The roots of English
Jul. 31st, 2007 11:35 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lprovenIain "Mosh" Purdie - WINOLJ but is syndicated somewhere, but %^*ing LJ now won't let me view my own list of friends - asked me to comment on his blog post here where
The snag is, the answer won't fit, so here it is...
The thing is, sometimes the origins of a word get obscured. Everyone knows that English is an Indoeuropean language, for instance, but how few know what that means? About as many as know that Finnish is a Finno-Ugric one from the Uralic group.
English is a hybrid. It comes from several roots. Englisc - Old English - was the language of the Angles, descendants of the Saxon invaders; their tongue was a Saxon one, related to low German, especially Frisian. It's mixed a little with the Celtic languages previously spoken before the Saxons got here and took over; the people who today speak a language related to the real original language of Britain are the Welsh.
Hints in names: Surrey <= Sud rige, the South Reich, the "southern empire" or "southern reach". (Reich and Reach come from the same root). Essex <= East Sax(ons). Sussex <= South Sax(ons), Wessex <= West Sax(ons), and so on.
Then the Normans invaded and Old English got a big injection of Norman French, leading to our dual words for things: the animals are "swine", from the same root as "schwein" in modern Hochdeutsch, but their meat is "pork" from "porc". These examples are well known, but in German or Norwegian, the meat is just "swine flesh".
So our language has dual roots from 2 branches of the Indoeuropean tree: one from the Teutonic languages (modern relatives German, Dutch, Norwegian/Danish/Swedish, Icelandic) and one from the Romance group (the descendants of Latin: modern relatives French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanain, Rumantsh)
Often now, a millennium after we suddenly got a French king and court, the (often longer) romance word has overtones of authority while the (often shorter) Saxon one is direct and informal: "demand" vs. "ask", "problem" V "bother", "oppose" V "against". There are hundreds of examples; mostly we're not aware of them.
Your example "window" is nothing to do with "fenester", directly. It's a Norse kenning, a pun: it means "wind eye", the eye that the wind used to see into your house. Windr auge became "window" in English, "vindu" in Norse. But "wind" probably shares a root with "vent", and "wind" in modern French is "vent": the shared root there is long before Latin or Teutonic and goes straight back to Indoeuropean.
Some useful tools: [1] get a proper web browser, like Firefox, with keyword searches. :¬) Then [2] look up the roots of words on the online dictionary by typing "dict window" as an address. You get this:
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=window
To see some of the differences between Saxon and Norman words in modern English, look up Anglish, an artificial dialect of English which uses exclusively Saxon roots wherever possible. In Firefox, type "wp anglish" to get the Wikipedia page:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglish
Also go read Poul Anderson's wonderful "Uncleftish Beholding", which is - as the title says - Atomic Theory in Anglish. ("A-tom" = "no cut" in Greek, which becomes "un cleft" in Anglish. "Atomic", pertaining to atoms, becomes "uncleftish". "Beholding", an understanding of an idea - a theory.)
It's a wonderful piece by a great master of our language, and once you read it, you for the first time comprehend what "oxy-gen" means. "Sour stuff". Pure brilliance. Anglish is also known as "Ander saxon", a modern kenning - it's a pun by Doug Hofstadter. ("Ander" from Anderson, but also from the Saxon root meaning "other".)
In summary: to understand why English words as as they are, you need to look at their synonyms; you'll often readily be able to find one latinate word and one teutonic one. In this way, English is rich: if you're thinking in French or German, you only get one word; we have 3, 4, 5 or more. French "chaud": warm or hot. English: 2 words, "warm" and "hot", plus blazing, blistering, boiling, burning, incandescent, searing, sizzling, torrid and many more. English is big: probably the biggest language on Earth with something like a one million words.
What a funny old language (Monday, July 30, 2007)
I've been around a few places recently and I'm currently nesting in France. As I've been around Europe a lot in the last few weeks, I've noticed a lot of similarities (and differences) in the languages - mainly Spanish, German, French and Italian. Don't get me started on the Eastern European ones as I'm simply baffled by the whole fricking lot of them.
But the one that raises the most questions? English. It's weird. I mean, I love it, but it's weird.
Take the following two examples. In English, we say "window". This translates into the following words in various languages:
French - fenêtre
German - Fenster
Italian - finestra
Spanish - ventana
Dutch - venster
Latin - fenestra
Greek - parathyro (in "Greeklish")
OK, Spanish is a little off but the rest are obviously hugely based on the Latin. Where the hell did we get "window" from? And to throw another spanner in the works, why do we resort to the Latin root for the word "defenestration" (the act of throwing something, usually a person, through a window)? OK, "dewindowation" looks and sounds crap, but still...
