Latin purc- vs. English “furrow” (remember “porcelain” back at the beginning?) is an example of what is called Grimm’s Law, which describes a systematic change of certain consonants in the Germanic languages (including English) compared to the mainstream of Indo-European, which includes Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, Russian, Gaelic, Persian (Farsi), and many others. The law is named for Jacob Grimm, half of the fairy-tale Brothers Grimm. In addition to being a collector of folklore, he was one of the first serious students of what is now called Comparative Linguistics.
Sticking to Grimm reality, I’m using mainly Latin for the examples below because the Latin/French component of English is so large, and many of these words exist side by side with Old English (i.e., Germanic) terms of similar meaning. Examples from Persian or Gaelic would presumably be less obvious, but they do exist, trust me. Most of my other examples are from Greek. Please note that I’m not claiming that an English word comes from a particular Latin or Greek example, but only that, at minimum, both words derive from some primitive proto-Indo-European common ancestor, and that the English (Germanic) consonant in question changed from “standard” Indo-European while the Latin or Greek did not. In any case, a slightly simplified version of Grimm’s Law states the following:
Obvious examples are pater vs. father, pipe vs. fife, pisces vs. fish, etc. Latin pro-, proto-, prime, etc. compare to Germanic for-, fore-, and first, all with the sense “ahead of”. Latin peril is Germanic fear. A Greek pet- root meant to spread; it’s in both flower petals and the Germanic fathom — the distance defined by the outspread arms.
Greek pyro- is Germanic fire. The pu- root that gave Latin putrid and pus (and also puta and putain, Spanish and French for “whore”) resulted in Germanic foul, filth, and defile, as well as fuzzy, which originally meant “rotten”. (Pustule, by the way is not related to “pus”; it’s a Latin word for “blister”.) Latin pork, mentioned before, is in the Germanic farrow, once a single piglet but now a litter of them, and is part of the Dutch aardvark — literally, earth pig. French/Latin pullet and poultry correspond to Germanic fowl and foal, all with a root meaning of “young”.
An Indo-European pele- root meaning “more” is in Latin words like plenty, plus, plural, the Greek plethora and poly-, etc. An expletive “fills out” a line, as mentioned elsewhere, while plenty means “full of”, and a plenipotentiary has full power. Plenary means “full”, as in a plenary indulgence or plenary session of the legislature. Also from Greek, pleonastic speech or writing uses many more words than necessary. The Germanic equivalent gives fill, full, and folk (the many), so Germanic refill is exactly the same word as Latin replenish. Replete literally means “replenished”, but it is normally used to mean “stuffed”. Finally, completed means “thoroughly filled [up]” and is therefore the opposite of depleted, emptied.
Greek plek-, to fold or braid, is Germanic fold and flex. Latin derivatives of this root are -plex in words like duplex (folded double, exactly as in Germanic two-fold) and complex (folded together), pleat, reflect (fold back), deflect (bend aside), etc. Latin multiplex is a synonym of Germanic manifold (many-fold), and simplex (one-fold, i.e. unfolded) is more usually spelled “simple”, q.v.. A reflex was originally an image seen in a mirror; the current sense of an involuntary twitch is by way of “copying” an action. Perplex was originally an adjective, “thoroughly entangled”.
Also from Latin are words in -ply- such as ply itself, reply (to fold again or turn back — cf. reflect), pliant (foldable), etc. Display and deploy are the Latin and French versions of “unfold”. (Splay is a clipped form of display.) From the image of cloth folded and re-folded, ply came also to mean “layer”, as in plywood. The pair explicit and implicit are from the image of a document which is “folded outward” so the contents are visible to all or “folded inward” so the contents are hidden. Imply and employ are the same “folded in” word; cf. the same change of meaning in involve, literally to tangle. Exploit is the French form of “explicit”. Finally, a mechanic’s pair of pliers most definitely fold in the middle, and a ballet dancer’s plié involves folding the knees outward.
Plight is the result of a merger of two unrelated words. Germanic “plight” meant risk; it still hangs around (with the meaning “to pledge”, originally “to risk”) in “plighting one’s troth‘ during a marriage ceremony and in the legal plea (contest, struggle, battle) where two parties plead their case. Through Latin and French, a second “plight” meant entanglement or difficulty, a -plex/fold word from the previous paragraph. Since a tangled plight was very possibly dangerous, both French and English lost the distinction in phrases like “the plight of battle”. The tangled plight is also commonly seen as the braided plait.
The Indo-European word for “away” was apo-. This led to Greek words like apology and apostle, Latin terms in ab- like aborigine (from the beginning), and a whole collection in post- (afterward) such as posterior, post-mortem, puny (French puis-ne and Latin post-natus, last-born), etc. Another large Latin set comes from the meaning “put away” or “place” — Latin ponere, posit- — position, deposit, post, positive, preposition, transpose, propose and proponent (both “place before”), component/compound/compose (place together), expound, and more. Meanwhile, the mutation to Germanic produced off, of, offal (off-fall, i.e., waste), aft, ebb, and after.
There are a bunch of Latin words in pla- (plate, plain, plane, plank, plaza, placid, plateau, plaque, placenta, placard and its twin placket, platform, etc., all with the sense of “flat” or “broad”) that in Germanic are fla- words — flat, flake, field, floor, flounder (a flat fish), fluke (of a whale), the Dutch veldt, the ice floe, and the flag in flagstone. 05Feb12 (Plakentos meant “flat [edible] cake” in Greek; 17th century doctors started calling the afterbirth the placenta uteri.) The opposite of “placid” is implacable. Platitude is from French; it is literally “flatness”, but by extension means boring or trite.
Spanish llano, plain, is definitely from Latin plano, even if it has lost a /P/ along the way. Spanish lleno, full, and lluvia, rain, show the same phenomenon; they are from Latin plen- and pluv-. Likewise, Spanish llamar means to call out (Latin clamare as in English clamor), llave is a key (clav-), and llaga is a sore (plag-, as in plague), all showing the Spanish loss of a hard consonant before /L/ and replacement by /LL/.
02Nov11 From Old French, English acquired the archaic flawn, originally a pancake, hence the proverb “as flat as a flawn” but also a custard or cheesecake. The modern version (using the current French spelling) is flan, an open fruit tart common on dessert menus. (The initial /F/ shows French must have acquired the word by way of Old German; the modern German and Dutch words for pancake are fladen and vlade.)
05Feb12 Planet certainly looks as if it should be a “small plane”, but the words seem to be unrelated. Greek planasthai meant to wander; the derived noun planetos (wanderer) was applied to heavenly objects that, unlike stars, didn’t hold still. (It’s possible that planet is related to plane, with the wandering sense developed from “spreading out”.)
