Blog 15: Proto Indo Euopean Sonorants: *r and the secrets of Ethelred
Now to the sound-code for the PIE sound *r.
(i) *r at the start of a word
If you were asked to name a rodent, you would probably think of a rat. In English the word ‘rat’ appears alone and without any obvious origin, but ‘rodent’ – a borrowing from Latin in which it means ‘gnawing’ – shows that just as the mouse may have been named for stealing, the rat is the animal that gnaws. So here again we see the stability of an initial sonorant between English and Latin. This stability is confirmed by the match between inherited ‘red’ and two Latin borrowings ‘Rufus’ and ‘rubicund (a later blog will discuss the second consonant in these words), as well as inherited ‘rip’ and Latin borrowings like ‘rupture’, ‘abrupt’ or ‘interrupt’.
Similar stability of *r is shown by a root *Hreĝ -, which appears to have had the original meaning of ‘to stretch out’, from which come senses such as ‘to direct’ and in several languages, with a lengthened vowel, ‘King’.
In noun form, the root would have an added *s in the nominative case, so *Hrēĝs. This appears in Celtic, for example, in the name of Vercingetorix, the leader of the most serious challenge to the conquest of Gaul by Julius Caesar, and in the series of books created by René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo about the Gaulish fictional hero, Asterix. It is also seen in place-names such as ‘Portree’ (‘King’s port’) in Skye, Gaelic having lost the final velar consonant.
The English match, seen in the first part of my forename, ‘Richard’ (literally ‘strong to rule’), along with German ‘Reich’ and Dutch ‘Rijk’ (‘King’) as in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, goes back to a Proto-Germanic borrowing from Celtic,. English ‘rich’ comes from the same source.
The Latin match is evident from words like ‘regal’ (and the parallel borrowing from Old French ‘royal’) – to say nothing of the traditional dog’s name ‘Rex’.
The Indo-Iranian match is well known from Hindi ‘Raj’.
There is also a less obvious Greek match, seen in English in the word ‘anorexia’, which we mentioned under *n. In Greek the sense of ‘stretch out’ has evolved to cover also ‘desire’ (stretch out for something) or ‘appetite’. This lies behind the word that supplies the ‘orexia’ element of ‘anorexia’. As you will recall from ‘onomatopoeia’ the initial ‘o’ is a sign that the PIE root would have begun with a laryngeal, so this is how we know that the root would have the initial *H that we have already indicated.
PIE *r, like its twin *l appears seemingly randomly as either of these sounds in Sanskrit and other Indic languages. One example is a PIE root *reg-, which appears to be to do with the process of dyeing cloth. In Sanskrit this gives rise to two very different words, both however with a sense of colour. One, conserving the *r, is the raga, the essential tonal framework under-pinning types of Indian classical music, which is so named as providing the ‘colour’ of the music. The other is ‘lac’, and its derivatives like ‘lacquer’ and ‘shellac’, which have to do with the lac beetles which provide red dye and lacquer.
However, just as we seen with *l, the fact that *r is widely conserved in initial position cannot be relied on to mean that every initial ‘r’ in an inherited English word goes back to a PIE *r. It may just as well go back to a PIE *kr-
So:
- ‘riddle’, in the sense of a ‘sieve’, is a cousin to borrowings around the idea of judgement, such as from Latin ‘discrimination’ and ‘crime’ and from Greek ‘critic’ and ‘crisis’. The secret of this constellation of words includes indeed the borrowing from Latin ‘se-cret’ itself!
- ‘raw’ is similarly a doublet of ‘crude’ and ‘cruel’ (from Latin).
More examples when we discuss PIE *k.
So here is the sound code for English r:
Initial r in an inherited word usually = PGmc *r= PIE *r = Latin/Greek/Celtic/Balto-Slavic/Iranian r = Indic r or l
Some cases of initial r go back to PGmc *hr = PIE *kr (see further under *k)
(ii) *r elsewhere
We have already seen (Box 1, Blog 6) that *r is unusually prone to metathesis, usually with a vowel. ‘Nerve’ and ‘Neuro-’, which we mentioned under *n,is another good example of this.
We will see under *s a perhaps more surprising relationship between *s and *r. Here, let me just ask if it has ever occurred to you that there is something quite odd in the apparent switching between ‘s’ and ‘r’ in the famously irregular English verb ‘to be’: for example, why do we say ‘was’ as well as ‘were’ and ‘is’ as well as ‘are’? It’s another case where an apparently small oddity will lead us to a major issue.
(iii) Sonant r̥
The reflexes of PIE *r̥, whether short lor long, match those for *l̥. So we will again see Germanic forms with a ‘u’-vowel (usually but not always leading to a written English ‘o’), Latin forms with an ‘o’ or ‘u’ vowel for the short sonant and an ‘a’ vowel for the long, and Greek forms with an ‘a’ vowel.
For the short sonant, we can take inherited ‘horn’ and Latin-derived ‘cornet’, both going back to an original * k̂r̥n-. Borrowings to do with the heart from Latin-derived ‘cordial’ and ‘discord’ to Greek-derived ‘cardiac’, all from an original *k̂r̥d-, also show the expected vowels.
For a ‘u’ vowel in Latin and an ‘a’ in Greek we can take Latin-derived ‘ursine’ and Greek-derived ‘Arctic’, both deriving from an original PIE *Hr̥tko-, meaning ‘a bear’, with ‘Arctic’ showing a neat metathesis of the original *tk to ‘kt’. The Northern sky’s Great Bear constellation explains the logic of having a bear represent the North. Also from the same source is King Arthur, literally ‘Bear-man’ in Celtic.
For long *r̥, the normal reflex in English and Latin is shown in English ‘corn’ and Latin-derived ‘grain’, both from a root *ĝr̥H-no-.
Another English example of long *r̥ is ‘word’, the first element of which comes from the zero-grade of a PIE root *we/orH- ‘to speak’. Here the Latin-derived doublet ‘verb’ is from the e-grade, which explains why we see an ‘e’ rather than an ‘a’ in ‘verb’. (We will explain the non-matching final consonants of ‘word’ and ‘verb’ in a later blog.)
(iv) Secrets of Ethelred
The PIE root *HreiH- ‘to number or count’ gives rise to an interesting word-family across several languages. With a dental suffix it lies behind the last element of the inherited words ‘hundred’ (based on the idea of ‘count of tens’), and also provided the Old English ‘red’ for ‘counsel’, as in both the name and the nickname of the rash King ‘Ethelred the Unready’. (In Old English Ethelred means ‘noble counsel’, and ‘unready’ in this context meant ‘lacking in good counsel’. Alfred the Great by contrast was named to display ’Elf-counsel’.) The same root also gives German ‘Rat’ as in ‘Rathaus’ for a ‘house of counsel’, or Town Hall.
This root also provides the first element of ‘riddle’, this time in the sense of a language puzzle. The associated verb, originally meaning ‘to advise’ or ‘to guide’ has developed the seemingly remote meaning of understanding writing and is now limited to the sense of ‘to read’.
The same suffix gives us our words ‘ratio’, ‘ration’ and ‘rationality’ from Latin and ‘reason’ via Old French.
With a *-dhm suffix it is the source for the Greek word about ‘number’ that we have borrowed as ‘arithmetic’, the initial ‘a’ once again showing that the root began with an (a-coloured) laryngeal.
(v) What’s an inherited English word from another PIE root beginning with *r?
Root: reig-, to stretch out
Borrowings from Latin: ‘rigor’; ‘rigid’
What’s the inherited English verb from this root? Hint: might there be palatalization of the PIE *g, which, as we shall see later, would normally give PGmc *k?