Another Tuesday comes our way, and so does your regular FunEty!
Today’s word is “lukewarm”, meaning something that is neither hot or cold, but a bit tepid.
This little compound (of the adjective “luke”, meaning tepid, and the adjective “warm”, meaning… well, warm.), came to English around the late 14th century but that is about as much as the etymology will tell us. It’s origin is unknown, but two prominent hypotheses have been put forth:
1. It’s a borrowing from Middle Dutch or Old Frisian “leuk”, meaning tepid or weak
or
2. It’s an unexplained, unattested variant of the Old English word “hleowe”, an adverb meaning warm.
Both “leuk” and ”hleowe” find their origin in Proto-Germanic *khlewaz from PIE *kele-, meaning warm (it’s a bit hard to tell where the unknown form comes from).
Now, we’re a bit wary about explanations that include the word “unexplained”, yet, the OED tells us that it appears etymologically impossible to connect the first element of this compound with modern Dutch “leuk”, though it doesn’t expand very much on that so we’re not entirely sure on why that is so, and suggests instead a transformation from a (unattested) Old English verb *hlíewcian.
The OED entry doesn’t leave us any less wary of unexplained developments, though it should be kept in mind that it is certainly possible as only a limited number of Old English texts survive today and most of them are written in West Saxon.
Tell us what you think – borrowed or native (or perhaps a combination)?
Tuesday! Time for some etymology, don’t you think? Well, we do!
Today’s word is pamphlet!
This word for a small, unbound treatise comes to English from Anglo-Latin panfletus, a popular short form of Pamphilus, seu de Amore, which means “Pamphilus, or about Love”. Now, why would it be called that?! Well, you see, panfletus (or pamphilus) originally referred to one specific work: a Latin love poem called, you guessed it, “Pamphilus, seu de Amore”!
Very popular during the Middle Ages, the work was widely copied and circulated on its own. The name eventually underwent a semantic broadening, coming to refer to any brief work issued by itself without covers, which typically deals with current interests, during the 16th century (kind of like how “Hoover” came to refer to many different kinds of vacuum cleaners, not just the vacuum cleaners by the brand Hoover).
The word pamphilus is actually also about love: from Greek pamphilos, meaning “loved by all”, from pan-, “all”, and philos, “loving, dear”.
So go out there and love all those little pamphlets! It is all there in the name!
It’s the first weekend of a new month! You know what that means, right?
Allow us to introduce you to Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin!
Born on the 16th of November, 1895, Bakhtin was a Russian philosopher, literary critic and semiotician, who also worked on literary theory, ethics and philosophy of language.
There can be no doubt that Bakhtin had a significant influence in a number of different fields of study: for us, though, the most important work Bakhtin did might be the work known as The Dialogic Imagination, a collection of four essays about language first published as a whole in 1975. In this work, some terms that are now in common use in linguistics (and other fields) were introduced. Among others, we find important terms such as heretoglossia, dialogism, and chronotope.
You might recognise some (or all) of these as important concepts in today’s study of language and they all originated in this one person – quite a feat, wouldn’t you say?
Bakhtin also proposed that all languages represent a distinct point of view on the world. As such, there are no “neutral” words because language is always “shot through with intentions and accents” and even the most unremarkable statement therefore possesses a taste or conveys an attitude.
So there, your topic for Monday’s coffee-break chat is there for the taking: is there something like a neutral statement?
Next month, we’ll give you some small insight into another one of those influential, and inspiring, linguists throughout time! Join us then.
It’s certainly late again! Today, though, it’s kinda appropriate, because today’s word is curfew!
While today, this word means a certain time when movement is restricted somehow – usually the time a kid has to be home from the really fun thing that they definitely wanted to stay longer at (but occasionally something more serious like curfew during wars, threats to society, or serious emergencies) – this word used to refer to something quite important: the time when hearths should be banked and lights extinguished to prevent unattended fires during the night! As you can probably imagine, a fire could be catastrophic in a village or a town during the Middle Ages (which it would be today too, of course, but we tend to not use fire as much in our daily lives) and banking the fires was likely a very important part of someone’s nightly routine.
This meaning is actually reflected in the word’s etymology: from Anglo-French coeverfu from Old French cuevrefeu, meaning literally “cover fire”! When it came to English, during the early 14th century, it was curfeu and referred to a specific signal, like a ringing bell, at a fixed hour, a decent reminder to cover the fire up and not burn the entire neighbourhood down. A somewhat important thing to do, wouldn’t you say?
That’s it for today! We’ll be back with more etymological fun next week! See you then!
A bit earlier today than last week! Our apologies for that – our schedule has been crazy lately!
Speaking of crazy, today’s word is “lunatic”!
When it came to English, during the late 13th century, it meant something like affected with periodic insanity which was dependent on the phases of the moon while, today, it’s mostly used, by laymen obviously, to refer to someone who is mentally ill, regardless of the phases of the moon of course.