It would be perfectly reasonable to call a Greek policeman a platypus (flatfoot), although perhaps not to his face. All the current meanings of plant go back to the original sense of (flat) bottom of the foot, now seen in its literal sense only in plantar warts, the plantar fascia that connects the heel to the ball of the foot, and the zoological term plantigrade, describing animals like bears and humans that walk flat-footed with the heels touching the ground. (The opposite is digitigrade, walking on the toes like horses, dogs, cats, etc. The only digitigrade primate species is the ballerina.) To “plant” something originally meant to tramp down the ground after placing a seed or seedling, and that sense is still felt in phrases like “feet firmly planted”.
Surprisingly, the Greek philosopher Plato’s name is also a “flat” word. His actual name was Aristokles; he was nicknamed Plato because he was a very broad, powerful man who had been a champion wrestler in his younger days. To think of Plato in the WWF as “The Slab” or “The Wall” definitely gives a new perspective to the man! Plato could presumably explain things quite well — that’s ex-plan, to “flatten out” or smooth. (This is probably a metaphor for planking a document down right under the nose of the person who does not understand.) A Spanish esplanade is the same word, retaining the etymological meaning.
Poland is one of Plato’s cousins, since polye means “field” in Slavic, and the country is predominantly flat farmland. Navigators call an area of open water in arctic pack ice a polynya, from Russian. The dance called a polka, however, apparently is not related to the country, even though the Polish words for themselves are a Polak (male) and a Polka (female). The dance is of Bohemian origin, not Polish, and the name seems to be from Czech pulka, which means “half”, presumably from the short quick steps characteristic of the polka. (This does not mean, however, that a polka is the same as a minuet, also named for its small steps.) There was a large craze for the polka in the late 19th Century, leading to polka hats, polka dresses, etc., of which the only remainder is polka dotted fabric. Another dance really does mean “Polish”, however — the polonaise.
Before some anal etymologist jumps on me, the original Indo-European “flat” root was pele-, but it immediately mutated into both plek- and plat-, both still with the same meaning. The experts claim they can tell which of the three ie roots is responsible for each of the words I’ve mentioned in this section, but for simplicity I’ve simply lumped them all together.
There are some words that look like they have undergone a Grimm’s Law /P/-to-/F/ switch except that the result certainly isn’t German. Sometimes the real reason is because Arabic doesn’t have a /P/ sound and substitutes /F/ in words borrowed from Indo-European. The most obvious is Farsi, now the Iranian name for their own language. This started out as Parsee, i.e. “Persian”. Parsee is still used as the name for a descendant of Persians who moved to India to maintain their heritage after Islam took over their native land.
Latin cardiac, cordial, etc. vs. Germanic heart, as shown in the Indo-European list mentioned previously. Latin canine and Greek cynic are Germanic hound. Latin “purc-”, mentioned above as a relative of furrow and furlong (furrow-length), actually gave Germanic “furh-”, but an “rh” is pretty indistinguishable from just plain /R/ in English — think of roads vs. Rhodes. (A furlong, or one eighth of a mile, was so-named because that was the dimension of a 10-acre square field.)
The Latin word for skin was cutis, as in cuticle, “little skin”, or subcutaneous, “under the skin.” It is the same word as Germanic hide as in horsehide. Greek -kracy meant “strength, ruling ability” (democracy means “people strength”, aristocracy is “best strength”, and bureaucracy is from French bureau, desk or office), and this matches Germanic hard. The Greek carcino- and Latin cancer are “hard” words, too — the original meaning was the hard-shelled crab, and the disease was named from the appearance of a typical tumor. This got generalized to any affliction which ate away at surrounding tissue, leading to both chancre (a venereal ulcer) and canker.
Latin corp- (body) is in corpse, corps, corporation, and corpuscle. If we apply the two Grimm changes discussed so far, “corp” changes into Germanic “horf”, and so it is the second syllable of midriff, middle of a body.
As mentioned elsewhere, Latin quo and quid (pronounced “kwo” and “kwid”) are Germanic who and what, and Greek cycle is Germanic wheel. As mentioned elsewhere, some English “qu-” words are really Germanic “cw-” — modern queen and quick, for example — re-spelled by the Normans to match French (and Latin) style for that sound.
The Roman goddess of agriculture, Ceres, gave her name not only to cereal but to Germanic harvest. These are from a general root meaning “to grow”, also seen in increase, decrease, concrete (grown together), create, the crescent (growing) moon, and the musical crescendo. The original meaning of recruit was to reinforce a body of troops, literally to grow again. Sincere is an unlikely relative of cereal, but it is Latin for “single growth”, used to mean pure or clean. Surprisingly, excrescent (growing out) is not related to excrete — that’s “seperate out”, a member of the secret and concern family, q.v.
The Latin cant- root meant to sing, as in words like cantor, canticle, cant (originally the whining tone of a beggar), chant, charm (i.e., an incantation), etc. The French form of Latin incantare is enchant. This is also in German Hahn, a cock, and English hen —see the next paragraphs for more.
Authors have to be careful using the word cock these days because the vulgar synonym for “penis” is so strongly entrenched. The male chicken sense is earliest; then came an intermediate meaning of cock or stopcock — a spigot or tap — so named because the handle of early varieties looked like a cock’s comb. The slang word for penis therefore means “spigot”; it came along by about 1600. To cock a gun is also from the fowl, due to the perceived resemblance of the firing mechanism of a matchlock or flintlock to a bird’s beak. Hence to do something before preparations are complete is to go off half-cocked.
21Sep11 Although the word is certainly derived from the clucking sound of the bird (c.f. chicken), it exists only in English and as French coq. The other Romance languages use derivatives of Latin gallus, while the other Germanic ones use variations on Hahn, which in English underwent a sex-change to become hen. (Hahn is German for both stopcock and penis, too. You can’t keep a good metaphor down.)
21Sep11 Another example of gender confusion among the chickens is French coquette. This is an oxymoron, a “female cock”. In French, the masculine form (coquet) meant a male flirt, presumably from a comparison with the strutting rooster. C.f. English cock-of-the-walk, etc.
Latin curs-, to run, is seen in cursive, cursor, course, corridor, excursion, courier, current, corsair, recur, occur (literally, “run against”, hence “meet”), incursion, etc. A curricle was a light one-horse carriage originally designed for racing. The “now” meaning of the adjective “current” came from the sense “moving along right now”, as in “current affairs”, while currency refers to the circulating money supply. Coarse originally meant “ordinary” and seems to be the same word as “course” via the latter’s one-time meaning of common or expected, as in the phrase “of course”. In Germanic, the root produced hurry, and almost certainly horse, the running animal.
The currant has no relation to running. Originally it was the “raisin of Corinth”, produced from a small grape and imported from Greece. When the round red gooseberry was introduced into England, people thought it was associated with the raisin, with the result that the red or black fruit is now the only current meaning of currant.
