Blog 12: Proto Indo European Sonorants: *m and the secrets of ‘meal’
This and following blogs will look at the way each of these assumed Proto Indo European (hereafter ‘PIE’) consonants have developed as reflected in English words, both inherited and borrowed from other languages descended from that original speech-community.
We will start with the sonorant consonants, which as we saw from the comparison between English and German in Blog 9 appear to be more stable in initial position than most other consonants.
There is therefore a high probability that one of these sounds in an inherited English word will go back to the corresponding PIE sound, at least at the start of a word. (The exception is where an English ‘y’ goes back to a Proto Germanic ‘g’, as discussed in Blog 8.)
In such cases the English sound also likely to be replicated across many of the modern languages descended from Indo-European, as well as in ancient languages like Latin and Ancient Greek, which supply so many of the borrowed words in present-day English. (As explained in Blog 9, however, you will find ‘v’ for English and PIE ‘w’ in most cases)
Part of the enjoyment of understanding how sounds inherited by the various IE language groups relate is to see the way that the meaning of words has changed. For each PIE initial sound, I will include an inherited English word whose ‘secret’ lies in the diversity of meanings of the words from the same PIE root that English has borrowed from other IE languages.
You will also be invited to try a ‘root-test’, where you can use information on English borrowings from a PIE root starting with the sound in question to identify one English inherited word from the same root.
So let us start with the sound-codes of PIE *m, which has proved one of the most stable initial sounds.
(i) *m at the start of a word
If you look at English words beginning with ‘m’ you will see many examples of slightly different structures with a common core of meaning, for example:
‘mid’ and ‘medium’
‘mind’ and ‘mental’
‘month’ and ‘menstrual’
‘motherly’ and ‘maternal’
In each of these doublets, the first word is inherited from Proto Germanic and the second is a borrowing from Latin, sometimes via Old French, showing a very consistent identity of the initial ‘m’ between English and Latin.
A less obvious set of words that span English and Latin are inherited ‘mourn’ and Latin-based ‘memory’ and associated words like ‘commemorate’. The original root *mer-, reduplicated to *memor- in the forms used in Latin, as mentioned in Blog 10, would appear to have meant ‘remember’ (another of the set), but can be used also in the sense of ‘remember with sadness’ as in ‘mourn’. (This root is often given as (s)mer-, as related words in several other Indo-European languages have an initial ‘s’: we will come back to this under *s shortly.)
As for Greek, the borrowed word ‘mania’ is from the same root *men- as ‘mind’ and ‘mental’, but without their dental suffix. Another such Anglo-Greek doublet is inherited ‘mead’ (a traditional alcoholic drink) and the first element of ‘methylated’ as in ‘methylated spirits’, which is borrowed from the Greek for ‘drunk’. So initial ‘m’ again matches between English and Greek.
There are also doublets showing identity of initial ‘m’ between English and Celtic languages.
Take ‘Mere’, a word inherited from Proto-Germanic with the sense of ‘lake’, and now little used except in poetry or in place-names such as Windermere. This matches not only Latin-based ‘maritime’ and similar words, but also several Celtic place names which include reference to the sea. For example, the Gulf of Morbihan in present-day Brittany means literally ‘little sea’; and Connemara in Ireland means ‘The descendants of Conn of the sea’ (as opposed to other clan branches elsewhere in the wider area which is known, from the same clan name, as ‘Connacht’ or ‘Connaught’). The name ‘Muriel’, also of Celtic origin, means ‘sea-bright’.
A similar match with the Slavic languages underlies ‘Pomerania’, the area ‘by the sea’ (the first element being a preposition meaning ‘by’), along the Baltic coasts of Poland and Germany.
All these ‘sea’ words go back to a root *mori-, which also lies behind other water-related words such as ‘marsh’ and ‘morass’, and two more words that require some explanation:
- ‘meerkat’ (from Afrikaans with the ostensible meaning of ‘sea-cat’). This is a strange designation for a creature usually visible in near-desert settings. ‘Sea-cat’ is thought to be an example of ‘folk etymology’ (see Box 3), perhaps from an oriental word visible in Hindi markaṭ ‘ape’;
- the ‘meershaum’ pipe (with a literal meaning of ‘sea-foam’), so called because the material is so light that it can float on water. Looking back to Blog 6, you can see that the English doublet to German ‘schaum’ is the Middle Dutch import ‘schum’ that gave us ‘scum’.
Box 3: Folk Etymology (1)
Erroneous beliefs about the meanings of words can sometimes affect their sounds. Known as ‘folk etymology’, a classic case is the way that French has borrowed the German word for pickled cabbage: ‘sauerkraut’. The first part, clearly related to English ‘sour’, was interpreted as the ‘cabbage’ element (French ‘chou’), while ‘kraut’ (German for ‘cabbage’) was reinterpreted as the French for ‘crust’: ‘croȗte’, giving the rather strange term in French of ‘choucroȗte’ or literally ‘cabbage crust’. Apart from ‘meerkat’ above, you will come across several examples in subsequent blogs.
