc., and answer questions from the teacher. It was written as a teaching aid for the pupils to learn Latin, but another, unknown, teacher kindly provided an Old English gloss for it (with Old English word order). Thanks to that teacher, this text is now often used to teach students Old English – how neat is that!

What makes me smile about this text is partly the actual content of it: it’s fun to read about these different Anglo-Saxon professions, what materials people used, what purpose they had, and all of that. I also love the idea of language teaching being so similar back in the Anglo-Saxon times: Aelfric needed an aid to make Latin teaching more fun, so he created a little dialogue/role play exercise!

I’ve attached an extract below, with an approximate translation, hoping that this will make you smile as well, from the conversation with the fisher:

[Teacher:] Forhwi ne fixast þu on sæ?
Why do you not fish at sea?

[Pupil:] Hwilum ic do, ac seldon, forþam micel rewyt me ys to sæ.
Sometimes I do, but rarely, because it’s very far from me to the sea.

[Teacher:] Hwæt fehst þu on sæ?
What do you catch at sea?

[Pupil:] Hærincgas ond leaxas, mereswyn ond stirian, ostran ond crabban, muslan, winewinclan, sæcoccas, fagc ond floc ond lopystran ond fela swylces.  
Herring and salmon, dolphins and sturgeon, oysters and crabs, mussels, winkles, cockles, plaice, soles and lobsters, and the like.

[Teacher:] Wilt þu fon sumne hwæl?  
Do you want to catch a whale?

[Pupil:] Nic.  
No.

[Teacher:] Forhwi?  
Why?

[Pupil:] Forþam plyhtlic þingc hit ys gefon hwæl. Gebeorhlicre ys me faran to ea mid scype mynum, þænne faran mid manegum scypum on huntunge hranes.
Because catching whale is a dangerous thing. It is safer for me to go to the river with my spear, than to go whale hunting with many ships.

[Teacher:] Forhwi swa?  
Why so?

[Pupil:] Forþam leofre ys me gefon fisc þæne ic mæg ofslean, þonne fisc , þe na þæt an me ac eac swylce mine geferan mid anum slege he mæg besencean oþþe gecwylman.
Because it is better for me to catch fish that I can kill, than this fish [the whale], as it could drown and kill with one blow, not only me but my companions as well.

[Teacher:] Ond þeah mænige gefoþ hwælas, ond ætberstaþ frecnysse, ond micelne sceat þanon begytaþ.
But there are many who catch whales, and escape danger, and make great gain by it.

[Pupil:] Soþ þu segst, ac ic ne geþristge for modes mines nytenyssæ.
You speak the truth, but I don’t dare because of my mind’s ignorance.

Seven Books of History Against the Pagans (Ohthere)
Rebekah

In the extant corpus of Old English (that means the works we still have—I just wanted to sound fancy for a second), there’s a curious little excerpt that recounts the voyage of a man named Ohthere. It dates to Alfred the Great’s Wessex and appears in a text called Seven Books of History Against the Pagans (how’s that for a title?). The Old English version of the text is something of a world history.

In the excerpt about Ohthere, the Norwegian tells King Alfred about his journeys through Scandinavia. Some of it reads like a dry, medieval travelogue—a lot of sailing north for three days then east for two and that sort of thing. But he also talks about the Sami and Denmark and the geography of Norway and all sorts of things that are fascinating even on Wikipedia; go back to the quirky phrasing of a thousand-year-old document, and now you’ve really got some fun going on. In the part most beloved by my first Old English class, Ohthere talks about walrus teeth, and he describes himself as having “600 unsold tame reindeer” (including several decoys). Ultimately, it was one of our favorite reads that semester (we often joked about the reindeer). There are some interesting accounts hidden away in the old manuscripts of the world!

Legend of Good Women
Sabina

Hey everyone and happy #WhanThatAprilleDay19! As you know by now, I work mostly with Middle English, which is of course the language in which “the father of English poetry” wrote in (for those who are unfamiliar with this honorary title, I’m talking about Geoffrey Chaucer).

In honour of that, I will tell you something about a Chaucerian text but not the one you are most likely to have heard about (that is, the Canterbury Tales). Instead, I will tell you a bit about one of my own favourite pieces of Chaucerian poetry: The Legend of Good Women.