The “real” ie root meaning “horse” is ekwi-, seen in Latin equus and Greek hippo- — hippodrome is “horse-running”, hippopotamus is “river-horse”, Philip (Greek Philhippos) is “horse-lover”, etc. Combined with the comment about the “hard” words above, the Greek “patron saint” of physicians, Hippocrates, would be Dr. Horsepower in English!
Anybody with an exposure to etymology would say that hippocampus is obviously a “horse field”, mixing Greek and Latin, but that person would then have a very hard time justifying the current use for a section of the brain. In fact, the second syllable is not Latin for field, it is Greek kampos, a sea monster. The hippocampus was a mythical animal with the head and forelegs of a horse but the body and tail of a fish, often shown in art pulling Poseidon’s chariot. The brain segment was named by some fanciful anatomist for an alleged resemblance to a sea-horse.
The ie kel- root means cover or hide. From this are Latin words like cell, cellar, conceal, and occult (hidden) as well as Germanic terms like hole, hull, hall, helmet, and Hell (the covered place). Greek apocalypse is literally an “uncovering”; its Latin translation is revelation. The current definition of a great catastophe or the end of the world is 20th-century, from the biblical book of “The Revelations of St. John the Divine”. In botany, the Greek calyx properly is the covering of a flower bud, although botanists have tended to totally confuse it with Latin calix, cup. (The latter term is the ancestor of chalice.) Last but not least, the original meaning of Latin color seems to have been “covering”. English borrowed it from French around the time of Chaucer; the native word was (and is) hue.
OK, I lied. The Latin plant-name cannabis is the source of canvas, and it’s Germanic hemp, a fact known to everyone under sixty whether they ever inhaled or not.
Both are illustrated in the change from Latin dentist to Germanic tooth and the first in duo vs. two and december vs. ten. (And cardiac vs. heart, too.) Other examples of /T/-to-/TH/ are the aforementioned pater vs. father and, keeping it in the family, mater vs. mother and frater vs. brother (/F/-to-/B/ change is mentioned below.) An example showing three changes is Greek tripod, which corresponds exactly to Germanic three-foot. More /D/-vs.-/T/ examples are Latin duc- (to lead, as in duke, duct, conduct, educate, seduce, induce, traduce, subdue, subduct, the Venetian Doge, etc.) vs. Germanic team (of horses, originally), tug and tow, and Latin dict- (to speak, as in diction and dictate) vs. Germanic teach. The Germanic god Thor, whose day is Thursday, has the same root as thunder. That word is also the first element of Latin tornado (literally, thundering).
30Sep11 An educator is literally one who “leads out” — ex-duc. As mentioned elsewhere, the same “leading” metaphor is in pedagogue. For that matter, the original definition of deduce in English was to lead forth, as in “Moses deduced the Children of Israel.” It also meant to inherit — “He deduced his fortune from his aunt.” The sense of to solve a problem by reason is later. Note that the “draw out” sense still exists in deduct, and a deduction can be either a financial withdrawal or a logical derivation.
Derive has much the same change in meaning; it originally meant to divert a stream into a particular channel, from the Latin ripa, which meant bank or shore. Other derivatives include river and riparian. Arrive is ad-ripa, “at the shore”, originally a sailor’s word, and the Riviera is a beach. A rival was someone who lived on the other bank of a stream. 13May12 The original rei- root meaning seems to be to tear or cut apart, so surprisingly river and rival are related to rive and its noun rift. If you don’t believe that, you also won’t believe that rivet is another relative, by way of “seam” or “boundary”. Yet another “cut” relative is reap, with its adjectives ripe and rife (abundunt). Rigatoni is “cut up” pasta. Finally, the sense of "cut" produced the meaning of “line”, and that created [in a] row, ridge, and rope. There is strong suspicion that noun and verb rig are related, since the early uses are all nautical and related to ropes and lines, particularly to set up the sails. C.f. a ship’s rigging.
Produce is to “lead forth”, and is therefore the opposite of reduce. The first meaning of “produce” in English was to bring evidence or a witness before a court. Surprisingly, although the word was generalized to “exhibit” by 1500, the theatrical sense of a production is not recorded much before 1800. The extension of “produce” to “create” is also early, and the first instances of a producer all refer to God.
Another /T/-to-/TH/ change is seen in the ten- root which means to stretch. This gave Latin words like tense, tent, extend (stretch out), distend (stretch apart), etc. From “stretched” there is a natural progression to Germanic thin, also seen in Latin extenuate (thin out), tenuous, attenuate, etc. The tenterhooks one is stretched on are a metaphor from weaving, where they are attached to the selvage to stretch cloth into shape. From Greek are the geometric hypotenuse “stretched under” a right angle (cf. Latin subtend), the “stretched out” antenna (originally a nautical word for a sail boom, then the insect part, before arriving at the radio sense), and both the musical tone (from a stretched string) and muscle tone (tautness). (Tone came to mean “general good health”, which is maintained by a tonic. Greek catatonia is when the mind’s tone has “fallen down”.) Metaphorically, ten- meant to concentrate the mind, creating the current meanings of intense, intend, and intent. Attend is “stretch toward”, originally in the Latin phrase attendere animum, to stretch the mind toward, i.e., to pay attention or be attentive. Interestingly, “to pretend” is literally “to stretch forward.” The original meaning was to make a claim, and the figure is that of someone holding out their proof at arm’s length. The only remnant of this sense is the pretender to a throne, i.e., claimant. The current usage is for the original “false pretender.” See the discussion of the tenured tenor earlier in this document for more relatives where the root meaning was extended [I’m sorry…] to “hold”. Also note that “pretend” has a very close relative in ostentatious, from Latin obs-tendere, to stretch out in front, i.e., to show something off. On the other hand, “pretend” is not related to pretext — see the texture/technical family for that one. Attain looks like it might be a relative, but not so — it is a tangere “touch” word.
One of the most obvious relationships is Latin frater and friar vs. English brother. Also, in disburse, reimburse, and the Greek bursa and bursitis, the root means “sack” — cf. Germanic purse. Latin bac- (rod, as in bacteria or bacillus) is Germanic peg. Other related words include the long narrow baguette of French bread and a debacle, literally “unbarring” and figuratively “opening the gates” in French, used for a sudden violent rush of water, as when a dam ruptures or when the ice in a river breaks up in Spring. It was then generalized to “confused rush, stampede”. Yet another unlikely relative is imbecile. The literal meaning is “without support, tottering, feeble” from the image of an old man deprived of his staff.
Latin beaker is Germanic pitcher. The Germanic verbs to put and to push correspond to the Latin verb to butt, all with an original meaning of to thrust or shove forward. In English, even though “put” is now much less aggressive than “push”, several sports terms still retain the original sense of “shove”: the track shotput, the golf putt, and the football punt. The baseball bunt is another “shove” word, of course. Also from the “thrust forward” sense is the architectural buttress, and the botanical bud (cf. shoot), and a small bud is a button. Sackbut, the archaic name of the trombone, is appropriately “pull-push” in French. To rebut is to push back or repel and to abut is to lean against. (Butt as a noun — rifle butt, cigarette butt, buttock, etc, — is a different word. It’s Germanic for the thick end of something.) The verb to abut seems to be a “place end to end” word, which means it’s not related to the military or architectural abutment, which is from the “thrust” sense.
