Can't believe it's been a year since my last post.

Wanted to share this link that was in this week's Word a Day weekly compendium. (if you aren't getting Word-A-Day see http://wordsmith.org/awad/)

"8 pronunciation errors that made the English language what it is today" (the Guardian 11 March 2014)
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/11/pronunciation-errors-english-language?

The article discusses 8 different types of pronunciation errors that have changed our language.
1. rebracketing - eg "a norange" to "an orange"
2. metathesis - sound swapping eg waps to wasp, aks to ask (and in some dialects, back to aks)
3. syncope - dropping pronunciation of letters eg krism's for Christmas, Woden's Day to Wednesday to "wensday"
4. epenthesis - inserting sounds that aren't there (to make it easier to pronounce) eg empty (originally emty) or "hampster" for hamster
5. velarisation - L after a vowel changing to a W eg walk, talk to wawk and tawk
6. affrication - changing ty before a vowel to tch eg tune from "tyune" to "tchune"
7. folk etymology - changing a new word to one that makes sense (sort of) in our familiar language eg crawfish from French écrevisse (which has nothing to do with fish)
8. spelling pronunciation - saying it like it looks eg pronouncing the L in balm; sometimes this reverses syncope but often puts a letter in that wasn't there in the first place

Some of these mispronunciations became the norm before the spelling was standardized, others after. We know about the former only through the work of word historians (who knew bird used to be brid?). The latter contribute to the confusion of English spelling. Note in #4 the first example empty changed before the spelling was standardized, hamster afterwards; the second example in #3, Wednesday, changed both before and after.

I like this statement in paragraph 4:  "Error is the engine of language change, and today's mistake could be tomorrow's vigorously defended norm." 

Borrowed Words

All languages borrow words from languages with which they come in contact; English is unique in the extent to which it has done so. Henry Hitchings in his book The Secret Life of Words estimates that English has borrowed words from 350 different languages. This book deals extensively with this phenomenon [1] of the English language. Wikipedia estimates that only 26% of the current 700,000 to 1 million English words come from its Germanic roots, the rest are borrowed from other languages. Words of French origin actually exceeds German, making up 29% of English vocabulary and Latin (including technical words) ties with French at 29%, with the remaining 16% coming from all the other languages [wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_of_French_origin].

There are different levels to which borrowed words become assimilated into English. Some words like ensemble or bratwurst are obvious borrowings and partially retain their foreign spelling and/or pronunciation. At the other extreme are words like marmalade [2] or mayor that have become Anglicized to the extent that we can't tell from the words themselves (pronunciation or spelling) where they are borrowed from, or even that they have been borrowed. The level of assimilation depends on time and usage - the longer since it was borrowed and the more it is used, the greater its degree of "Englishness" and the more familiar it appears to us. For example, words from Greek like area and problem are  more familiar than euphoria and persona; and from French marriage has been Anglicized while montage retains its French pronunciation.

Many borrowed words result from the age of exploration in which new things were discovered from around the world and named from words taken from the local language. Chimpanzee is from the West African language Tshiluba, geyser from Icelandic, sauna from Finnish, and futon from Japanese. Closer to home, Saskatoon berries and pemmican are from Cree words, as is the name of my province Saskatchewan [3].

Similarly words may be borrowed because there is no English equivalent, even though the object or notion is well known. My favorite example of this is the German word Ohrwurm (literally "ear-worm") for that tune you just can't get out of your head. Other loanwords may already have an English word for it, but the new word is more descriptive (entrepreneur) or adds a particular shade of meaning (scarlet and vermillion from French).

The terms "borrowing" and "loanword" seem rather odd in reference to words, as the loaning languages don't have to give up their words and there is no expectations of having to pay them back (sort of like your teenager "borrowing" $20 to go to the movies). English however has returned the favor many times and loaned words to languages from which it has previously borrowed. French now has le weekend and cool, Japanese intanetto and wado purosessa [4], and German has die bluejeans and der blogger.