The Legend is sometimes considered to be inferior to many of Chaucer’s other works, primarily perhaps because it rarely transcends the conventions of its time (which Chaucer is otherwise rather famous for doing). In fact, some even believe that Chaucer himself got bored with the task and left the tale unfinished as a result (which may or may not be true). Regardless, though, the Legend may potentially be the first significant work in English written in the iambic pentameter, so no matter what one thinks about the story, one can’t really exclude it from historical consideration.

Storywise, it is written in the form of a dream-vision, a literary device that was very common during the Middle Ages, and starts with a prologue in which, presumably, Chaucer himself falls asleep and finds himself in the company of the God and Goddess of Love. The goddess of Love, Alceste, soon berates him for his depiction of women in stories like Troilus and Criseyde. For those of you who are unfamiliar with that story, the point is that Criseyde is depicted as very inconstant in her love. Because of this, Alceste commands Chaucer to tell a tale of virtuous, good women and their deeds (supposedly, this demand was actually a poetic description of an actual request made by Anne of Bohemia, who became the Queen of England).

And so he does. The Legend tells the story of ten virtuous women and their unwavering loyalty and love to men that, ultimately, betray them. My personal favourite is the story of Dido, the queen of Libye and the founder of Carthage. Chaucer’s story is clearly based on Virgil’s Aenid and Ovid’s Heroides, telling the story of how Aeneas (or Eneas as Chaucer names him) comes to Carthage and how Dido falls in love with him. She soon takes him as a husband, but Eneas has no intention of staying. Instead, he sneaks away late at night, sailing to Italy as was always his plan. Dido, in a fit of despair, orders a sacrificial fire and, in the right moment, throws herself into the flames, driving the point of Eneas’ abandoned sword into her heart.

Most of the stories tend to work out like this, so perhaps Chaucer should have rethought the title of the story, changing it to, the more truthful, “Legend of false men”. Regardless, it is worth a read, if only to get the opportunity to read a typical dream-vision poem of the Middle Ages. And, if you’re like me, you’ll enjoy the stories too!

Epilogue

There you are, three of our favourite stories! Let us know what some of your favourite stories are in the comments or on Facebook or Twitter and don’t forget to read, recite, sing or listen to some historical stories today – enjoy the language, the style, the stories themselves… No matter, just enjoy!

Happy #WhanThatAprilleDay19!

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Do you do ‘do’, or don’t you?

I’m sure you haven’t missed that Sabina recently started a series about the early Germanic languages on this blog? The series will continue in a couple of weeks (you can read the latest post here), but as a short recap: when we talk about the modern Germanic languages, these include English (and Scots), Dutch (and Flemish), German, Icelandic, Faroese, and the mainland Scandinavian languages (Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish). These languages, of course, also have a plethora of dialectal variation under their belts1. Today, I’m gonna tell you about one particular grammatical feature that we find in only a couple of Germanic languages. You see, when it comes to the grammar of the modern Germanic languages, they’re all relatively similar, but one quirky trait sets the ones spoken on the British Isles apart from the rest: do-support.

Before we begin, I want to clarify my terminology: Do-support is a feature of syntax, which means that it’s to do with word order and agreement. The syntax concerns itself with what is grammatical in a descriptive way, not what we prefer in a prescriptive way2. So, when I say something is (un-)grammatical in this post, I mean that it is (dis-)allowed in the syntax.

So what is do-support?

Take a simple sentence like ‘I like cheese’. If a speaker of a non-English (or Scots) Germanic language were to turn that sentence into a question, it would look something like ‘Like you cheese?’, and in most Germanic varieties a (clearly deranged) person who is not fond of cheese would answer this with ‘No, I like not cheese’. In their frustration, the person who asked may shout ‘Eat not cheese then!’ at the deranged person.

But, those sentences look weird in English, both the question and the negative sentence. The weirdness does not only arise from the meaning of these sentence (who doesn’t like cheese?), but they’re, in fact, ungrammatical!

English, and most Scots dialects, require do-support in such sentences:

  • Do you like cheese?
  • No, I do not (or, don’t) like cheese.
  • ‘Don’t eat cheese then!’