It came to English either from Old French “lunatique”, meaning insane, or possibly from Late Latin “lunaticus”, meaning moonstruck, which of course comes from Latin “luna”, meaning moon (which explains the phases of the moon idea). We also get a derivative noun, that is, “a lunatic”, referring to a crazy person. Originally, though, this word actually also referred to someone who had lucid intervals in their madness, while later it became a legal term (that’s right, we said legal term) for a person of an unsound mind.
That’s it for today! Next week, we’ll have more FunEty for you, of course, and hope you’ll join us then to learn more about the (sometimes) rather crazy origins of some English words! See you then!
Wouldn’t it just be tragic if we forgot FunEty?! Well, we didn’t (we’re just running very late) but today’s word is tragedy!
During the late 14th century, this word came to English from French “tragedie”, from Latin “tragedia”, meaning simply a tragedy (in the theatre sense), from Greek “tragodia”, meaning a dramatic poem or play in formal language with an unhappy ending.
Literally, though, this Greek word actually means “goat song” (which, admittedly, sounds rather tragic if you have to listen to it, especially late at night)! From the word “tragos”, meaning goat, and “oide”, meaning song, and from which modern English “ode” hails, we now get “tragedy” meaning any unhappy event or disaster, a meaning that developed during the 15th century.
That’s it for today’s FunEty! More fun to come next week!
It’s Tuesday! And here we are with your weekly dose of FunEty!
Today’s word is “war” (have you noticed our little trend with violent words lately?)!
From Old English “wyrre” or “werre”, meaning a large-scale military conflict, a word that was, as many English words are, borrowed from Old North French “werre”, Old French “guerre” meaning difficulty, dispute, hostility, fight, combat or war.
A pretty standard etymology, right? English borrowing from French? Want the twist?
Well, here it is!
While the Old English word was (supposedly anyway) borrowed from Old North French, French actually borrowed the word from Frankish (also known as Old Franconian) *werra, from Proto-Germanic *werz-a-, which, surviving cognates suggests, originally meant something like “to bring confusion to”.
Isn’t that an odd twist of things? French borrowing from Germanic languages for a change! But French isn’t the only Italic language to borrow a word from Germanic to mean war, in fact Spanish, Portuguese and Italian also did, which suggests that there was something about the Latin word that made them try to avoid it – after all, borrowing is typically made because of necessity, not sheer whimsicality.
Anyway, the Latin word for war was “bellum”, but see, the word “bello-“ meant beautiful. It had therefore been suggested that the ancient speakers of these languages looked to Germanic for a.. suitable word to indicate this violent undertaking to avoid making it sound like something pretty (although, I suppose, war is often “made” to seem beautiful in some ways in stories and such so perhaps it wouldn’t be so unsuitable after all).
That’s it for today’s FunEty – and wasn’t it fun? French borrowing from Germanic for once!
We’ll be back with more FunEty next week! See you then!
Insights from the ISLE Summer School, 24-28 June 2019
This week, I had the pleasure of attending the International Society for the Linguistics of English (ISLE) Summer School. The summer school is bi-annual, and explores different themes each time – this year, the theme was using the past to explain the present, with the description: “A special focus will be on evidence for past states of English and Scots, with reference to the functioning of writing systems in manuscript and printed contexts.”
With a theme like that, there’s no wonder that this summer school caught the interest of two HLC:ers: Sabina and myself (Lisa)!
The summer school was organised at the University of Glasgow by the ISLE president, Professor Jeremy Smith. On the first day, he held a workshop which led us to think more about how the past can help us explain the present, and he emphasised the importance of considering that the old languages and writing systems we study were produced by people who were as much conditioned by social factors as we are today. In fact, the name of this year’s theme is a scrambled version of a pioneering publication by famous sociolinguist William Labov, On the use of the present to explain the past, which explored the idea that humans are not so different in history and today, and thus we can use our knowledge of today’s languages, and the people who speak them, to make inferences about history. Likewise, through looking at material culture (for example scribal practices, and the look and material of manuscripts), and through exploring the social context in which they operate, we can learn more about what drives language change.
The exploration of manuscripts continued into the workshops in the morning of the second day. Professor Wendy Scase from the University of Birmingham held a workshop about writing systems, and made us aware of the social factors which may condition how we write. The traditional view of spelling is that it follows pronunciation, but it’s not usually that straightforward, and there are often social cues in what spelling systems we adhere to.
One simple example is, of course, the differences between British and American English; the use of colour or color says nothing about pronunciation, but reading one or the other immediately tells you something about the writer. Consider also things like “heavy metal umlaut”, as found in the band names Mötley Crüe and Motörhead; these umlauted letters are pronounced a certain way in the languages who use them in their writing systems, such as Swedish and German, but these bands use them as a form of identity marker. If these social identity markers are used in the present day, we should be aware that this may also be the case in the past. As an example of this, a mediaeval writer may have chosen to use the italic script to advertise to the reader that they are a humanist.
Italic script. The image is taken from this article, where you can also read more about the history of Italic script.
As the second day progressed, we received introductions on how to use historical corpora by Dr Joanna Kopaczyk (University of Glasgow) and Dr Kristin Bech (University of Oslo). While these workshops were more focused on presenting resources for doing research in historical linguistics, the theme of the week still ran like a red thread through them: for example, we were reminded that when looking at historical written text, the scribal practice should not only be taken to be dialectal, but can also be socially conditioned.