Another set of words is from an ie root that means to strike or kill. Latin -fend in words like offend, defend, fend (off), and fence match Germanic bane (originally, murderer) and surprisingly, German bahn, as in autobahn. This latter comes from the sense of “hacked out”. Presumably the most important tools in building a primitive road through the wilderness were axes and machetes. (Similarly, route and its relatives rout, routine and rut are from Latin rupta, broken, whose literal sense is seen in the obvious rupture, interrupt, disrupt, bankrupt, and erupt. Corrupt and abrupt are a little less obvious; they mean “destroyed [broken] completely” and “broken away”.) Abrupt is still occasionally seen as a verb in the sense of “interrupt”, as in “He abrupted his journey.”
24Feb12 Rout (a military disaster), rout (a fancy party), and route (a path or highway) are all the same word despite the very different meanings today. The military meaning is the closest to the original Latin rupta — the implication is that the defeated army has been “broken” and is retreating in disorganized confusion. Route is Latin via rupta, broken way, and was presumably contrasted with the higher-quality via strata a paved way, discussed elsewhere. In military Latin rupta came to mean a squad or that had been “broken off” from the main body, which eventually led to the sense of a rout as any tight grouping, whether military or civilian, human or animal. In the 18th and 19th century, a rout was a crowded social affair with no dancing or cards, probably similar to a modern stand-up cocktail party.
Other examples of f-to-b include the Latin root flat- (to puff or blow, as in inflate or flatulence) compared to Germanic blow, blast, and bladder. Latin frangere/fract- (fracture, fraction, fritter [away], fragment, fragile, infraction, infringe, frail, fracas, frangible ) is Germanic break and brick. The Latin root for “burn” is fla- (flame, flare, conflagration, flagrant, etc.), and that root in Germanic gave bright, blaze, blush, and somewhat surprisingly, black — literally, burned. The related -bert in Germanic personal names (Albert, Robert, Bertram, Bertha, etc.) means “bright”. As mentioned previously, Germanic burn itself is from the Latin forni- root seen in furnace. Yet again, the Latin “flower” words in flor- became things like bloom, blossom, blade, etc. in Germanic. 24Feb12 Interestingly, Latin foss- (to dig, as in fossil) is Germanic bed, so the original bed was a flower bed, not the sleeping kind, or possibly an animal’s den. (A fossil was originally anything dug from the ground, without the restriction to the remains of living things.) Sticking to agriculture, a fava bean is redundant, because Latin fava is Germanic bean.
This is most obvious in the Latin host- (stranger) words (host, hostile, hospital, hospitality, hotel, etc.) vs. Germanic guest, and Latin horti- (as in horticulture) vs. Germanic garden. (The original Indo-European root in both cases started with a gh- sound, and predictably the Guttural Growling Germans pronounced it /G/ while the Liquid Laid-back Latins pronounced it /H/.) Latin hab- (to receive or hold, as in habit) vs. Germanic give is another example, like host/guest, of the importance of reciprocal relationships in the original ie tribal society. A Germanic bridegroom was originally brydeguma, where the second half is the same word as Latin homo, man. Human, humane, homicide, and the Spanish hombre are related. So is humus, soil, and its relatives like humble, humiliation, and humility. In fact, that’s the original definition. The ie root is a tongue-twisting dhghem-, earth or soil; “human“ literally means an earthling in the science-fiction sense, and the humble/humiliate words imply a person is like dirt. Inhumation means burial. See posthumous for an erroneous association.
24Feb12 By the way, hostage is not related to hostile or host. See obsess and the other “sit” words for that one.
The human species is known as homo sapiens. This is usually translated as “wise man”, but it literally means “man who can taste” — Latin sapere means to taste. From “able to taste” it developed into “able to distinguish or perceive” and then into “able to understand”. In English, sapient now means “wise” but once meant “tasty”. Savory still has the original sense, and its opposite is insipid, without taste. Another “understand” relative is savant, while savvy is French savez[-vous] or Spanish sabe [usted], take your choice, and sage, showing wisdom, is also French. Despite the “obvious” relationship, if a sage is sagacious, that’s a coincidence. The latter is from the seek family, with relatives like the past tense sought, beseech, sake, forsake, ransack, and presage. (The herb that goes with parsley, rosemary, and thyme isn’t related, though — that’s actually a “save” word because of it’s original medicinal use,)
Latin for “have” is habere, but Grimm’s Law says that despite the similarity, Germanic have can’t be related, and it isn’t. Have is actually a member of the kap- (seize) family that includes captive and capture, as mentioned elsewhere.
I guess I should point out that reciprocal is a Latin blend of the prefixes re- and pro-, so it literally means “back and forth”. In early use the word was particularly applied to the tides.
Certain people whose knowledge of classical languages is somewhat limited object to “homosexual” being used to describe female behavior, on grounds that the Latin word obviously applied only to men. Unfortunately, the first part is really Greek homo-, “same”, which is therefore perfectly appropriate to same-sex preference by either males or females. 24Feb12 (When the word was first introduced in the late 19th century, purists objected that it was illiterate for combining Latin and Greek. C.f. automobile and television for other examples of cultural breakdown.) On the same general subject, for the last hundred years or so certain Greeks have been afflicted by the double sense of “Lesbian” — a resident of the Aegean island of Lesbos, or a female homosexual. This is due to the island’s most famous ancient citizen, the poet Sappho, who among her many works wrote some love lyrics to women. Considering that the Greeks didn’t think much of women, it is ironic that Sappho was so well-remembered that her alleged preferences led to two English modern euphemisms — lesbian and sapphic. They both have double senses, actually, because a professor of literature will use “a sapphic” to refer to a poem in the verse form she invented, independent of content.
In recent news there was a report that some citizens of Lesbos were suing the Greek Gay and Lesbian Association for defamation. Certainly took them long enough. Not surprisingly, the Greek court threw out the suit. (Presumably it’s also far too late for the Welsh to sue people for using “welshing on a debt”, for the Dutch to complain about “Dutch treat”, for the Bulgarians to get uptight about the practice of buggering, and for the Gypsies to try and eliminate the verb “to gyp”, q.v.)
Speaking of lesbians, the first recorded instance of butch to mean a tough boy or man is as the nickname of George Cassidy in 1902. It’s probably shortened from “butcher”. The sense of a mannish lesbian, the opposite of femme, dates from about 1950.
