Secrets of the Words You Know
Blog 26 *t and the secrets of a thousand
Now we conclude our tour of PIE dentals with Voiceless *t
(i) *t at the start of a word
Just as with *p, Proto-Germanic alters the voiceless consonant to a fricative, which gives English ‘th’. This ‘th’ is usually itself unvoiced. The voiced outcome is very largely found either between vowels (‘father ’etc) or in words which are usually unstressed in speech, such as the definite article ‘the’ and pronouns like ‘they’, them’, ‘their’, ’thy’, ‘this’ and ‘that’. Such unstressed words are phonetically more prone to maintain the voicing of accompanying vowels.
We saw under *s an example of the expected development of *t>th in inherited ‘thatch’ versus borrowed ‘toga’, and under *b ‘thorpe’, borrowed from Old Norse, which shows the same Germanic change, versus Cornish and Welsh examples which conserve a PIE *t.
A good example of the conservation of initial *t across different language groups is a root *ten-, whose core meaning is ‘to stretch’.
The root gives rise to an impressive number of words borrowed into English. From Latin we have ‘tenuous’. From a Latin past participle (hence the second ‘t’, which is the routine sign of a past participle in Latin) come ‘tent’ (‘something stretched’) and ‘tension’ (showing that in Latin the sequence ‘tio’ develops to ‘sio’). A version of the root with a dental suffix gives ‘tend’ and its many derivatives like ‘intend’ (from Latin), and (via French) ‘obtain’, ‘retain’ and so on, as well as the adjective ‘tender’ (also via French).
The conservation of *t in Greek is shown by a Greek word from an o-grade version of the same root *ten- that gives us, via Latin and French, ‘tone’ and its many derivatives from ‘tonic’ to ‘baritone’.
A Sanskrit derivative from the same root is ‘tantra’, literally a ‘loom’ where threads are stretched, but better known in its sense of a system of thought or doctrine. Persian gives us ‘sitar’, which literally means ‘three strings’. The element ‘tar’ is ultimately from *ten-, and means ‘string’, again from the underlying sense of ‘stretch’, and conserving the original initial *t.
Is there an inherited English word from this root? Under Grimm’s Law, we would expect it to start with ‘th’. What might happen to something stretched? Yes, it could become ‘thin’!
English ‘three’ itself is another good example of a word inherited from initial PIE *t, contrasting with words like Latin-derived ‘triple’, Greek-derived ‘trigonometry’ (literally ‘measuring triangles’) and ‘triskel’ (the ‘three-legged’ emblem of the Isle of Man), or the Russian three-horse carriage, the ‘Troika’, all of which conserve the original *t of the PIE numeral reconstructed as *treyes. Germanic languages have words for this numeral starting with ‘d’, as in German ‘drei ‘ or Dutch ‘drie’; or with ‘t’, for the Scandinavian languages, as in Danish ‘tre’. (Scandinavian languages have generally simplified inherited Proto Germanic *th to ‘t’, but to ‘d’ in the unstressed words where English has a voiced ‘th’). As we have just seen from ‘sitar’, the combination*tr has followed a different path in Persian: developing first to ‘thr’ (by coincidence as in English) and then to ‘s’.
As it happens, Greek also shows an initial ‘s’, but from a different combination, *tw-. This is evident from the word ‘seismic’, from a PIE root *twei-, meaning ‘to shake’, which also appears in English in what seems at first sight the unrelated word ‘whittle’. What has happened here is that PIE *tw- has given the expected Proto Germanic *thw (still apparent in Old English), which has then been simplified to ‘wh’.
A root *terH-, with the meaning of ‘cross over’, ‘overcome’ or ‘across’, lies behind both ‘through’ and ‘thorough’, both being, as you would expect from the ‘th’, inherited words. It seems that the latter derives its meaning from the sense of going through something literally from side to side. The Latin preposition ‘trans’, so frequent in borrowed words, comes from the same source, as does ‘avatar’ a Hindi word with the original meaning of the descent of a deity to earth in a tangible form. We noted the sense of ‘overcome’ in this root under *n (Blog post 13) when we discussed the word ‘nectar’. As we observed under ‘sitar’, Persian changes *tr>s, so that their word from this root used for an inn or palace (literally a ‘protected place’) is a ‘saray’, as in the English borrowing ‘caravanserai’.
So the sound-code for English initial ‘th’ is:
In an inherited English word, initial ‘th’ = PIE *t = Latin, Greek (but *tw>s), Indo-Iranian (but *tr>s in Persian), Celtic, Balto-Slavic t = German/Dutch d (in most cases: German ‘tausend’ is an exception) = Scandinavian t (but usually d where the English th is voiced)
No other PIE sound yields English ‘th’
(ii) Secrets of a thousand
If you look carefully at the word ‘thousand’, you will see that it shares an ‘nd’ with another number term ‘hundred’. This is not a coincidence. A ‘thousand’ is literally ‘a swollen hundred’, from Proto Germanic*thūs-hundi-, with the first element going back to a PIE root *teuH-, whose basic meaning seems indeed to have been ‘to swell’.
Other English words inherited from this root, with the expected initial ‘th’ but different suffixes, include the most ‘swollen’ part of your leg and your fingers, that is your ‘thigh’ and ‘thumb’. Latin provides us with ‘tumor’ and ‘tuber’, again showing different suffixes for different types of swelling.
Greek shows a wider range of meanings from this root, including:
- ‘safe’ (maybe from the feeling that fatness was a sign of health), a sense that is at the origin of another German coinage of the Nineteenth century, ‘creosote’, literally ‘flesh-preserver’, where the zero-grade *tw- yields Greek ‘s’, as we noted above;
- ‘the body’ (presumably seen as a ‘full’ form), visible in medical terms starting with the element ‘somato-’, again with *tw>s;
- ‘cheese’, where the Greek word, perhaps based on the idea of coagulating, is visible as the second element of ‘butter’ or ‘cow-cheese’ as we shall see under *gʷ.
(iii) What’s an inherited English word from another PIE root beginning with *t?
This time, we will take another root *terH-, meaning ‘to rub’ or ‘to turn’. ‘Turn’ itself comes from the Greek for ‘a lathe’, developed from this root, via French and Latin, along with words like ‘contour’ and ‘detour’.
The sense ‘rub’ extends into the crushing of grain, so offering us (rather surprisingly) ‘tribulation’ which goes back to a Latin word that means a device for winnowing grain, and so metaphorically a source of affliction. If something is rubbed smooth, it can be seen as having lost interest, so leaving us the idea of ‘trite’ (another word from a Latin past participle, explaining the second ‘t’) for something over-used and so lacking in interest. A sense of twisting and piercing lead to the borrowing ‘trauma’ from Greek for a wound or injury.
What’s an English verb that comes from this root? (Think agricultural processing…and a final consonant from a suffix different from those behind any of the words above.)
The answer goes to subscribers next week as usual.