We can extend the matches for initial *m further by noting descendants of a PIE root *magh-, whose core meaning is about ability and strength. This lies behind inherited English words like ‘may’, ‘might’ and ‘main’ (the ‘i’ of ‘main’ once again representing an inherited Germanic ‘g’) and the Greek word that gives us ‘machine’, but also the words ‘Magi’ and ‘magic’, which come to us from Old Persian via Greek and Latin.
Another widespread group, from a PIE root *meg-, gives the sense of ‘large’ in English-inherited ‘mickle’ and ‘much’, Latin borrowings like ‘magnitude’ and ‘magnificent’, Greek compounds beginning with ‘mega-’ and ‘megalo-’, and Sanskrit/Hindi compounds like ‘Maharajah’ (‘great King’) or Mahatma (‘great-souled’). The Latin comparative forms for ‘greater’ give us in addition words like ‘major’ and ‘majority’, as well as ‘magistrate’ and (via old French) ‘master’ (and derived ‘Mister’), ‘mistress’, and (via Italian) ‘maestro’. So ‘Mr Big’ is a bit of a tautology!
Two further borrowings into English from India are from the root *men- mentioned above. The first and the more straightforward is the word ‘mantra’, a usually repeated expression of religious or philosophical thought. The second, applied to China more often than to India, is from the very closely related Sanskrit term ‘mantri’, meaning someone who gives counsel, and so a senior official. Indian culture has historically had great influence in South-East Asia, and this term was taken into the Malay language, where the Portuguese took it up, probably combined it with their similar-sounding word for ‘to command’ (‘mandar’, like English ‘mandate’ from Latin words literally combining the ideas ‘hand’ – Latin ‘manus’ as in ‘manuscript’ – and ‘give’ – Latin ‘dare’), and applied the resulting ‘mandarin’ to the senior Chinese officials with whom they interacted and also to their language.
The word for ‘mouse’ also starts with an ‘m’ in almost every language group (French ‘souris’ and similar words in other Romance languages are exceptions, deriving from Latin ‘sorex’, meaning ‘shrew’). It is argued that the PIE root for ‘mouse’, *muHs-, may itself be linked to the root *meuH- underlying ‘move’ (a borrowing from Old French), and that the mouse may therefore have been named for its propensity to steal food.
The diminutive of the Latin word for mouse gives us our word ‘muscle’, the bulge of a muscle under the skin being seen as like a small mouse. In Sanskrit, for a similar reason of shape, ‘muska-s’ means ‘testicle’.
This is the source – via Persian, Greek, Latin and French – of our word ‘musk’, the scented gland of the ‘musk-deer’ being of scrotum-like appearance. Additional echoes of this odiferous animal include the muscat and muscatel wines, and ‘nutmeg’ from Old French ‘nois muguete’ or ’musky nut’.
Against this background, we can be confident that in most cases an initial ‘m’ in an English word inherited from PIE will go back to PIE *m, and that you are likely to find at least a few words that start with ‘m’ with similar meanings to inherited English words in almost any Indo-European languages you know.
So the basic sound-code for English initial m is simplicity itself:
Initial m in an inherited word = Proto Germanic *m= Proto Indo European *m = Latin/Greek/Celtic/Balto-Slavic and Indo-Iranian m
We will set out all sound codes in this way, in other words first tracking the English sound back first to Proto Germanic (mentioning modern Germanic languages only where they show something distinctively different) and then to Proto Indo European, and then showing correspondences first in the centum and then the satəm languages from which borrowings are likely to come. (For lack of borrowings, sound codes will not mention Albanian and Armenian or now extinct Indo-European languages such as Hittite and Tocharian.)
From Merry to Bracelet
But here is a partial exception: the word ‘merry’. What doublets does it show? Surprisingly, at first sight, they begin with a ‘b’, and their meaning is also not what you might expect. The doublets are words from Latin via French like ‘brief’ and ‘brevity’ and from Greek like scientific words beginning with ‘brachio-’, similarly meaning ‘short’. (‘Brachiocephalic’ people are ‘round’-headed as opposed to long-headed). All these words go back to a PIE root *mregh-u-, also meaning ‘short’. (You will remember from Blog 8 that a final ‘y’ in English – as in ‘merry’ – is often from Proto-Germanic *g, which in turn is the expected outcome of a PIE *gh, as we will discuss later). The evolution of its meaning in English is thought to reflect how good cheer makes time feel short.
To fill out the story of English borrowings from this root, in Greek, ‘brachio’ was also used to refer to the upper arm (considered to be shorter than the forearm). This was then borrowed into Latin as a term for the arm as a whole, or indeed – perhaps illogically – the forearm, and can be seen in words from late Latin and French like bracelet and ‘brassière’ – the latter from an old French term first used for an arm guard and then for a shoulder strap.
More such surprising links await you…..
This example shows that in the phonetic context of the initial cluster *mr- the *m evolves to a ‘b’ in both Latin and Greek. We can therefore add to the sound-code for initial m:
Proto Indo European *mr->Latin/Greek br-
(ii) Syllabic * m̥
Numbers provide a good way to see how ‘syllabic *m̥’ (see Blog 10) has evolved in some of the daughter languages of PIE.