__________________
[1] from Greek
[2] from Portuguese
[3] A story goes that some American hunters pull into a gas station and ask the attendant where they are. The attendant replies "Saskatoon, Saskatchewan". One hunter then turns to the driver and says "I told you we went too far north - the natives don't even speak English".
[4] Try saying them out loud without the final "o".

A-Hunting We Will Go

Ever wonder about the a- tacked in front of some verbs? Where did it originate? Does it (or did it) have any special meaning?

We're familiar with this construction now only from a few old folk songs like "A-hunting we will go", a few old English Christmas carols "Here we go a-wassailing" and "six geese a-laying", and the 1969 film "Daddy's Gone A-Hunting" which borrowed the name (and little else) from a silent 1925 MGM film of the same name. It is also found in a line of the Knight's song to Alice in Through the Looking Glass: "an aged aged man, A-sitting on a gate" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haddocks%27_Eyes).

Wikipedia describes it as an "archaic intensifying prefix". David Crystal in By Hook or By Crook explains that the a- originally meant the action is on-going, something you do over and over. "A-sitting" indicates the old man had been sitting on the gate for a long time, or was accustomed to doing so. Its use in this regard died out centuries ago but has been kept alive by poets and song-writers who found it useful to fit the meter of their compositions. All of the examples given above are relatively recent and likely used for this reason. "A-wassailing" was composed about 1850 and "A-hunting we will go" was written in 1877 for "The Beggar's Opera". "The Twelve Days of Christmas" is older, first published in 1780 and likely somewhat older than that. Through the Looking Glass was published in 1871.

The a- construction also survived at least into the 20th century in the Appalachian English dialect. One can imagine a stereotypical hillbilly leaning on the door of his mountain shack, rifle in the crook of his arm, saying "I ain't afeerd o' nobody". It was taken there by the early settlers and because of their cultural isolation survived long after it was dropped by English-speakers everywhere else. For more on this fascinating dialect see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appalachian_English.

Lately I've been a-reading By Hook or By Crook by the English linguist David Crystal. It's subtitled "A Journey in Search of English" but I would describe it as a "delightful romp". As Crystal describes his journey through Wales and England recording local dialects, his narrative gets sidetracked into many different directions, all of them (to me anyway) quite interesting. I will share more of these in shorter posts like this one rather than wait for time to compose longer essays.

Riding, Farthing, Reeve & Sheriff

Here in Saskatchewan, we are coming up to a provincial election. Each district in which a Member of the Legislative Assembly (MLA for short) is elected is called a riding. This word has an interesting etymology – it started when the County of Yorkshire was divided into three administrative divisions by the ruling Danes probably in the 10^th century.

Yorkshire was ruled by the Danes between 866 and 1066 which resulted in a higher proportion of Old Norse words adopted into Yorkshire English than in any other part of Britain. One of these words was thrithi for thirds. This became thriding in Old English when applied to one of the three Yorkshire divisions – West Thriding, East Thriding and North Thriding. Because of the “t” or “th” endings of the first words in the names, the “th” of thriding was dropped to form simply riding. My Bielby ancestors on my maternal grandmother’s side came from a small village in East Riding.

A similar word is farthing, created from a “fourth-ing”. A farthing is an English coin worth ¼ of a penny – the smallest coin in British currency, hence symbolically of very little value. In Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, a farthing is one of four regions of the Shire.

While on Saskatchewan politics, another word that comes to mind is reeve. In the western provinces and parts of Ontario, the reeve is the elected chair of a rural municipal council (equivalent to the mayor of a town). Reeve comes from Old English “gerefa” and was used in Anglo-Saxon times in Britain for a number of minor local officials. It is no longer used in Britain (to my knowledge) but has survived in “the colonies”. Similarly sheriff originated as “shire reeve” – the reeve of a Shire. I don’t know to what extent a sheriff is still used in Britain, but the position was made famous by American western novels and movies, and is still used today, in varying roles, in many American States and in Canada.

