Secrets of the Words You Know
Blog 14: Proto Indo European Sonorants *l: Alexander and the Gurkhas, dulcet and glucose, and the secrets of ‘to lend’
Now let us turn to PIE *l at the start of a word
Here are some matches between inherited and borrowed words. Once again, we will concentrate on the first two consonants of each word to show links between the PIE roots and words that English has either inherited or borrowed from related language groups.
First, some matches between words inherited from Proto-Germanic and words borrowed ultimately from Latin (some via Old French), the inherited word first:
We have already come across ‘lip’ and ‘labial’, from a root*leb-, meaning ‘lick’ or ‘lip’.
‘leech’ (in sense of the insect which clings to your leg to suck your blood) and ‘ligature’ from a root *leig- ‘to bind’. The ‘ch of ‘leech’ is another typical case of the fronting of a stop consonant to an affricate in English, just like ‘kirk and ‘church’.
‘lust’ and ‘lascivious’ from a root *las- (with a core meaning of ‘be greedy’, and different suffixes).
One that links English and Greek is:
‘lick’ and ‘lichen’, where the Greek word presumably implies that the lichen is seen as ‘eating’ the tree or stone, as the root *leigh- gives words for ‘lick’ in many Indo-European languages. The ‘ch’ in Greek is NOT an affricate like the ‘ch’ in ‘church’, but a breathy ‘k’ sound.
The secrets of love….
The word ‘love’ has straightforward matches in both Latin and the Slav languages, for example Latin-derived ‘libido’, and the name of the ‘lovely’ capital of Slovenia, ‘Ljubljana’ (written ‘j’ pronounced as English ‘y’), all from a root *leubh- But in addition, it has less obvious links to other words in English itself, such as the near-obsolete ‘lief’ (‘I would as lief do that’) and associated ‘belief’ and ‘believe’ (where one is putting one’s trust in someone or something), and also ‘leave’ in the sense of ‘give someone leave to do something’. A borrowing from a Dutch term ‘verlof’, where ‘lof’ is a direct counterpart to ‘lief’, gives English the term ‘furlough’, with an original use particularly within the military (permission to be absent for a period), though now applied more widely.
…and of battle!
A PIE root with a similarly widespread distribution is *leuk- which means roughly ‘shine’, and is the origin of inherited ‘light’ (as the opposite of ‘dark’) and a whole series of borrowings from Latin with various suffixes, including ‘lucid’, ‘luminous’ and ‘lustre’, and also ‘lunatic’ (from the Latin for the ‘shining’ moon). The term ‘leukaemia’ is composed of the Greek for ‘white’ and ‘blood’ (as in ‘an-aemia’ etc) with the first element similarly from this root. More surprisingly, perhaps, a word derived from the same root is the now poetic ‘lea’, meaning a meadow or originally a clearing in a forest and so ‘bright’, which has a doublet in Flemish, so that a water meadow is – yes – ‘Waterloo’.
A comparison with Welsh brings us to the iconic Welsh ‘double ll’ sound, which is in essence an unvoiced ‘l’ – a very unusual example of an unvoiced ‘sonorant consonant’. It is frequently seen in the term ‘Llan’, used to describe a church and the precinct around it. Breton and Cornish have not made a similar change, so that we see towns named after saints like Landerneau in Brittany for St Ténénan, or the country estate of Lanhydrock in Cornwall for St Hydroc, each starting with a single voiced ‘l’, in contrast to Welsh ‘Llanfair, or ’Church of Mary’ (m>f , pronounced ‘v’, being a standard mutation in certain phonetic environments in Welsh). All these words are doublets of English ‘land’, from a PIE root ‘lendh-’ meaning ‘open country’.
Alexander and the Gurkhas
In one major language group the regular conservation of PIE *l breaks down. This is Indo-Iranian. In Iranian languages, such as Persian, initial PIE *l usually gives ‘r’, and this also happens in some but by no means all cases in Sanskrit and its derivatives (probably as a result of taking words from different dialects, as we saw in English with ‘fox’/’vixen’).
A seemingly improbable match shows a case of PIE *l>r in an Indic language. The Greek name ‘Alexander’ means ‘defender of men’, the first element being from a PIE root Hlek-, meaning roughly ‘protect’, and the second word meaning ‘man’, as in ‘android’ or ‘man-like’. (Note that the initial ‘A’ of ‘Alexander’ is another example of Greek showing a vowel where there was originally a laryngeal, as in ‘asterisk’.) The famously martial Gurkhas are also ‘protectors’, and the ‘rkh’ element goes back to the same root, thus showing *l>r. So what are the Gurkhas renowned for protecting? As we will see in a later blog, ‘Gu’ is the expected development in Indic of the PIE root that in English supplies us with ‘cow’.
One can conclude that a PIE *l in initial position will give an ‘l’ in most daughter language groups, with the exception of ‘r’ in Iranian and sometimes in Indic languages.
That is a relatively simple sound-code. However, we must beware of asserting the converse: that all initial ‘l’ sounds in English words inherited from PIE go back to a PIE *l. Such sounds may go back instead to a PIE *kl-.
We will explain later why the *k may disappear in English inherited words before another consonant, including ‘l’, but this quirk explains such apparent mismatches as:
- English inherited ‘lean’ (as in ‘to bend over’) and our borrowing from Latin ‘re-cline’
- English inherited ‘low’ (as of the sound made by cattle) and Latin borrowings of words like ‘clamour’.
Such examples are however quite rare.
