Tag: Fun Etymology

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!

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!

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!

FunEty-time!

Today’s word is “liquor”. Coming to English during the Middle English period from Old French licor, from Latin liquorem (in nominative form becoming liquor), which originally came from the word liquere, this little word is an excellent example of a semantic language change known as “semantic narrowing”.
You see, the Latin form liquorem could indicate a liquid, liquor, wine or even the sea! The older Latin form liquere simply meant “be fluid, liquid” so it didn’t necessarily indicate something containing alcohol. The narrowed sense caught on quickly though, and roughly 100 years (c1300) after the word itself was first recorded, the narrowed meaning of some fermented or distilled drink shows up. By the 18th century, the broader sense that the word originally had appears to have become obsolete and we’re left with a much more limited meaning. Such language changes are quite common in languages as they evolve, and we’ll definitely see more of them in coming FunEties, but in the meantime, enjoy the fact that “As long as liquor is in him” was a Middle English expression, “as long as he is alive”.

Welcome back next week!

Aaaand it’s Tuesday again! I’ll admit, I enjoy doing your FunEty every week, it is such an interesting way to learn more stuff! I hope that you agree!

Let’s talk “alcohol”! This word came to English during the early 15th century as “alcofol”, meaning any very fine powder! This word comes from Latin alcohol, meaning the powdered ore of antimony, ‫but‬ ultimately derived from Arabic ‫اَلْكُحْل‬‎ “al-kuhl” which was the metallic powder used to darken the eyelids! “Al-“ is the definite article “the” in Arabic and “kuhl” comes from the Arabic word “kahala”, meaning to stain or paint.

By the late 17th century, alcohol was used in English to mean the pure spirit of anything, including liquids, but we have to wait all the way until 1753 before it is first recorded to mean the intoxicating ingredient in strong liquor, which was then extended to meaning the intoxicating element in fermented liquors!

Goodness, that’s quite a trip! Join us next time when we look a bit closer at the word liquor, which doesn’t always (or at least didn’t always) refer to alcoholic drinks. Welcome back!

It’s Tuesday! Again! Where does the time go? You may or may not have noticed that the HLC website was down earlier today but don’t fret! It’s up and running again, working as smoothly as ever, though we went a bit berserk when we realised that it was down.

Speaking of berserk, it’s our word of the day!

This word, though you might think it an early arrival to the English language (I mean, Vikings were around quite early on) actually wasn’t introduced in English until the mid-19th century, by the legendary Scottish poet Sir Walter Scott who used the word “berserkar”, reportedly believing that it came from Old Norse “berr”, meaning bare or naked, and “serkr”, meaning shirt.

Scott thus seems to have believed that it meant something like “warrior who fights without armour” though, while that may or may not be true, the word is more likely to hail from Old Norse “berserkr”, meaning a raging warrior of superhuman strength.

This Old Norse word is ultimately a compounded form of Proto-Germanic *ber-, meaning bear, and “serkr”, thus literally meaning “a warrior clothed in bear skin” (and perhaps insinuating the power of a bear, though that’s conjecture on our part).

Welcome back next week!

Hey, so remember last Tuesday when we said that we’re gonna talk about something that, if you’re unlucky, comes to you at night today?

Well, so we are: today’s word is… nightmare!

A compounded word from Old English ‘niht’, meaning as we learned last week “night”, and mære, meaning “incubus”. It is cognate with Middle Dutch nachtmare, German Nachtmahr.

In fact, from the late 13th century to the mid 16th, the word nightmare did refer to an incubus, or an evil female spirit who afflicts sleepers with a feeling of suffocation. Around mid-16th century, the meaning shifted from incubus to the suffocating feeling that it causes but the meaning of “bad dream” is first recorded as late as in 1829 and the meaning of “very bad experience” is first recorded in 1831!

Welcome back to yet another Fun Etymology Tuesday (or as I’ve simple started calling them: FunEtys)!

Today, we go into the depths of darkness… today’s word is night!