So at election time, remember that the word riding originally meant a third of Yorkshire, and reeve was rescued from extinction by Canadian municipal government. And when reading a Zane Gray or Louis L’Amour novel or watching an old “cowboys and Indians” movie, remember that the hero’s title of sheriff originated as a “shire reeve” in England. Of course not all sheriffs are heroes – like any government official, a sheriff’s position is susceptible to corruption, as attested to by the reputation of the Sheriff of Nottingham in the Robin Hood stories.

Grammaticalization - the French "Pas"

Linguists class words as either concrete or grammatical. Concrete words represent objects, actions, feelings, etc - things that can be named. Imagine two people sitting under a tree in the African savanna 100,000 years ago inventing words for the first language (that's not how it happened by the way). We can understand how words might have been made up for animals, stones, sun & stars, even feelings like hot and tired. These are concrete words (nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs). It is harder to imagine how they would have come up with words that we use to tie these concrete words together into meaningful sentences. Words like "and", "but", "the", "for", etc. These are called grammatical words because they form a language's grammar (prepositions, articles, conjunctions, interjections, auxiliaries).

Linguists believe that most if not all grammatical words started out as concrete words which later began to be used in a different way. An obvious example is the number one being used as the article "a". In French it is the same word "un/une". A more interesting example is the French word pas (pronounced pah - the French are even worse than English for not pronouncing all their letters). [Since my French is quite rusty, I  will use the examples from McWhorter's Lecture 4 in The Story of Human Language DVD.]

Pas is a concrete word meaning "step" which developed into a grammatical word meaning "not". Originally in French "He does not walk" would be "Il ne marche". For emphasis one could say "Il ne march pas" - "He doesn't walk a step". Similarly "Il ne mange" (He doesn't eat) could be said "Il ne mange mie" (He doesn't eat a crumb) and "Il ne bois" (He doesn't drink) as "Il ne bois goutte" (He doesn't drink a drop).

As time went by, the emphasis became weaker (like the word "awesome" which used to mean something really spectacular and can now be used to describe a salad) until the added "step", "crumb" or "drop" no longer made any real difference in meaning, and were dropped from usage. All that is, except for the word pas for step. It not only hung in there for not walking but began to be used for all negative actions. "He doesn't eat" became "Il ne mange pas"; "He doesn't drink" became "Il ne boit pas", etc. This is how I was taught French 40+ years ago.

Completing the process, in modern spoken French the "ne" is no longer used, leaving only the "pas". So to continue with our examples of not walking, eating or drinking, we now have "Il marche pas", "Il mange pas" and "Il boit pas" where the word for "step" is the only negative.

A familiar example in English [from The Unfolding of Language by Guy Deutscher] is the verb going to which means "moving yourself to" but has taken on an element of a future tense. Consider: "I am going to the store. When I get to the store I am going to buy a book." Interestingly the "going to" in the second sentence can be shortened to "gonna" but the "going to" in the first cannot. So the slang word gonna has developed only for the future sense of "going to" not the original travelling sense. In the future should gonna become accepted as "proper English" it will be a new grammatical word. With further changes it could eventually morph into something unrecognizable from its original "going to".

Transitions like this have created all the grammatical words we now use not only in English but all languages. Fascinating!

Coroner and Coronary

These two words appear related in that they both have to do with death. A coroner is a government official who determines the cause of death, and coronary disease is a common cause of death.

Coroner and coronary are related, but their surprising root is crown, having nothing to do with death. The source of both is Latin corona for "crown".

A coroner is an official of the government or "Crown", an office originally established in medieval England. In England, Canada, and other British Commonwealth countries the federal government is commonly referred to as "the Crown", representing the King or Queen of England as the ultimate authority. In Canada, land owned by the Canadian Federal government is still referred to as "Crown Land".