Hence the sound-code for English initial l is:
Initial l in an inherited word usually = Proto Germanic *l= PIE *l = Latin/Greek/Celtic/Balto-Slavic l = Iranian r = Indic l or r
Some English initial l = PGmc *hl = PIE *kl (see further under *k in a later Blog post)
(ii) Sonant *l̥
Examples of short and long sonant *l̥ are the words English has inherited as ‘wolf’ and ‘wool’. ‘Wolf’ derives from *wl̥kʷo- and ‘wool’ from *wl̥H-neH-, the original combination l̥H giving a long l̥ as compensation for the loss of H.
Both show a rather similar outcome to the sonants *m̥ and *n̥, which also gave ‘u’ vowels in PGmc, as the linked vowels are broadly conserved in English as a ‘u’ sound despite their spelling. The double ‘o’ of the English spelling of ‘wool’ marks the original difference in length that has since been lost in spoken English.
In Latin, short *l̥ usually gives ‘ol’ as in our borrowing ‘mollify’ from a root *mel- meaning ‘soft’ from which we have inherited ‘melt’ and ‘mild’. However, there are also examples of ‘ul’, as in ‘fulminate’ from *bhl̥g-, to which we will return under *bh, and another word we are about to meet below. Long *l̥ gives /lā/ in Latin, which is why the animal oil from a sheep’s wool is ‘lanolin’.
In Greek, the outcome is usually ‘la’ or ‘al’ in both cases, as is visible in English borrowings from Greek such as ‘plate’ (via Latin, and cognate with English ‘flat’ as yet another case of ‘p’/’f’ relationships).
A sweet spot
PIE seems to have included a few roots either beginning with the cluster *dl- or as a zero-grade form of a root of the form *del-. This cluster has proved quite unstable. We will come later to a case where the *d is lost in an earlier *dl- in a very common word in both Germanic and Latin. Here let us just consider a root *dl̥k-u, meaning ‘sweet’.
In Latin, the original *l̥ appears as ‘ul’ as in our borrowing ‘dulcet’. In Greek, however, the related word is the ‘glyko-’ element that we see in ‘glucose’ or ‘liquorice’ (the initial ‘g’ of this latter word, originally meaning ‘sweet root’ having been lost on its transit via Late Latin and French).
So why has Greek changed ‘dl’ to ‘gl’? It is an example of ‘dissimilation’ (box 7 below)
Box 7: Phonetic Context (4): Dissimilation
In Box 4 (Blog post 12), we described the way in which speakers of a language may alter one sound to be more like another (‘Assimilation’). Less frequently, speakers may however do the opposite. The switch of n>m before another ‘n’ in ‘gymnasium’ in Blog post 13 is an example, and the change of *dl (both articulated with a very similar tongue position – try it!) to Greek ‘gl’ in ‘glyko-’ is another.
Similar examples include:
In Latin, the word ‘meridian’ comes from the two words ‘middle’ (Latin ‘medio-’) and ‘day’ (Latin ‘dies’), where the ‘d’ of ‘medio-’ has been dissimilated to an ‘r’.
In French, the Latin word ‘peregrinus’ (which means ‘foreigner’ or ‘stranger’ and was the term used under the Roman Empire for subjects without the rights of Roman Citizenship) had its first ‘r’ altered to ‘l’, as in English borrowing ‘pilgrim’.
In English, examples include ‘purple’, where the ‘l’ replaces a second ‘r’ in the Latin/French word from which it is taken.
(iii) Secrets of ‘to lend’
The root behind the English verb ‘to lend’ and its associated noun (actually borrowed from Old Norse) ‘loan’ is PIE *leikʷ-. Its core meaning is ‘to leave’, as in Latin-based ‘relinquish’ (with infixed ‘n’) or ‘derelict’ (‘something left to decay’). The English/Old Norse words derive from the concept ‘leaving something to someone’. This root is also a component of the words ‘eleven’ and ‘twelve’, which signify respectively one and two ‘left’ over the number ten. Equally remote-seeming are the Greek-based words ‘eclipse, el-lipse’and ‘el-lipsis’ from the same root, in each case signalling something left out, whether the light of the sun, the perfection of a circle or words left to be understood. We will explain the Greek ‘p’ in a later blog.
The English verb ‘to leave’ is NOT related to the root above, but to a root *leip-. This has the core meaning of ‘to stick or adhere’, as is visible in the English borrowing from Greek, where the derived word means ‘fat’, of ‘lipids’ to describe greasy substances or the coinage ‘liposuction’ for fat removal by plastic surgery. In English its sense has evolved from sticking to a place (‘leave it where it is’) and so ‘remaining’ to include the very different sense of ‘departing’. ‘Life’ has the same origin, based on the idea of continuing existence.
As you can see, etymology and historical linguistics can require quite difficult judgements as to whether two, even apparently similar, words do have the same origin.
(iv) What’s an inherited English word from another PIE root beginning with *l?
The root to examine is *Hlegʷ –
A substantial number of borrowings from Latin come from this root. They include ‘levitate’, ‘lever’, ‘al-leviate’, ‘re-lieve’ and ‘leaven’. Can you find an inherited English adjective with a meaning that links these words?
Looking at the structure of the root, you can see that the final consonant is our first labio-velar in this set of questions. Hint: although Latin, as you can see, reflects this with the labial sound ‘v’ (pronounced as ‘w’ in Classical Latin), the Germanic languages conserve the velar sound in the specific context of the word you are about to identify.
What is it?
Answer in the next email to subscribers.