24Feb12 Note that these external distinctions have nothing to do with “dominating” or “submissive”. Just as many a hard-driving executive (male or female) might be a “yes, dear, anything you say” type at home, I know a lesbian couple where the more aggressive partner looks like a fluffy cheerleader while the less-aggressive one looks like a hard-ass cross between a cop and a wrestler.
Speaking of Greek islands with secondary meanings, note that Cyprian has meant a prostitute for two thousand years. In ancient times, residents of Cyprus were famous for their enthusiastic worship of Aphrodite. For over 2,500 years, Cretans have been proverbial liars, for some reason. The so-called “Cretan paradox” or “Epimenides paradox” goes back to about 600 bce, although not by that name; the simplest form is “Epimenides [a Cretan philosopher] said, ‘All Cretans are liars.’” St. Paul referenced Epimenides in his Epistle to Titus: “One of Crete’s own prophets has said it: ‘Cretans are always liars, evil brutes, lazy gluttons’.” The liar paradox has become the archtype of all self-referential paradoxes. Another famous example (from Bertrand Russell) is, “In a certain Spanish town, there is just one male barber; and every man in the town keeps himself clean-shaven: some by shaving themselves, some by attending the barber. If the barber shaves all and only those men in town who do not shave themselves, then who shaves the barber?” 24Feb12 Another is a hypothetical library catalog of all books that do not reference themselves; it necessarily both must and must not mention itself. Perhaps the simplest is the coin where one side says, “The other side is true.” The reverse side says, “The other side is false.”
The Old English -wise in words such as likewise and otherwise means “manner” or “style” — originally they followed a preposition: “in like wise,” i.e. in like manner. This is the same word as guise, still used in phrases like, “He was in the guise [style] of a soldier”, although it is now more common in the compound disguise, that is, a different style. Back a ways, I mentioned the various “wal-” words meaning foreigner, at least as seen by Germanic speakers. Gaul (and the Galatians) and the Kelts are other members of that family, implying that, like Slav/Slave, the terms were taken from the foreigners’ name for themselves.
Examples include grain vs. corn, grackle vs. crow, gen- (family or birth, as in genus, generate, genius (what you’re born with), generous (literally, well-born), etc. etc.) vs. kin and kind. The original meaning of “kind” as an adjective was “acting like family”. Think of Shakespeare’s pun when Hamlet said his uncle was “more than kin and less than kind”. King is another Germanic relative — its original meaning was “family head”. Ditto is yet another “kind”, the German word for child, as in kindergarten. The biblical book of Genesis is quite concerned with genealogy, the study of births. Benign and malign are bene-gen and mali-gen, well-born and ill-born, while cognate is co-gen, born together. Another word where “gen” has contracted down to “gn” is pregnant, from pre-gen, before birth. (French even got rid of the /G/, producing prenatal.) Degenerate is from Latin de generis, down from the kin, i.e., a disgrace to one’s ancestors, and regeneration is, of course, being born again. General in all its senses means “of a class, of a race” — the military use was originally an adjective, a captain general. Congenial and congenital are the same word (born with), although their definitions are now quite far apart.
Captain general, attorney general, surgeon general, and most other phrases where the adjective follows the noun (e.g. court martial), are relics of French legal, military, or culinary terms, and all still show their origin by their plurals — attorneys general, courts martial, etc. More examples are body politic, sergeant major, knight errant, church militant, battle royal, and many foodstuffs like beef Wellington, steak tartare, and eggplant Parmesan. Cf. mothers-in-law and “backwards” geographic terms like the River Thames and Mount Baker. Since Washington, Alberta and Uganda all have peaks so-named, the world has at least three Mounts Baker. If, God forbid, the capital of Louisiana ever got cloned, the state would be afflicted with Batons Rouge.
Note that the plural of grande dame is grandes dames, one of the few cases where English uses the French adjective declension, too. (There are more such phrases, but one sees beaux arts and belles lettres much more often than the singular beau art and belle lettre.)
The current pronunciations of “pregnant” and “cognate” are “spelling pronunciations” derived from erroneously attaching the /G/ to the prefix. Logically, they should be pronounced PREgnant with a long /E/ and COgnate with a long /O/ like other words with the /pre-/ or /co-/ prefix. “Zoo” and “cocaine” are mentioned elsewhere as spelling pronunciations, as is bike as a clipped form of “bicycle”. Many words where there could be a misreading used to be hyphenated — “co-operate”, “de-activate”, and so on — but now we just have to trust to luck that future generations won’t decide that “cooperate” should be pronounced with a long /U/ like cooper.
Latin glue is Germanic clay and clammy. Latin/Greek grav- (dig, scratch) gave Latin engrave, graven images, and the thing for dead bodies, as well as Greek graph- (to write); these match Germanic carve and crab (because it scratches). The experts are uncertain whether the name of the crab is from “carve” or from “hard,” as above. (Grave as an adjective — a grave crime — is a different word. That’s part of the “heavy” family that includes gravitation, aggravation, etc.) The verb to grub is another “dig” word, and grubby seems to mean “covered with dirt like a digger”. A similar root produced “split” words like Germanic cleave, cloven, and cleft, as well as Greek glyphein (to carve) seen in heiroglyphics. Greek gyne (woman, as in gynecology) is Germanic cwen/queen. As mentioned elsewhere, the Latin words in gel- (gelatin, etc.) are from a root that means “frozen”, and that’s Germanic cold and cool.
21Feb12 Although crabs have a reputation for being perverse and cantankerous (c.f. crabby), the notably sour crab apple does not seem to be related. Swedish skrappa means “wild apple”, and the Scottish term for the fruit has been scrab for several hundred years, so it’s possible the English simply dropped the /S/ (a quite common phenomenon) as the word drifted south.
Greek -gon (bend or angle, as in pentagon or diagonal) is Germanic knee. Latin genuflect is literally “bend (flex) the knee.” Proceeding down the leg, Latin angle itself is of course Germanic ankle, and going the other direction, one arrives at the Germanic knuckle. Actually, there’s probably a third “angle” body part, the chin. An anchor (once spelled “anker” like it sounds) is another notably bent object. Note that these examples imply that the /K/ in knee, knuckle, etc. used to be pronounced, which of course it was. “Diagonal” is straight Greek for “across an angle”.
There aren’t many good examples in English, because Latin had converted the /TH/ to /F/ or /D/ already and didn’t have it as a native sound. (Latin used /TH/ only to represent the Greek letter theta.) One example is Greek thyroid, which matches Germanic door (from its location in the throat), but which in Latin became the for- root previously mentioned as the root of foreign and forest. Another is an ie theu-, smoke, which led to Greek thyme (used for incense), the liturgical thurible (incense holder), and Germanic dull, dust, and dove (from the bird’s smoky color). Deaf, which originally meant blind, is a possible relative. Keltic dun- means “dark brown”, leading to the dun color and personal names like Duncan (brown head). In Latin, the root became fume, and to obfuscate something means to throw up a smoke screen. The root extended its meaning to “breath”, leading to deer, once any [breathing] animal as mentioned above. (Cf. Latin animal, from anima, breath.)