The "coronary" heart condition is more properly called Coronary Artery Disease (CAD) or Coronary Heart Disease (CHD). The word coronary here comes from the crown-like shape of the arteries encircling the heart. These coronary arteries supply the heart muscle with oxygenated blood. If the arteries become blocked or "occluded" by atherosclerotic plaque, the heart muscle tissue can die, a condition called myocardial infarction, and lead to cardiac arrest (a "heart attack"). It seems ironic that the heart which is full of blood that it pumps to the rest of the body depends on these small arteries to supply it's own vital oxygen - sort of like a gasoline tanker truck running out of fuel. Heart bypass surgery is a common procedure to replace these plugged coronary arteries with ones taken from elsewhere in the body. See the June 28, 2011 blog post on my Stay Healthy Naturally blog for natural alternatives to bypass surgery.

Source: A.Word.A.Day for August 15, 2011. If you haven't already subscribed to this delightful free email service, you can sign up at http://wordsmith.org/awad/

True Folk Etymology

This post will deal with true Folk Etymology, where an unfamiliar word is changed into a more familiar form, or as Anatoly Lieberman puts it in Word Origins...and how we know them "the process of altering otherwise incomprehensible words, in order to give them a semblance of meaning". The other sense of Folk Etymology (called "Etymythology" by Michael Quinion in his book POSH) in which people make up plausible origins of words or phrases, was discussed in a previous post July 13.

There are two sources of unfamiliar words -- old words that have lost their meaning over time, and new words borrowed from another language. An oft quoted example of the former is bridegroom. The original was bridegome where gome was an Old English word for "man". By the 16th century gome had fallen out of use, remaining only in bridegome where it no longer made sense.  The more common word groom was substituted even though at the time it referred to a manservant or person of a lower class (the horse keeper sense of groom developed more recently).

Another example is kitty-corner for diagonally opposite. The original was cater-corner where cater is an English word meaning "four" Anglicized from the French quatre. Cater developed into a verb meaning "to place diagonally". Cater is now rarely used outside this expression, so it no longer made sense, and various versions sprang up including catty-corner and the more familiar kitty-corner. It is speculated that some people thought the word had something to do with prowling cats, but I don't think this is necessary at all for the word change. Kitty-corner just seems easier to pronounce, and makes a little more sense than cater-corner. One word that does relate to cats that I had not suspected, is caterpillar which is from Old French chatepelose meaning "hairy cat".

A frequently referenced example of a word changed from a foreign language is cockroach from Spanish cucaracha (it was cacarucha with the U in a different syllable at the time it was borrowed). Cock and roach were two familiar but unrelated English words joined to approximate the new unfamiliar word.

Sometimes the translation completely changes the meaning. In America, the French Cap d'Espoir (Cape of Hope) was Americanized to Cape Despair and the place name Purgatoire (Purgatory) became Picketwire.

Celtic Vestigia

The English language developed in England so to understand the history of English we must explore the history of England.

The earliest inhabitants to leave any trace on the English language were the Celts. Their legacy is surprisingly small considering the centuries they inhabited Britain prior to and during the Roman occupation.

The Celtish languages are part of the Indo-European language family. There are six Celtic languages surviving into historical times, divided into two branches – the Brythonic (Welsh, Cornish and Breton) and Goidelic (Irish, Scottish and Manx).

The Brythonic (Brittonic) language was spoken across Britain south of the Firth of Forth by the people known as Britons during the Iron Age (800BC – 100AD). North of the Firth of Forth the distantly related Pictish language was spoken. By the 6^th Century AD regional Brythonic dialects had developed into the Welsh and Cornish languages. In the 4^th and 5^th centuries AD Britons immigrated to the mainland (escaping the invading Saxons), settling in what is now known as Brittany, France. Here the third Brythonic language, Breton, developed, replacing the Gallish (or Gallic) Celtic language which was previously common across most of western mainland Europe.

