Quick One

Hello, and happy Tuesday. I apologize for giving yesterday a miss and being late today, but it’s been busy here in my academic cage.  A couple of months ago, back before I decided I have no spare time, I had started to try to find books or documents on the different stages of English, and as part of that, I had purchased two books, Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf and the Barnes and Noble-published Canterbury Tales, that contained both the original, written language, and a translation into modern English.  I had hoped to learn Old English while reading Beowulf, but, as per usual, I have over-estimated my abilities.  Luckily, the translation is wonderful and worth reading even if you’re not interested in Old English.  I can’t say the same of Barnes and Nobles’ house translator, but that version of the Canterbury Tales is well worth it if you’re interested in Middle English.

“Silly” is used extensively in the book to describe various characters, but with a different meaning than it has today.  In modern usage, it means something along the lines of trivial, harmlessly deficient or simpleness.  It has evolved from West Germanic and Old English seli, ultimately from OTeut. type *sligo- f. *sli-z luck, happiness.  In its earliest use, this was the meaning of silly (written seely at that time), and is the sense that was intended by Chaucer.  It also meant pious, holy, and harmless.  Over time, it came to mean helpless or deserving of pity, which was a primary meaning at the time when the spelling switched from seely to silly.  From there, it developed the sense of helpless, defenseless, weak, or feeble, and then, feeble of mind.  Interestingly, according to the OED, it is also a conventional poetic epithet of sheep.  The fact that sheep are involved in poetry enough to have a conventional epithet is surprising to me.

Don’t forget to send suggestions/requests in!

(W o/if)man

Today I thought I would look at the origins of the words commonly used for the adult male and female of our species: man and woman.  At times there has been objection from different camps to the use of “man” or the masculine for either gender when speaking generally, and while I agree with it in many ways, apologists for the predominance of the masculine could hearken back to the origins of the language to defend their practices, as “man” originally could refer to either humans in general, or in the sense that it is used today.

There were specific terms to refer to adult male and female human beings, those being wer(e), ‘man’ and wif, ‘woman’.  Wer has cognates in the other Germanic languages, but also in the Latin word for an adult male, vir (the root of virile).  According to the Oxford English Dictionary, both wer and wif had synonyms in wæpmann (weapon-man, the former particle being, apparently innuendo, and not condemnation of the masculine proclivity towards violence), and wifmann (wif+man, feminine), though by the end of the 13th century, both of the masculine-specific words were obsolete, leaving no word to distinguish the adult male, other than the second sense of “man”.

Wifmann, on the other hand, eventually became standardized as woman (after going through a number of –probably–regional variations including wifman, wummon, wymman, and wimmon) by the 16th century.  The original word for “woman,” after struggling through a couple of rough patches (having to take work–second billing, no less–as a particle in the words fishwife, alewife, and housewife, eventually found its way to the meaning it currently holds, as a married woman.  The OED describes the life of “wife” thusly:

A woman: formerly in general sense; in later use restricted to a woman of humble rank or ‘of low employment’ (J.), esp. one engaged in the sale of some commodity.  Woman joined to a man by marriage; a married woman. Correlative of husband n. 2. (The ordinary current sense.)

So, another example of the someone–in this instance–a word pulling it (her?)self up by her bootstraps’ a triumph of the English language marketplace.  Lingual prescriptionists would probably
have us still referring to women as “wifes”.

Interestingly enough, a similar process took place in Latin and some of its progeny.  Homo/homines, the Latin word referring either to humankind or an adult male(s) (as was mentioned earlier, vir was the male-specific word), came to refer specifically to adult men (Italian uomo, French homme, Spanish hombre, etc.).  The Latin for woman, mulier, came to be the word for wife in Italian, moglie, while in Spanish it has maintained its original meaning, muliebre = woman.  Another Latin word for “woman”, femina, was adopted into Old French, and eventually became femme, meaning both woman and wife.  In Italian this word became femmina, and is used for females in general.  The word for “woman” in Italian is donna (<domna, domina), which is a cognate of dominate, and was originally a title of respect, if not nobility (not entirely clear to me).  To complete the discursive discussion of Latin, the original Latin for “wife” was uxor, from which we get uxorious: “dotingly or submissively fond of a wife; devotedly attached to a wife” and uxorial: “of or pertaining to a wife or wives.”

So, I think that will be it for today, and it remains to be seen whether I will be adding entries over the weekend.  I will be trying out different titles for the blog for a while.  Let me know what you think.  And please send in suggestions for words to discuss; the first was very interesting.

Good weekend to all.

Day Two: The Peninaugural Post – Turmeric.

So, day two. This scheme is already breaking down (or I am making things very easy for myself) as I’ve started inventing words, e.g. peninaugural, both parts of which have interesting etymologies. “Pen(e)-” is from classical Latin paene, meaning almost, which was used to qualify nouns, adjectives, and adverbs. While in most of the examples in the OED, it is written as an individual component in a compound word (e.g. pene-perfection), the most well-known examples (at least that I’m able to come up with) prepend it: penultimate, “next-to-last”, and peninsula, or, “almost an island”. Inaugural is described (again by the OED) accordingly:

[f. L. inaugurt-, ppl. stem of inaugurre to take omens from the flight of birds, to consecrate or install after taking such omens or auguries, f. in- (IN-²) + augurre to take auguries]

Investigating augur further, it seems that it there are two potential derivations. One is that it comes from av-is, bird, + -gar, related to garrire, to talk, garrulous, talkative, and Sanskrit, gar to shout. The second is that it is derived from augere to increase, promote, which should be the source of our “augment.” I find the second to be much less satisfying, and given that an augur was a Roman official whose duty it was to give advice on public affairs and to predict future events from omens derived from the flight, singing, and feeding of birds, the interpretation of the entrails of sacrificial victims, celestial phenomena, etc, which sounds eerily similar to the running of certain large countries today, only less invisible.