Yet again, the ie root for “to do or act” yielded Greek theme, thesis, apothecary, and synthesis, as well as Germanic do, deed, deem, and doom. The Latin change to /F/ produced all the fact, -fy, and -fication words mentioned elsewhere. Also from Greek, dyna- meant “power”; modern descendants include dynasty, dynamo, dynamite, dynamic, and the dyne as a scientific unit. Heterodyne is an early radio term — literally “mixed power” — for the beat frequency when two broadcast signals are combined.
Apothecary is obviously Greek; it meant “storehouse”. The word came to mean “shop” in general, and the French and Spanish massaged it into boutique and bodega. For the meaning change, compare the grocery store.
It seems obvious that theos, the Greek word for god (theology = study of god, atheism = no god, etc.) must be the same word as Latin deus, but it ain’t so. The Latin mutation of Greek theo- is really fa- as in fanatic (possessed by a god), profane (outside the temple), fair (held on a holy day), feast and its derivatives festival and festive, etc., while deus is from another ie root meaning “to shine”. (See the above discussion of Easter for more “shine” words.) Deus, divine, deity, diva (goddess), and the Germanic god Tiw (whose day is Tuesday) are from the “sun god” sense, while dismal (literally, “bad day”), dial (originally the sundial), dawn (literally, “daying”), and maybe diet are from the “day” sense, all through Latin and/or French. Astronomers have decided that, to avoid confusion, “day” should apply only to the Earth’s 24 hour rotation, and that a rising and setting of the sun on some other body should be called a sol. This word has been familiarized recently in connection with the Mars landers. (This only works inside our solar system; 06Jun11 I have no idea what will happen with the planets of other stars — maybe they will have “stels”.)
Even so, if you ask an astronomer the length of a day, you will get three answers, depending on the reference point chosen, and none of them are calculated using the Earth’s “true” rotation.
None of this factors in the continual slowing of the Earth’s rotation due to the Moon’s tidal friction, mentioned elsewhere.
The French massaged Latin diurnal into jour, leading to soup du jour (“of the day”, but higher priced) and journey, a day’s travel. (In many cases, “soup du jour” is because the menu writer wasn’t sure how to spell “broccoli”.) A journeyman is one who is employed by the day. A journal is a “day book” and was originally a synonym of its cousin a diary. A sojourn is “during a day”. (Jury is not related, though — that’s a “justice” word.) The other “jury”, meaning temporary, looks as if it should be a “day” word (so that jury-rigged would mean “rigged just for the day”) but the experts can find no connection. Ditto with jerry-built, poor and flimsy, which seems to be Liverpool slang from about 1870 and may commemorate some unknown lowest bidder.
To almost everyone else’s astonishment, the experts are unanimous that Germanic “day” itself is not a member of this group, but that the resemblance is pure coincidence!
The Germanic word god itself is somewhat obscure but seems to be from an ie root hut- (see previous item for H-to-G) that means to call or invoke. For example, in Sanskrit the word puruhutu (much-invoked) is often used as an epithet of a god or goddess. There is a minority view that god is actually from an ie root that meant to pour [a libation]. As an aside, many people would agree that the most appropriate scientific name ever given to a chemical is that of the caffeine-like active ingredient in chocolate. It is called theobromine, “food of the gods”.
The voiceless /TH/ sound heard in thick and thin serves as a real trap for non-native speakers of English, because it is a surprisingly rare sound in the world’s languages. It existed in proto-Germanic, but now is found only in English and Icelandic. The sound also exists in Arabic, Hebrew, and as mentioned above, Greek, and that’s about it. Speakers of German, Slavic, the Indo-Iranian and Romance families, and most non-ie languages tend to pronounce “thin” as “tin” or “sin” (and voiced /TH/ as in these and those as “deze” and “doze” or “zeze” and “zoze”) unless they’ve had a lot of practice. A good example is Arabic Othman; in Turkish he became Osman (the Turks’ name for themselves is Osmanli) while Westerners decided on Ottoman. German had a /TH/ spelling, but the sound was hard-/T/, as mentioned before in the discussion of “thal”, pronounced “tall”, German for valley. Recently German authorities have begun a campaign to “rationalize” the language with a /T/ spelling instead — Neandertal, etc. Goth and Lithuania used to be spelled with a /T/ and are so pronounced, but I don’t know if they will be victims of the spelling police. Castilian Spanish also has a /TH/ sound, because that’s the way they pronounce /S/ — they all have a bad lithp.
Unvoiced /TH/ is thus a literal shibboleth, from the Bible story (Judges, chapter 12) of the Israelites picking that word (which means “stream”) as a password in a battle with enemies who could not pronounce unvoiced /SH/ or /TH/ — anyone who claimed the password was “sibbolet” was immediately killed. Similarly, Italians have been known to use cicera, literally “chick-pea”, to sort out Frenchmen, who do not have a hard /CH/. (The Roman author Cicero was a nickname — he had a big wart on his nose — although of course the Romans said Kickero.) Allegedly, US soldiers in the Pacific theater in WW II used lollapalooza as a word impossible for the Japanese. Aladdin’s “Open sesame” password from the Arabian Nights might be another one; in Arabic the pronunciation is “sheshame”. There are two notoriously difficult tongue-twisters: “The sixth sheik’s sixth sheep’s sick,” and “The Leith police dismisseth us.” If you think you have trouble saying them correctly, try them on any (former) friend whose mother tongue is not English!
The rarity of the /TH/ sound is the reason why it is spelled with a digraph in English. Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic all have a /TH/ letter — /θ/ (theta) is the Greek version — and so did Old and Middle English — /þ/, called thorn. (Just as “alphabet” is Greek alpha-beta, the runic alphabet is called the futhorc, from the first six letters.) Unfortunately, the technology of printing developed on the continent among Germans, Dutch, and Italians who did not have that sound, and so the type fonts imported to start the English printing industry had to make do with the “continental” letter set. For a while, it was customary to replace a thorn with a /Y/ in printed text because the handwritten versions of the two looked somewhat the same, leading to the well-known ye for “the”, as in Ye Olde Curiosity Shop. (That “Ye” is pronounced “the”, please note!) Eventually the printers gave up the fight and used /TH/, the digraph which the Romans had used to express Greek theta, a sound not in the Roman alphabet either. (Roman /TH/ was sometimes voiced, as in “then”, but more commonly both letters were pronounced, as in “outhouse”. Since /H/ is now silent in all the Romance languages, the modern pronunciation is /T/ — c.f. French theatre.)