Irish and Scottish Gaelic and Manx (from the Isle of Man) make up the Goidelic branch. These languages bear similarities to Iberian Celtic while the Brythonic languages are more similar to Gallish Celtic, suggesting that the Irish Celts came from Iberia (modern Spain and Portugal) while the Britons came across the English Channel from what is now France and Belgium. Thus the roots of differences between the Irish and English are very deep.

The Gaelic language was introduced to Scotland from Ireland in the 4^th century AD by Irish raiders who settled in western Scotland. The Romans called Irish raiders Scoti and the area in northeast Britain settled by the Irish became known as Scotia (the Roman name for Scotland was Caledonia and Ireland itself was at one time known as Scotia). [I tried to explain this one time to a Scottish born friend but he wouldn’t hear of it.] Over time Scottish Gaelic diverged from the Irish Gaelic and spread throughout most of Scotland, displacing Pictish and Old English. Gaelic was later replaced by Scottish English, surviving in the Highlands and northern islands into modern times.

This brief history of the British Celtic languages lays a foundation for understanding the history of the English language. For a foundation, however, Celtic had surprisingly little lasting influence on English. A short chapter in my new book The Story of English deals with “The Celts and the Romans”. While the Romans ruled southern Britain, the Celts were more or less allowed to carry on with their life and language. After the Romans left, the Anglo-Saxon invaders pushed them into the far western corners of the island. There was very little assimilation either of the Celtic people or their language. We have to look carefully to find traces of them in modern English.

Most modern English words of Celtic origin are of place names and landforms. The place name suffix combe is Celtic for valley (spelled cwm in Welsh, a useful Scrabble word!). Tor means hill or high rock (a bit of trivia I learned in a university geography class which has also proven useful in Scrabble). It has been suggested that the landform names for hills and valleys were borrowed from Celtic because the Anglo-Saxons, coming from countries with low flat land, lacked names for them. London (Latinized to Londinium by the Romans), Dover, Kent and the rivers Thames, Wye and Avon, among many others, are of Celtic origin. These place names increase in frequency from east to west across England.

Some words have been obviously borrowed from modern Celtic languages: bard, plaid, loch and glen from Scottish Gaelic and brogue, coracle and colleen from Irish Gaelic. Not so obvious is whiskey from the Gaelic compound word for water + life (similar to Latin aqua vitae for distilled alcoholic drinks). Bannock is another word believed to have a Celtic origin: OE bannuc (piece of a loaf or cake). It has survived in Scotland where it refers to a round, flat unsweetened and usually unleavened bread, and in Canada where its adaption to being baked over a campfire has made it a staple of northern trappers and traders. It was likely Hudson Bay Co. traders from Scotland that introduced both the bread and the name to northern Canada.

Two surprisingly modern looking words can be traced back to Celtic: slogan and car. Slogan comes from the Gaelic words sluagh (army) and gairm (cry) which together make war-cry. This proves that advertisers mean business! The word car has a more complicated derivation from words meaning “cart”. Old Celtic karros became Latin carra and Old French carre which was introduced into Middle English by the Normans. But this and likely many other words were previously borrowed by the Romans from the Celts living on the continent, not necessarily from the British Celts. Other Celtic words – like gravel, lawn, truant and valet were borrowed by the French from Gallic and later introduced into English following the Norman Conquest.

In summary, there remains very little evidence in modern English of the Celtic languages, once spoken across what is now England for centuries.

Man and Woman

This interesting pair of words raises a few questions: Why does woman end with man? What does the wo mean? Does woman mean “man with a womb”?

In Old English (OE), man referred to both adult sexes and is of Germanic origin. Old Icelandic uses the word mathr in the same way, to refer to adults of both sexes, making konamathr (man) and kvennamathr (woman). In OE a female adult was wīfman (wife + man) and a male adult wǽpnedman (weaponed + man). Wife is OE meaning woman, origin unknown. “Weaponed-man” likely refers to a warrior and by extension adult males.