From Old English niht, pronounced [nixt] ([x] is the sound found in Scottish “loch”), West Saxon neaht, Anglian næht, neht. This word means simply “night” or “darkness” from Proto-Germanic *nahts, from PIE *nekwt-, also meaning “night”. The PIE root is also source of Greek nuks “a night”, Latin nox, Old Irish nochd, Sanskrit naktam “at night, Lithuanian naktis “night,” Old Church Slavonic nosti, Russian noch’, Welsh henoid “tonight”).

In English, the modern vowel indicates that the word came from the oblique cases of Old English and the -gh- spelling is actually due to a Middle English scribal habit: before -t, hard H, that is [x] here, often came to be represented by scribes as gh (though the no-longer-used letter yogh (ȝ) could also be used)!

That’s all for our little “time-related” theme! Next week, join us for something that, if you’re unlucky, comes to you at night…..

See you then!

Ladies and gents! We did promise to keep it up and up we shall keep it!

Today is Tuesday and it’s time for another Fun Etymology! Today’s word is “evening”!

From Old English æfnung, meaning “the coming of evening, sunset, time around sunset” from æfnian “become evening, grow toward evening” from æfen “evening”. Originally, evening was a synonym of the noun “even”, also from æfen, which had lost its final -n somewhere around the 13th century and show up around the year 1200 as, you guessed it, “eve”! Now, “eve” referred specifically the time between sunset and darkness but has, of course, become superseded by evening nowadays while “Eve” has undergone a semantic narrowing, meaning that it now refers only to very specific evenings (Christmas Eve, New Year’s Eve, etc.).

You might notice something lacking in our etymology! If you did, we’re sorry! We would love to go further back than Old English but, as a matter of fact, we can’t! We know that this word comes from a Common Germanic base as we find cognates in most Germanic languages (Swedish “afton”, German “Abend”, Dutch “avond”, etc.) but the Proto-Germanic word itself remains elusive (though several hypothesis have been studied throughout the years).

As you know by now, that sometimes happens in historical research: things become lost to us. So, the next time you consider throwing out that book on current language use in your native language (or even just a really bad fictional tale – hey, we’ll take what we can get!), just think of the poor linguist 500 years or more from now, pulling their hair while trying to figure out that little odd thing that the English/German/Faroese/Indian/etc. language did in the 21st century and maybe think again. (Though, of course, this might never be a problem simply because languages are significantly more documented nowadays). But still!

Welcome back next week when we take a look at the darkest of times…… We’re referring to the word “night” of course! See you then!

Philosophical question: Is the Fun Etymology on time if it’s still technically Tuesday for one-fourth of the HLC? Or is it not?

Speaking of time, though, today’s word is ‘noon’.

It’s an iconic, evocative word. You don’t have to be American to recognize the tension of a duel at high noon: the streets tensely still, a saloon door creaking, and a tumbleweed rolling by as the sun blazes down from directly over the worn Stetsons of two coiled gunfighters. And you don’t have to be a hobbit to appreciate a quiet little midday nuncheon.

In English, short, everyday words like this tend to be part of the language’s core Germanic heritage, but in a surprising twist, this one isn’t. ‘Noon’ ultimately comes from the Latin word ‘nonus’ meaning…’ninth’. ¿Dice qué?

The term ‘non’ was borrowed back in Old English (hence its native-seeming skin) from the Latin phrase ‘nona hora’, meaning the ninth hour of daylight. In both Latin and Old English, the term referred to the hour of 3:00 PM, an important canonical prayer hour (called nones).

Beginning around the 12th century, the sense started to shift towards its current meaning of 12:00 PM. There are several hypotheses for why the meaning changed. It could have been the unreliability of timekeeping in the medieval period, or it could have been due to the dramatic seasonal differences in daylight hours in Northern Europe. It may even have been driven by food in some way: religious fasts traditionally ended at nones, so the time may have inched earlier to end the fasting earlier, or it may have come out of a secular societal shift in the timing of the midday meal. Whatever the reason, it became the ‘noon’ we know by the 14th century.

Whoever said monosyllabic words were boring?