Thorns were still common in handwriting as late as Shakespeare, however, and not only ye but also ys, yt, yn, yei were commonly used for “this”, “that”, “then”, “they”, etc. well into the 1700’s. This must have been confusing for foreigners who didn’t know the trick, since in abbreviations like “yrs” for “yours” (yrs truly) it really was a /Y/, and “ye” could either be the alternate form of “the” or the second person plural personal pronoun! (Icelandic is a quite archaic language, and it still retains the thorn character in print.)
English has a few peculiar family names with an initial lower-case
/ff/ — ffolkes, ffyfe,
ffrench, and so on. The authorities are agreed this is from a
misreading of the Old English handwritten capital /F/, which looked
like a ligature of two lower-case /f/’s — 
. These
days one occasionally sees such names written with an initial capital
— notably the comic writer Jasper Ffordes — but that is
inaccurate.
Another Old English letter not present in the continental type fonts was the yogh — /ȝ/ — used for the semi-consonant /Y/ sound before another vowel. Think of “pure” compared to “poor”. That little /Y/ in pure is the remains of a yogh. By Renaissance times it was written only in Scots and Northern English, and early printers replaced it with continental /Z/, again from the appearance. This practice led to its presence in northern names like Mackenzie, which is correctly pronounced “Mackenyie”, and Dalziel, pronounced “Dalyell”. Menzies should be pronounced “Menyies”, but casual English pronunciation usually makes it sound more like “Mingus”. The actor Denzel Washington’s name is simply the northern spelling of “Daniel” and, in theory, should be so pronounced. (Cf. the many words pronounced with a short-/E/ in America and a short-/A/ in England when followed by an /R/, such as derby, clerk, etc. In some cases America has also adopted the short-/A/ — sergeant, the doublet person/parson, and the fact that darling started life as “dearling”.)
Eventually, some words with a yogh were re-spelled to use /I/ or /Y/ instead (e.g., year and eye were originally ȝer and eȝe) or it was simply dropped. The a- in front of verbs (alight, awake, abide, etc.) was once ȝe-; cf. German verbs with ge-. Americans and Irish often drop the sound itself in words where the English do not. For example, American “dew”, “due”, and “do” are homophones, but in England the first two are pronounced “dyoo”. The proper British pronunciation of duke is “dyook”, rhyming with “puke”. The American version, rhyming with “kook”, is distinctly low-class in Britain. (The English novelist Georgette Heyer consistently used the spellings “dook”, “stoopid”, etc. when reproducing the speech of working-class characters, which probably puzzles her American readers.)
Note that half the Mackenzie clan surrendered to the Sassenachs and now pronounce their own name the way it looks to the English, while the other half re-spelled it to be Mackinney to keep the proper Scots pronunciation. This is by no means uncommon — taking another example from a different letter and language, it’s quite possible that Sir Mick Jagger and Chuck Yeager are distant cousins, with one branch of the family retaining the German pronunciation of Jaeger through re-spelling, and the other surrendering and going with standard English pronunciation of /J/. Many Youngs, Youngdahls, etc. used to be “Jung-”. My wife’s maiden name is Caylor, which is certainly a phonetic re-spelling of Koehler (Köhler) to keep people from pronouncing it “Coaler”.
Perhaps my wife’s ancestors should have grown up in Central Texas. A lot of the original settlers here were German, and the Austin-San Antonio area has such place names as the towns of Boerne and Gruene, Koenig Lane and Mueller Airport, all pronounced with an attempt at the original German umlauts — “burney”, “green”, “kaynig” and “miller”, respectively. For that matter, I have relatives spelling the family name “Deardorf” instead of “Dierdorf”, presumably because someone got irritated with their first syllable pronounced “dire” instead of “deer”. Me, I’d never think of doing something like that, if only because it’s such fun correcting telephone solicitors.
Certain people who should be world-famous are obscure because of pronunciation difficulties — cf. Ignacy Lukasiewicz (Wook-a-shave-its), a famous mathematician who devised the so-called “Polish notation”. If she received her PhD today, Dr. Maria Salomea Dolega-Sklodowska (Dowenga-SklawDAWFskah) would probably keep her maiden name for professional purposes. If so, she would be far less remembered by generations of science students, but fortunately for them, she apparently adopted the pronounceable name of her husband Pierre Curie, even though she got two Nobel Prizes and he only got one. 07Dec11 (Actually, she did not give up her maiden name — she was quite proud of her Polish heritage and always used “Sklodowska-Curie” professionally; she was upset that newspapers and the general public dropped the “hard part”.) Astrophysicists honor Bohdan Paczynski, the expert on the formation of supermassive black holes, by calling the torus of hot interstellar gas spiralling into a black hole a “Polish Doughnut”. The only species of wild horse is Przewalski’s horse (equus ferus) of the Asian steppes. The explorer’s name is pronounced “pruhyeeVALski”, more or less.
12Dec11 Marie Sklodowska-Curie was the first person to win two Nobel prizes, not merely the first woman. (Counting her husband, daughter, and sons-in-law, the Curies netted six Nobels. One daughter and her husband shared a Chemistry prize, and their second daughter’s husband was awarded a Peace prize for directing Unicef.) In a hundred and ten years, only three other people have won two prizes. Linus Pauling is the only double winner in completely unrelated fields; he won for Chemistry (the quantum nature of chemical bonds) and Peace (he organized the scientific community’s petitions to force the test-ban treaty). John Bardeen of Bell Labs won two in Physics (the theory of superconductivity and the invention of the transistor), while Frederick Sanger got two in Medicine for the structure of Insulin and the method used to decode DNA.
Switching from Poles to Greeks, consider the great painter who was known as El Greco because Domenikos Theotokopoulos did not fall gracefully on Spanish ears. (He was born in Crete, actually, but from Spain I guess that was close enough.) The electronic music composer Vangelis would undoubtedly be less famous if his movie scores were credited to Evangelos Odysseas Papathanassiou. The test for cervical cancer is called the Pap Test, short for Dr. Georgios Papanikolaou, the Greek physician who invented it.
While on the subject of human anatomy, a whole lot more women know about the G Spot than know about the German gynecologist Ernst Gräfenburg who first described it. Similarly, everybody knows about the ubiquitous E. coli bacterium, but nobody remembers the 19th century German bacteriologist and pediatrician Theodor Escherich who discovered it. (Despite the headlines, unless you have a few billion E. coli in your gut, you die. The bug is the body’s source of several essential vitamins.)
NASA calls their X-ray orbital telescope the Chandra observatory, named for the Indian-American astrophysicist and Nobel laureate Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar. (In an interesting combination of heredity and environment, Chandrasekhar literally was raised from birth to be a Nobel Prize winner. He was a nephew of the Nobel-winning physicist Sir Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman, and Chandra’s mother was fiercely determined that her child would out-do his brilliant uncle.)
