Word by word

A. While is an example of grammaticalization. In Proto-Indo-European, it was a verb k^weiə-, “to rest.” In Old English, this verb became a noun, hwīl, meaning a peaceful stretch of time (we still say spend a while in this meaning). But after this, it became a grammatical word, showing that one thing happened within the same span of time as another. This grammatical meaning came from the part of hwīl referring to time, rather than rest. Today’s while, then, has completely lost the connotation of rest that k^weiə- had.

B. The is another grammaticalization, coming from the Old English word for that. To say the cat is to point out a certain cat, as opposed to a cat, which refers to any cat. But to say that cat is to be even more forcefully specific. The meaning of that weakened to the over time. This means, however, that Old English—and Proto-Indo-European—were languages like Chinese and legions of others that have no articles. The is a frill that English has drifted into, seeming as peculiar and superfluous to many foreigners as alienable possessive marking is to us.

C. Snow is an ordinary English word that has had its meaning for eons. However, the first s is a mystery. Other Indo-European languages have it in their snow word, too, but Latin’s word nix lacked the s; thus, we have neige in French and nieve in Spanish. We might think that the s just dropped off in Latin. But in other cases, Latin has an s where one of its sisters doesn’t. Latin has such words as specit for “sees,” but in Sanskrit, this is páçyati. Indo-Europeanists call this s that floats in and out of the family s-mobile and think it was the remnant of a prefix. We will never know what the prefix was or its meaning, but we utter its remains whenever we say that it’s snowing.

D. Fell is evidence of a suffix that is completely gone.

1. If we made up a language on the spot, we would be unlikely to decide that the way to mark the past would be to change a verb’s vowel. This happens in a language only by accident over time, because the vowel in some past suffix on the end of the word changes how people pronounce the vowel within the word. For example, before English had emerged, the plural of foot used to be fōti. But speakers would anticipate pronouncing the “ee” sound by pronouncing the “oh” sound close in the mouth to where “ee” is pronounced. This made the word “FAY-tee.” Because final vowels are so fragile, the -i dropped off and left just “fayt.” Then, the Great Vowel Shift changed this to feet. We assume that there was originally some sound like this after fell, but now, it is lost to the ages.

2. But then recall that such verbs as fall may also change their vowels to mark the past because of ancient mixture with a Semitic language. It could be that when we say that the temperature fell, this is a legacy from people whose descendants now live in Tel Aviv, Cairo, and Addis Ababa.

E. She is a strange case as well. The Old English word was hēo, which was not pronounced the way it was spelled (“hey-oh”) but as “hey-uh.” But it is not a usual process in sound change for h to become a sh sound. One possible explanation refers to the fact that Old English still had three genders, so that there were three forms of the definite article, masculine sē, feminine sēo, and neuter þæt. Maybe people began associating hēo with this feminine the: after all, in Old English, to see several girls and say of one of them, That one is wearing green, one would say sēo is wearing green. Maybe there was a short step from this to changing hēo to sēo. One reason speakers may have made this change is that the word for he, pronounced “hay” then, was becoming hard to distinguish from “hay-uh.”

F. Arrive is a borrowed word from French; we would be surprised if every word in this sentence traced back to Old English.

1. The native word is come, and as often, the French word is more formal than the original English one, as with pig versus pork.

2. Arrive actually started as an idiomatic expression in Vulgar Latin. Ad rīpam meant “to the shore” in Latin, and adrīpāre was, therefore, a created verb, as if we were to say “I got-to-theshored.” Adrīpāre became arrīpāre as the d became more like the r it came before, and in Old French, the word was ariver. We borrowed it from French and have no idea that we are mouthing a Vulgar Latin neologism when we say arrive!

3. And as for the past ending -ed, some linguists think that it began as the word for did in early Germanic (“I arrive-did”). This means that arrived contains the remnants of three words from two different languages.

G. To goes back to Old English tō, and the reason we pronounce it with an “oo” is the same reason that a word pronounced “fode” is now pronounced food: the Great Vowel Shift.

H. Ask traces back to an Old English word āscian, but despite how we feel about the pronunciation “aks” today, in Old English ācsian was as common as āscian, casually written in formal documents. As so often, our contemporary senses of what is “wrong” are arbitrary—even literate English speakers once saw nothing amiss in the alternation between these words.

I. About came from a case of the rebracketing that we saw create the word alone (the arrive case is another one). At plus by plus out, pronounced together rapidly over time, became the single word about, just as God be with you became Goodbye.

J. Their is not an original English word but one of the many words that the Vikings gave us. Why we switched to their (!) word instead of our own hiera is unknown.

K. Fee has a nice story. It, too, is not originally English—quite.

1. We took it from Norman French’s word fie, which started as fief, and French had, in turn, borrowed this word from the language of Germanic-speaking invaders (the Normans were, in fact, originally Norsemen, Vikings who had stayed on the continent). Thus, English borrowed a word through French from one of its own sister languages.

2. The Proto-Germanic word had been *fehu. But this, in turn, was an example of the strange consonant changes of Grimm’s Law that, for example, changed Indo-European p’s, such as the p Latin has in pater, into the f of father. The Proto-Indo-European word was *peku, and it meant wealth or property. That root came through more intact in Latin, in words we later borrowed, such as pecuniary. Thus, fee and pecuniary (and peculiar) trace to the same root!

We see that any sentence of English is, viewed up close, a petri dish of disparate elements stewing together, testaments to a long history of one of the first language’s 6,000 living branches and its endless mutations and mixings with other branches. Of course, we can see similar stories in any sentence from any of the 6,000 languages in the world. I hope to have demonstrated what a wonder the world’s languages are when viewed as dynamic and symbiotic systems in a constant flux that is here predictable, but there surprising. Under this perspective, language, rather than being a basket of words knit together by a collection of “rules” that we learn in school and usually fall short of, is one of the many wonders of being members of our species.

مواضيع ذات صلة

Finale—Master Class Introduction

Finale—Master Class

Sign language

Artificial spoken languages

Artificial Languages

Predictions

The success story

Obstacles to keeping 6,000 languages alive

Language revival movements

Language Death—Prognosis

What happens to a language when it is dying?

A natural process—to an extent