Following established rules for word changes, wifman morphed over the centuries to woman. The plural women was added later, likely to match the plural for man. Man itself was shortened from wǽpnedman by dropping the prefix, a common trend in most languages.

Etymology & Folk Etymology

Here are my definitions:

• Etymology is the science of word origins.
• Folk Etymology is the art of guessing word origins.

This is what Merriam-Webster Online has to say:

Definition of ETYMOLOGY

1 : the history of a linguistic form (as a word) shown by tracing its development since its earliest recorded occurrence in the language where it is found, by tracing its transmission from one language to another, by analyzing it into its component parts, by identifying its cognates in other languages, or by tracing it and its cognates to a common ancestral form in an ancestral language

2 : a branch of linguistics concerned with etymologies

Definition of FOLK ETYMOLOGY

1 : the transformation of words so as to give them an apparent relationship to other better-known or better-understood words (as in the change of Spanish cucaracha to English cockroach)

First Known Use of FOLK ETYMOLOGY

1882 [folk etymology was in practice for millennia before the word was coined]

My Canadian Oxford gives a 2^nd definition: “a commonly held but false explanation of the origin of a word”. This is the meaning I’m using in this essay (I’ll write about the first meaning another time).

The Greek root of etymology means “true”. Etymologists attempt, as accurately as possible, to determine the true or actual source of a word. Folk Etymologists on the other hand can make up anything as long as it sounds plausible.

There must be something inherent in human genes to make us want to know the origins of things – words, phrases, objects… Or is it just me? No – I must have many fellow origin-seekers judging by the number of books written on the subject (I own 10 or 12 myself).

Most of early writing on word origins (and a significant amount of contemporary writing) was what would now be considered folk etymology. And much of it was wrong. For example Samuel Johnson’s first dictionary gave the origin of bonfire to be from the French for “good fire”; it actually comes from “bone fire”.

An etymologist knows you can’t determine the origin of a modern word just by looking at it. Here are some other examples of similar sounding (and similar meaning) words having completely different origins:

• Pan (the cooking utensil): from Old English panne, possibly from Latin patina meaning “dish” [question for you etymologists – how do you know it’s not from Latin panis, making “bread pan” almost as redundant as “pizza pie”?]
• Pantry: from Old French paneterie, ultimately from Latin panis therefore “a cupboard to store bread”. 

• Minimum: from Latin minimus meaning “least”
• Miniature: from Latin minium meaning “red lead” which was used to make (among other things) small illustrations in manuscripts called in Italian miniatura. By the time it reached English it had lost its original meaning of “red drawing” and become “small drawing” probably under the influence of minimum. 

• Isle: comes from Old French ile
• Island: from Old English igland, a compound of ig (island) + land. The spelling was modified to resemble Isle because of an assumed relationship. 

• Man: from Old English mann, plural menn, of Germanic origin.
• Human: from Middle English humaine from Old French from Latin humanus and ultimately from Latin homo (human being) 

This last pair I will expand on in a future post.

Source: 

Word Origins…and how we know them, Anatoly Liberman, 2005.

The Canadian Oxford Dictionary, 2001

Litter - 3 meanings, 1 origin

The word litter has three seemingly unrelated meanings: a stretcher used to carry a person lying down; debris lying on the ground like hamburger wrappers and paper cups; and a group of baby animals (think kittens or puppies) born to the same mother at the same time. Surprisingly these all ultimately come from the same Latin word lectus meaning bed via Old French litiere. The "stretcher" meaning has a more obvious connection to "bed"; at one time a litter was a bed or seat carried on the shoulders of four men. The "garbage" meaning came from the practice of spreading straw on the floor for bedding for people or animals to sleep on. The "baby animals" meaning makes sense if you think of them as litter-mates - sharing the same birthing bed.

There are also pairs of similar words with similar meanings, but having very different origins. When I remember or find some I will do a post on them. Any suggestions?