I wonder if these men and women were compensated by getting less unwanted telephone calls — I certainly can visualize a poor solicitor seeing such a name come up on his or her computer monitor and quickly clicking to the next entry. Names don’t even have to be long — I know someone named Chudej, which has the property (for non-Czechs, at least) that if you see it, you can’t pronounce it, and if you hear it, you can’t find it in the telephone book or on the Internet. The pronunciation is “Hoo-jay”, more or less. That reminds me of the joke that the pterodactyl is obviously an Irish animal, either “Peter O’Dactill” or “Terry Dactill” depending on whether the user has read the word or heard it pronounced.
Similarly, I’m sure the Welsh keep place names like Rhosllanerchrugog, Gwyddelwern, Llanymawdowy, and the grand champions, Gorsafawddachaidraigodanheddogleddolonpenrhynareurdraethceredigion and LLanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch, just to irritate and embarrass the English. That last is even too much for the Welsh, who, I have heard, usually say “Llanfair PG”. The reason for all those -llan- syllables in place names is that it means “church” or “parish” in Welsh. (As an aside, Welsh is certainly the only language which can have four consecutive /L/’s. 14Dec11 That /LL/ digraph is pronounced /CH/ more or less. Don’t ask. Of course in Spanish it’s pronounced /Y/.) I’m told that some Welshmen won’t admit they are fluent in English until the tourist reassures them they are from the USA, Australia, or Canada rather than from England. All things considered, this is certainly an easier feat than an anglophone trying to extract English from a perfectly-bilingual resident of Montreal.
Long words in themselves are not particularly difficult if the reader knows the language. English speakers touring Germany soon become accustomed to signs like hauptbahnhofparkplatzeinfahrt and automatically break the monster into its components: haupt (high), bahn ([rail]road), hof (hall), park (same as English), platz (plaza, place), ein (in), and fahrt (fare, travel). Thus we have the “high-railroad-hall-park-place-in-travel”, the main railroad station parking lot entrance. Just in case you think this is (a) long, and (b) artificial, here is the actual name of a recent German law: Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz, loosely translated as the “Beef Labeling Regulation and Delegation of Supervision Act“. German newspapers abbreviate it to the ReÜAÜG. The RheindonaudampfschifffahrtselektrizitätenhauptbetriebswerkbauunterbeamtenGesellschaft is the “Association of Subordinate Officials of the Head Office Management of the Rhine-Danube Steamboat Electrical Services”. There is no such thing as the longest legitimate German word. Nouns can get arbitrarily long; one way is because numerals are written out as a single word. For example, in English 79,254 is seventy-nine thousand, two hundred and fifty-four, but in German it is Neunundsiebzigtausendzweihundertvierundfünfzig, and this obviously can be extended to infinity. Think of the ability of chemists to likewise create exceedingly long chemical names — see Alphamethylphenethylamine for a trivial example.
Many other languages get just as bemused by the English habit of long noun phrases like a college Division One June 2006 baseball World Series home plate umpire chest protector strap, which has fifteen consecutive nouns (seventeen if you treat 2006 as “twenty oh six or two thousand six”, all but one of which grammatically act as adjectives.
There is at least one grammatical construction where English goes so far as to treat an entire phrase as a single word, namely when adding a possessive. Consider the phrase “the Secretary of State’s limousine”. The position of that /’s/ only makes sense if “secretary of state” is regarded as one word. This doesn’t happen with the only other remaining English noun inflection, the plural. Two of the breed are “Secretaries of State”, not “Secretary of States”.
06Jun11 Most other Indo-European consonants, — /L/, /M/, /N/, /R/, and /S/ in particular — were not affected by Grimm’s Law, although /S/ in particular is changed in various language families. Observe that all these are the “extended” consonants — those that can be drawn out for a long time. (Mmmmmm…, ssssss…, etc.) Grimm’s Law seems to have only affected the “plosive” sounds that cannot be prolonged.
The early philologists found quite a few exceptions to Grimm’s Law — Germanic words where a consonant did not change as expected. Eventually it was realized that there was a secondary principle, now called Verner’s Law, that applied when the consonant in question was in certain positions relative to the stressed syllable of a word. This had been masked because the stress of a proto-Germanic word was not necessarily on the same syllable as that of its modern descendants, and is one of the reasons that most of my examples so far have been at the beginning of words, where Grimm’s Law always applies no matter where the accent falls. This is complicated by the fact that since most Germanic languages were heavily inflected, Verner’s Law might cause different forms of the same word to be spelled differently — the added endings changed the syllable count and the stress. A few examples showing where Vernor over-ruled Grimm are Latin septem to English seven (instead of “sethem”), Latin centum to English hundred (instead of “hunthred”), and the variations between lose/lorn, raise/rear, dead/death, etc. The -kyr- in valkyrie, from the same root as choose, is another Vernor’s Law substitution.
About 500 ce, the southern German-speaking regions (Bavaria, Switzerland, Austria, etc.) underwent a further consonant shift, creating the so-called High German or Hochdeutsch dialect. Among other things, it changed /P/ to /PF/ (cf. English “pan” vs. High German Pfanne), /D/ to /T/ (“day” vs. Tag), /T/ to /TS/ or /SS/ (“two” and “eat” vs. zwei and eßen), /F/ to /B/ (“wife” vs. Weib), and /K/ to /X/ or /KH/ (“make” vs. machen). A thousand years later this became the standard literary German mainly because that’s the version that Martin Luther used, and “German” by itself now means High German. Low German or Plattdeutsch in the North kept the “original” consonants (i.e., they were shifted only once), producing Saxon, Dutch, and English. It is still spoken along the Baltic coast of Germany, but it is now regarded as low class. Among the diaspora, “Pennsylvania Dutch” and Yiddish are High German, as is the German formerly spoken in New York City and Texas, while the non-Pennsylvanian Mennonites and Hutterites speak a version of Low German.
Note that the platt- of Plattdeutsch must have been borrowed by the Germans from another language; if it was a Germanic word then by Grimm’s Law it would have started with /F/. (The German word for flat is flach, which itself must have originated after the High-Low split, since it isn’t “pflach”.)
08Aug11 If I can interject an interesting (to me) personal anecdote here, my surname (Dierdorf) got caught up in the middle of this. The German town of Dierdorf is east of the Rhine, between Coblenz and Cologne. It is right at the line where the High German Consonant Shift, described above, happened, and the two ends of my name went their separate ways. The first letter stayed as Low German /D/ instead of becoming High German /T/ — the word for “animal” is Dutch dier and English deer, but in High German it’s tier. The terminal letter, however, did shift to High German /F/ instead of Low German /P/. (The Dutch word for “town” is dorp, English thorp.) Here’s a so-called isogloss map showing that the various consonant shifts varied by region or even by village in the intermediate zone, with some changes “taking” and some not. As you can see, the dorp-dorf line is exactly where my name says it should be!
No one knows why proto-Germanic changed in these ways from the parent Indo-European, although other languages have undergone similar but less drastic systematic shifts, a few of which are discussed in the next sections.