Want another example? Try "blood":
French - sang
German - Blut
Italian - anima
Spanish - sangre
Dutch - bloed
Latin - cruor, cruorem
Greek - aima (in Greeklish)
Now in this case, English seems to be in the slight majority for a change. French and Spanish have joined forces and Latin's sat there wondering why nobody is listening to it. On the other hand, what's the English term for blood-letting? It's "exsanguination". So we hop roots to another source again. Argh.
I'm no language expert, though I find them interesting. Anyone got any ideas where these to-ings and fro-ings come from?
The snag is, the answer won't fit, so here it is...
The thing is, sometimes the origins of a word get obscured. Everyone knows that English is an Indoeuropean language, for instance, but how few know what that means? About as many as know that Finnish is a Finno-Ugric one from the Uralic group.
English is a hybrid. It comes from several roots. Englisc - Old English - was the language of the Angles, descendants of the Saxon invaders; their tongue was a Saxon one, related to low German, especially Frisian. It's mixed a little with the Celtic languages previously spoken before the Saxons got here and took over; the people who today speak a language related to the real original language of Britain are the Welsh.
Hints in names: Surrey <= Sud rige, the South Reich, the "southern empire" or "southern reach". (Reich and Reach come from the same root). Essex <= East Sax(ons). Sussex <= South Sax(ons), Wessex <= West Sax(ons), and so on.
Then the Normans invaded and Old English got a big injection of Norman French, leading to our dual words for things: the animals are "swine", from the same root as "schwein" in modern Hochdeutsch, but their meat is "pork" from "porc". These examples are well known, but in German or Norwegian, the meat is just "swine flesh".
So our language has dual roots from 2 branches of the Indoeuropean tree: one from the Teutonic languages (modern relatives German, Dutch, Norwegian/Danish/Swedish, Icelandic) and one from the Romance group (the descendants of Latin: modern relatives French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanain, Rumantsh)
Often now, a millennium after we suddenly got a French king and court, the (often longer) romance word has overtones of authority while the (often shorter) Saxon one is direct and informal: "demand" vs. "ask", "problem" V "bother", "oppose" V "against". There are hundreds of examples; mostly we're not aware of them.
Your example "window" is nothing to do with "fenester", directly. It's a Norse kenning, a pun: it means "wind eye", the eye that the wind used to see into your house. Windr auge became "window" in English, "vindu" in Norse. But "wind" probably shares a root with "vent", and "wind" in modern French is "vent": the shared root there is long before Latin or Teutonic and goes straight back to Indoeuropean.
Some useful tools: [1] get a proper web browser, like Firefox, with keyword searches. :¬) Then [2] look up the roots of words on the online dictionary by typing "dict window" as an address. You get this:
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=window
To see some of the differences between Saxon and Norman words in modern English, look up Anglish, an artificial dialect of English which uses exclusively Saxon roots wherever possible. In Firefox, type "wp anglish" to get the Wikipedia page:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglish
Also go read Poul Anderson's wonderful "Uncleftish Beholding", which is - as the title says - Atomic Theory in Anglish. ("A-tom" = "no cut" in Greek, which becomes "un cleft" in Anglish. "Atomic", pertaining to atoms, becomes "uncleftish". "Beholding", an understanding of an idea - a theory.)
"For most of its being, mankind did not know what things are made of, but could only guess. With the growth of worldken, we began to learn, and today we have a beholding of stuff and work that watching bears out, both in the workstead and in daily life...
The firststuffs have their being as motes called unclefts. These are mighty small: one seedweight of waterstuff holds a tale of them like unto two followed by twenty-two naughts. Most unclefts link together to make what are called bulkbits. Thus, the waterstuff bulkbit bestands of two waterstuff unclefts, the sourstuff bulkbit of two sourstuff unclefts, and so on. (Some kinds, such as sunstuff, keep alone; others, such as iron, cling together in chills when in the fast standing; and there are yet more yokeways.) When unlike unclefts link in a bulkbit, they make bindings. Thus, water is a binding of two waterstuff unclefts with one sourstuff uncleft, while a bulkbit of one of the forestuffs making up flesh may have a thousand or more unclefts of these two firststuffs together with coalstuff and chokestuff."
It's a wonderful piece by a great master of our language, and once you read it, you for the first time comprehend what "oxy-gen" means. "Sour stuff". Pure brilliance. Anglish is also known as "Ander saxon", a modern kenning - it's a pun by Doug Hofstadter. ("Ander" from Anderson, but also from the Saxon root meaning "other".)
In summary: to understand why English words as as they are, you need to look at their synonyms; you'll often readily be able to find one latinate word and one teutonic one. In this way, English is rich: if you're thinking in French or German, you only get one word; we have 3, 4, 5 or more. French "chaud": warm or hot. English: 2 words, "warm" and "hot", plus blazing, blistering, boiling, burning, incandescent, searing, sizzling, torrid and many more. English is big: probably the biggest language on Earth with something like a one million words.