Let us take the number 10. Latin has in this case very largely conserved the version of this number that is reconstructed for PIE (*dekm̥), and this features in English in the word December, showing that ‘em’ is the normal evolution in Latin of a ’syllabic’ *m̥. In Greek, as we can see from the borrowing ‘decade’, the syllabic *m̥ has – as indicated in Blog 10 – changed to ‘a’, the nasal sound completely vanishing. Similarly, in the Hindu festival Dashara, the ‘dasha’ element (meaning ‘10’) also shows *m̥> ‘a’ in Indic languages.
We can confirm and extend these differing realisations with the number 100, with an assumed Proto Indo European form of *dk̂m̥-tom (usually thought of as originating as a short form of *dk̂m̥t dk̂m̥tom, or ‘ten tens’). Here again we can see Latin ‘centum’ as in ‘century’, Greek borrowing ‘hecatomb’ (literally a sacrifice of ‘one hundred oxen’) and, as we saw in Blog 11, Avestan (a form of Old Persian) ‘satəm’. And we can now add the Germanic reflection of syllabic *m̥ (‘um’) seen in English-inherited ‘hundred’, the ‘m’ assimilated to ‘n’ before the following dental consonant, as in Latin. Assimilation (Box 4) is our second example (after Metathesis in Box 1 of Blog 6) of how phonetic context canshape how sounds evolve, as mentioned in Technical Note 1.
Box 4: Phonetic Context (2): Assimilation
Some sounds ‘go well together’: for example, it’s easier to pronounce an ‘m’ before a ‘p’ or ‘b’ and an ‘n’ before a ‘t’ or ‘d’, as fewer changes in articulation are needed than in a sequence like ‘mt’ or ‘np’.
That’s why we see words like ‘embittered’, where the first element goes back to an earlier *en. The particular case of nasals matching immediately following consonants is usually regular across all similar words in a language.
There are however several types of ‘assimilation’, as such changes are called. One of the more radical is the change of a consonant to match a preceding or subsequent consonant across an intervening vowel, as we shall see when we look at the numeral 5 later.
(iii) The secrets of ‘Meal’
We have already seen some diverse meanings in words in English that go back to a root beginning with Proto Indo European *m. Here is a particularly striking example.
The root *meH- appears to have had the basic sense of ‘measure’. English has inherited from the root, with a suffix in *l, the word ‘meal’, which was used in early English texts with reference not to eating but to the measure that is time, and seems to have acquired its present meaning from the sense of ‘the appointed time for eating’. An echo of the initial sense, with no reference to food, is in the word ‘piecemeal’. A number of modern Germanic languages use their equivalent word for both ‘time’ and ‘meal’.
English has also borrowed a set of words with a suffix in *t, which in Latin has developed to ‘s’, and which include ‘measure’ itself (borrowed from Old French), and ‘immense’ (‘can’t be measured’) and ‘dimension’, from Latin. From Hindi we have derived ‘mahout’, which comes from Sanskrit ‘mahamatra’ (the ‘great measurer’ being originally a high official), which shows the root more clearly. And it is possible that this root is also the origin of ‘meter’ and related elements in words from ‘metronome’ to ‘trigonometry’, derived from Greek.
An extended form *meHn-, with further suffixes, is the origin of the inherited words ‘month’, again reflecting the sense of ‘division of time’, and ‘moon’, as the heavenly body that measures each month. Greek and Latin are among the many Indo-European languages that have similar terms for ‘month’. English borrowings from these languages include ‘menopause’ (the first element ultimately from Greek), ‘menstrual’ (from Latin via Old French) and ‘semester’ (from the Latin for ‘six months’).
You can see from this brief survey how, even within one language’s own inherited words, the use of suffixes in PIE can over time make it very hard to spot relationships between what are in fact related words. Who would have thought of ‘meal’ and ‘moon’ as at all related?
(iv) What’s an inherited English word from another Proto Indo European root beginning with *m?
Here’s your first ‘root test’. There is a Proto Indo European root *mer-, which features in many words borrowed from other Indo-European languages. These include:
- From Latin, ‘mortal’; ‘postmortem’
- From Greek, ‘ambrosia’, the drink of the Gods in Greek myth, where the initial ‘a’ again reflects a Proto Indo European ‘negative *n̥’, and – reminiscent of what happened in Latin and Greek with an initial ‘mr’ cluster – the ‘b’ is inserted between the ‘m’ and the ‘r’ for ease of pronunciation. The drink thus confers ‘immortality’.
- From Sanskrit, the name of the city, sacred to Sikhs in particular, of Amritsar (which literally means ‘immortal lake’), the initial ‘a’ again reflecting the Proto Indo European negative particle). The Thai beer ‘Amarit’ is taken from the same Sanskrit word.
Can you think of an inherited English word beginning with ‘m’, with an ‘r’ as its second consonant, and with a link to the concept of ‘death’?
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