The above examples of do-support, interrogative (the question), negative declarative (the negated sentence), and negative imperative (the command) are unique to English and Scots, but there are other environments where do is used, and where we also may find it in other Germanic languages, such as:

  • Tag-questions: ‘You like cheese, don’t you/do you?’
  • Ellipsis: ‘I ate cheese yesterday, and Theo did (so) today’
  • Emphasis: ‘I do like cheese!’
  • Main verb use: ‘I did/am doing a school project on do-support

In all the examples above except for the emphasis and main verb usage, do is essentially meaningless; it doesn’t add any meaningful (semantic) information to the sentence. Therefore, we usually call it a “dummy” auxiliary, or simply dummy do.
(Auxiliary is the name for those little verbs, like do, is, and have, which come before other verbs in a sentence, such as in ‘she is eating cheese’ and ‘I have eaten cheese’)

English and Scots didn’t always have do-support, and sentences like ‘I like not cheese’ used to be completely grammatical. We start to see do-support appearing in English around the 15th century, and in the 16th century for Scots. As is the case with language change, do-support didn’t become the mandatory construction overnight; in both languages we see a period where sentences with and without do-support are used variably which lasts for centuries before do-support eventually wins out (in the 18th-19th century).

Interestingly, in this period of change we also see do-support in non-negated sentences which aren’t intended to be emphatic, looking like: ‘I do like cheese’. These constructions never fully catch on though, and the rise and fall of this affirmative declarative do has been called a “failed change”.

It’s ok, affirmative declarative do, you’ve still contributed greatly to do-support research!

Why did we start using do-support, though?

Well, we aren’t exactly sure yet, but there are theories. Many scholars believe that this is a so-called language-internal development, meaning that this feature developed in English without influence from another language. This is based on that do used to be a causative verb in English (like cause, and make in ‘I made Theo eat cheese’), which became used so frequently that it started to lose its causative meaning and finally became a dummy auxiliary. This process, where a word gradually loses its meaning and gains a purely grammatical function, is called grammaticalisation.

There have also been suggestions that it was contact with Welsh that introduced do-support into English, since Welsh had a similar structure. This account is often met with scepticism, one reason being that we see very little influence from any celtic language, Welsh included, on English and Scots grammar in general. However, new evidence is regularly brought forward to argue this account, and the origin of do-support is by no means a closed chapter in historical linguistics research.

What we do know is that do-support came about in the same time period when English started to use auxiliaries more overall – you may have noticed that, in English, we’re more likely to say ‘I am running to the shop’ than ‘I run to the shop’, the latter being more common for other Germanic languages. So, we can at least fairly safely say that the rise of do-support was part of a greater change of an increased use of auxiliaries overall.

The humble dummy do has baffled historical linguists for generations, and this particular HLC writer has been trying to understand do-support in English and Scots for the past few years, and will most likely continue to do so for a good while longer. Wish me luck!

Footnotes

1I’ve written about the complex matter of language vs. dialect before, here.

2In our very first post on this blog, Riccardo wrote about descriptivism and prescriptivism. Read it here for a recap!

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Fun Etymology Tuesday – Spirits

And we’re back, with yet another Fun Etymology! Today’s word is “spirits” (in the alcoholic sense of the word).

The word itself comes from Anglo-French spirit, Old French espirit, from Latin spiritus, meaning a breathing (both respiration and of the wind, breath and breath of god. From this Latin root, we also get spirit (meaning the soul or a ghost), of course, which is related with a bunch of other sayings (like being in “high spirit”). The Latin root is related to Latin spirare, meaning “to breathe”, perhaps from PIE *(s)peis-, meaning “to blow” (which, btw, is the source of Old Church Slavonic pisto, meaning to play on the flute).

So, how did we get from breathing to liquor? Well, from the late 14th century, this word started to be used in alchemy, meaning a “volatile substance” or “distillate”, and from c. 1500 as “substance capable of uniting the fixer and the volatile elements of the philosopher’s stone”. Sound kinda Harry Potter-y right? Anyway, this led to spirits meaning a “volatile substance”, a meaning that became semantically narrowed to “strong alcoholic liquor” by the 1670s.

A pretty long trip from it’s “original” meaning and it’s modern, wouldn’t you say?

Welcome back next week!

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Early Germanic Dialects – Let’s get going!

Willkommen zurück, everyone! (I have no idea if you would actually say that in German but we’ll stick to it!)

You might remember that we, three weeks ago, kicked off a new little series by introducing you a little bit to Proto-Germanic? Well, this series is called Early Germanic Dialects (coincidentally, this is also the name of a course on this particular topic that we took during our studies), and in it, we will be introducing you a little bit to – you guessed it – the early Germanic dialects!