On the third day of the summer school, we went on a field trip to Ruthwell Cross, in Dumfriesshire. The runes inscripted on the cross make the earliest evidence we have of Anglo-Saxon in Britain, and it was interesting to learn about some of the unique features of the runic system which are only found on this monument, which again led us to think about what the purpose was behind using these particular symbols.
The Ruthwell Cross, photo by Lisa Gotthard
In the final two days of the summer school, all participants presented their PhD research, and we reflected on the mechanisms behind language change in a discussion led by Jeremy Smith. In this discussion, we looked at different examples of words or expressions which use and meaning had changed in the history of English, and whether social factors may have driven these changes. In the HLC’s weekly etymologies on facebook, we have sometimes demonstrated how social associations may trigger the meaning of a word to become more negative or positive – an example being the word ‘villain’, now a pejorative term, which developed from simply referring to someone living on a farm. This is only one type of language change that can be socially conditioned, and this week we’ve come to learn even more about how identity markers and other socially conditioned factors play a role in how we express ourselves, both in writing and speaking. This is why it’s so important for historical linguists to approach our textual sources with the same sociolinguistic awareness with which we would approach today’s spoken data.
Personally, I found this week to be incredibly inspiring, and in our final discussions you could tell that we had all received plenty of input and inspiration for continuing our research with some more attention to material culture and social practice.
Gosh, you guys, the HLC seems to have lost track of the days! We’re sorry – here is your longed for FunEty!
Yesterday’s word was “demon”!
This word came to English around the beginning of the 13th century and refers to some kind of evil spirit, incubus or devil. Interestingly, the Latin word from which this word derives, “daemon”, means simply spirit and the Greek word from which that derives, “daimon” even means guiding spirit (or deity, divine power, lesser god or tutelary deity, sometimes also the souls of the dead)!
From PIE *dai-mon, meaning divider or provider of fortunes or destinies, from the root *da- meaning to divide, the malignant sense we see in English is because the Greek word was used in Christian Greek translations and Vulgate for god of heathens, heathen idol and unclean spirit, while the usual Ancient Greek sense is attested in English from the 1560s and is sometimes written daemon or daimon to distinguish it from the evil feel of demon.
So there it is: one day late, but better late than never, your FunEty of this week! I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did!
A couple weeks ago, we talked about a process called reduplication, which is when languages double syllables or words to various effect. As with most morphological and phonological processes, there’s a flipside to this coin. (Languages can be a bit like tired, hangry toddlers: indecisive, inconsistent, contrary, and completely beyond being reasoned with.) Sometimes, instead of leaning in to the singsongedness of repeated syllables, languages decide that two syllables are just too similar, and one of them must be eradicated. We call this phenomenon haplology.
I may jest about languages arbitrarily adding or removing syllables, but haplology is actually an elegant remedy for words that may otherwise be cumbersome to pronounce. Consider a few homespun English adverbs: The most common way to form an adverb in English is to add -ly to the end of an adjective. In most cases, this is nothing to bat an eye at. ‘Warm’ becomes ‘warmly’, ‘happy’ becomes ‘happily’, ‘treacherous’ becomes ‘treacherously’. But what about words that already end in [l]? ‘Gentle’ and ‘humble’ become…’gentlely’ and ‘humblely’? Naw. Maybe back in Middle English, but for modern speakers, these adverbs have been streamlined to ‘gently’ and ‘humbly’. They’ve undergone haplology.
There are just some sounds that don’t roll gently off the tongue in quick succession. Another example from English is the pronunciation of ‘February’. Some dialects still carefully pronounce each written sound as in /ˈfɛb.ɹuˌɛɹi/, but that’s a lot of [ɹ]s all piled together. Some dialects have solved the crisis by dissimilation, producing something more akin to /ˈfɛb.juˌɛ(ə)ɹi/. Some UK dialects, though, have solved the problem with haplology instead, resulting in a pronunciation of /ˈfɛb.ɹi/.
A Basque example also shows the elimination of excessive Rs. The word for ‘cider’ comes from ‘sagar’ (apple) + ‘ardo’ (wine). Instead of the compound becoming ‘sagarrardo’, the syllables are simplified, and the result is ‘sagardo’.
Lest you begin to think haplology only happens to liquids like [l] and [ɹ], look at Latin ‘nutrix’ (nurse). It comes from ‘nutrio’ (suckle, predecessor of English ‘nourish’ and ‘nutrition’) + ‘-trix’ (a suffix that formed a female agent noun, like how Amelia Earhart was an aviatrix). The resulting ‘nutritrix’ lost one of its <tri>s—thus, ‘nutrix’.
It has always been a source of great amusement to me (and other linguists—we’re a whimsical lot) that the term ‘haplology’ itself has the potential to undergo haplology, thereby becoming ‘haplogy’. Although this has not actually occurred, haplology is out there, watching over our languages, making some tricky words just a little easier to pronounce.