As a farm boy, I feel it necessary to include a note about auger (which is also a later form of the Latin augur), which has an interesting story itself.  Given its similarity to Proto-Germanic (unattested) *auga, “eye,” I thought that it might have some connection (though I didn’t see how that was going to happen).  Actually, while it does have its origins in the Germanic languages and was present in Old English, it underwent metanalysis, a process which should become clear as we go through the etymology.  The original, Old English form was nafu-gár, the constituent parts of which are, as is in all likelihood obvious, nafu- nave (hub of a wheel), and -gár, (Hwæt! Wé Gárdena in géardagum…) meaning spear, piercer, or borer, so literally, nave-borer.  Now, metanalysis is the process by which the initial “n” became associated with the indefinite article rather than the word, a process that has occurred in more common words like apron (originally, a napron), and adder (a nadder).  Hence, we end up with auger.  And, yes, to answer the question on everyone’s mind, nafu/nave is related to navel.  Nave is cognate with Middle Dutch, nave, naef, naf (Modern Dutch naaf); Old Saxon naba, nava (German Nabe); Swedish nav; Danish nav; and, excitingly, with Sanskrit!: nabhi, nabha (nave or navel); and classical Latin, umbo, boss of a shield (umbilicus/umbilical); Old Prussian nabis, nave or navel; and Latvian naba, navel.

I have already had one request for the etymological explication of the “turmeric.” Turmeric is a product of the root of an East Indian plant, which is the chief ingredient in curry powder, is used as a condiment by itself, and is used as a yellow dye.  The etymology of this word turns out to be very interesting.  Its first attestation in English is in the early mid-16th century, around 1540.  Before orthographical standardization occurred, it was recorded as tarmaret and tormarith, as well as the more-identifiable turmirick.  The two former versions resemble forms recorded by Littré in French–terre mérite–and medieval Latin–terra merita–both of which carry the meaning deserving or deserved earth.  Further, according to the OED,

Some have suggested a corruption of the Persian-Arabic name kurkum ‘saffron’, whence L., F., and Sp. curcuma; but the change seems too unlikely.

This seems to be about as close as I’m going to be able to get with the time available to me, but thank you very much, one reader, for the suggestion.  The derivation was not at all what I would have expected.  Please keep the suggestions coming, and check back tomorrow for more unbelievably interesting information on language.

Introductions

If you’re anything like me–which presumably you aren’t–you first became intensely interested in words, etymology, and the history of language when you were 16 years old on a transatlantic flight, a flight that would change your life, due both to your reading material and the destination of the flight. It was Bill Bryson’s rather eloquently named book, The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way, a Christmas present reluctantly given to me by my parents, that changed my life. And it is a book that I would highly recommend to anyone (but most likely only to myself) who even suspects that they might be interested in language as a humorous, easy-to-read introduction to the topic.

In any case, the purpose of this blog is to force (read, allow) myself to spend more time investigating word origins and grammatical questions simple enough that they don’t require too much background research (given that I have a completely unrelated dissertation to write). The goal is to address one question each (week) day; in the eventuality that there are any readers, I would be happy to take suggestions on words. I’d also be happy to receive gifts, bribes, or voluntary tribute (though I’m working on making that involuntary); happier, actually.

So, enough with the pleasantries. In honor of one of my favorite musicians and fellow self-proclaimed lingua-phile, Tom Waits, I thought I would look into a word that came up in a story he told while discussing his love of language during a recent concert (which is available here: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=92916923, via NPR).  While I’ll leave the story–which isn’t actually relevant in the least to the purpose of this blog–to Tom Waits, it involved the word condiment, which is the word I’m going to discuss today, as it was a word I had idly hypothesized/wondered about in the past.

Specifically, I wondered whether “condiment” had a shared root with the Italian “nascondere”, Spanish and Portuguese “esconder,” and English-via-Latin “abscond”, the latter group having the meaning, generally, of “to hide or conceal.”  All three of these words are derived from the same Latin root, ab – meaning away, or far from, + condre – meaning to put together, to stow, and to hide (condere is itself a compound form, combining con - with + dare - to put).  The thought, or more accurately, hope that I had was that condiment would have originated from the condiment’s role in hiding or masking the flavors of the underlying food.  In fact, condiment comes to us from the Latin word condimentum, past participle of condire, meaning to preserve or pickle.  According to the Oxford English Dictionary (henceforth, OED):

condre: to season, pickle, preserve, an accessory form of condre to put or lay together, lay or store up, preserve, pickle, etc.

So, ultimately, there is a common root, but the linkages that I hoped for between condiment and abscond are not as apparent as I would have liked (at least not in my primary sources: the OED and the Garzanti Linguistica dictionary of Italian).  While investigating I made one other interesting discovery.  The German equivalent of condiment is Gewurz (with the concurrent meaning of spice).  For anyone interested in wine, this ought to be recognizable as a part of the name of the Gewurztraminer grape, which, as it turns out, means “spicy traminer.”

Other words related to some of those discussed today include recondite – meaning removed or hidden from view, or removed from ordinary apprehension, understanding, or knowledge; as well as, potentially, ensconce, from the Old French word esconce, with the meaning of hiding place or place of shelter.  However, the origin of ensconce is not entirely clear, as some uses relate to the employment of small earthworks or fortifications, which seem to derive from the Dutch schans of the same meaning.

If anyone has suggestions for words that need some investigating, please submit them.

Thanks.