Before we study those, though, we need to talk to you a bit about the relationship of these dialects. We’re sure you remember that we’ve talked quite a lot about the concept of ‘families’ of languages (Germanic, Italic, Finno-Ugric, etc.). Today, we’ll look closer at the Germanic language family!

So, of course you know by now that the Germanic languages are languages that comes from Proto-Germanic (which, in turn, hails from Proto-Indo-European). What you may not know (or at least we haven’t outright told you) is that the Germanic language family is also divided into different branches, three in total. These are: West Germanic, North Germanic and East Germanic.

East Germanic, unfortunately, had only one known descendent and that language has gone extinct: Gothic. We know that Gothic once existed and we have a pretty good idea about what it looked like because of a few surviving texts. One of the most recognised of these is the so-called Codex Argenteus, a beautiful 6th century manuscript which contains a 4th century gothic translation of the Bible. Known most commonly as the Silver Bible or the Silver Book, the manuscript is an impressive sight: its thin vellum pages are stained a regal purple, the script and illuminations are made in silver and gold with an ornate jewelled binding. Sorry, I got a bit carried away there, but truly, it’s quite remarkable. If you ever find yourself in Stockholm, Sweden, make a bit of a detour and see it IRL at the University of Uppsala, its current home.

Anyway, back to linguistics. So, Gothic is the only descendent of East Germanic, meaning, of course, that there are currently no living descendents of East Germanic. That is not the case for the other two branches though. Let’s look at North Germanic first.

The North Germanic branch of the tree are the languages that come from Old Norse, meaning, of course, the Viking languages!

Kidding (kind of). The languages that comes from Old Norse are Icelandic, Faroese, Norwegian, Danish and Swedish. These languages share a couple of features which are not found in most of the East and West Germanic languages, such as u-umlaut (though you may see u-umlaut in other Germanic languages, such as Old English, too, but it is commonly more limited than the u-umlaut found in Old Norse and not to be confused with the ‘umlauted’ vowel Ü in German).
You’ve heard us talk about umlaut before, quite a bit actually, but we’ve primarily focused on i-umlaut. U-umlaut works in a very similar fashion: when a /u/ or a /w/ followed in the next syllable, stressed vowels were rounded so instead of milk, as in English, you get mjòlk (Icelandic), mjölk (Swedish), for example. Of course, there are important differences within these languages too, but we’ll get there in due time.

Now, the West Germanic branch is a bit bigger than East and North. This branch consists of all languages that comes from Anglo-Frisian, that is Old English and Old Frisian, and the languages that comes from Proto-German (not to be confused with Proto-Germanic), that is Old High German, which eventually produced German and Yiddish, as well as all languages that comes from Old Low German, also known as Old Saxon and Old Dutch, which eventually became Low German, Dutch and Afrikaans.

Let’s put that in a tree for you:

This makes it a bit easier to visualize, of course, but this way of representing things have shown to be somewhat problematic. As you may notice, for example, it gives you no indication of timeline, and of course, all of the language changes that makes West Germanic different from North or East Germanic didn’t happen at the same time. Consider the tree, if you will, an extremely simplified visualization of a very complex relationship.  

This post has aimed to give you some insight into the relationship of the Germanic languages, but we will end on another note of caution: this relationship is far from uncontroversial. For example, there are some features shared by the Anglo-Frisian languages and the North Germanic languages but not by the Proto-German languages, and there are some features shared by Old High German and Gothic that set them apart from the other languages – some have even gone so far as to claim that English is a North Germanic language, not a West Germanic one.  This, of course, indicates a closer relationship than what is readily evident by the traditional tree that you see here.

So, keep this with you, always: don’t accept the tree as the unequivocal truth, because really, it’s not.  

via GIPHY

References

Our primary reference for this post is:

Robinson, Orrin W. 1992. Old English and its closest relatives. London: Routledge.

If you would like to know more about the Silver Bible, check it out at the University of Uppsala

And if you would like to know more about the claim that English is actually a North Germanic language, check out Emonds and Faarlund’s book English: The language of the Vikings, published in 2014. Fair warning though: the hypothesis has been questioned by many voices in the historical linguistic community and we suggest you also check out a couple of reviews on the book to get an understanding of both schools of thought. We will not be discussing our personal thoughts on this topic here, but if you want to know more and discuss it with us, just send us an email or ask us a question on Facebook or Twitter.