Secrets of the Words You Know
Blog 8 English as a Germanic Language: the fronting of ‘g-’ and the secrets of ‘gold’ and ‘yellow’
The answer to the question at the end of Blog 7 is Copenhagen. You should expect English initial ‘ch’ in a word inherited from Proto-Germanic to match a ‘k’ or ‘hard c’ sound in another Germanic language.
And why the ‘g’? The Danish for the city is ‘København’, with the ‘v’ one would expect for a ‘haven’. The ‘g’ in English is due to translation of the Danish sound via a North German pronunciation, where the word for ‘harbour’ is ‘hagen’.
So now let us turn from ‘k’ to ‘g’.
The sound ‘g’ is usually distinguished from the sound ‘k’ by the fact that it is ‘voiced’, as explained in Technical Note 1. If ‘k’ is fronted to ‘ch’, you might therefore expect that ‘g’ would be shifted to the voiced equivalent of ‘ch’, that is to say the sound usually written ‘j’ in initial position in English. This never happens.
Indeed all words in English beginning with written ‘j-’ are either borrowed or (as with ‘jaw’ and ‘jowl’, discussed in the previous blog) affected by a borrowed word. Many examples are borrowings from French, from ‘jail’ and ‘jaundice’ through ‘jealous’ to ‘jolly’ and the ‘law’ words like ‘just’, ‘judge’ and ‘jury’. Their relative scarcity explains why the ‘J’ tile scores so highly in Scrabble.
So what does happen to an inherited ‘g’ before a front vowel? The words ‘gold’ and ‘yellow’ that I mentioned back in Blog 3 unlock the secret. English inherited both words from Proto-Germanic words which had different initial vowels. These vowels are still reflected in the ‘o’ of ‘gold’ and the ‘e’ of ‘yellow’. English has maintained *g before the ‘o’ of ‘gold’ but changed it to ‘y’ before the front vowel ‘e’ of ‘yellow’.
We will come back to such ‘vowel gradations’ – a very important legacy from Proto-Indo-European – later.
The result of the fronting of ‘g’ before a front vowel was to merge it with the sound already used in words such as the ancestors of ‘young’, ‘yoke’, ‘year’ and ‘yeah’, all of which go back to a Proto-Germanic (and indeed Proto-Indo-European) *y-.
Another typical example of this shift from ‘g’ to ‘y’ is the inherited word ‘yarn’. Its origin is in a root that appears to mean gut, in the sense of entrails. Borrowed words from the same root show an initial ‘h’ in ‘hernia’, from Latin, and an initial ‘ch’ in ‘chord’[1] from Greek (matching the ‘ch’ in ‘chlorophyll’ that we saw was related to ‘gold’ and ‘yellow’). As we will see later, this ‘sound-code’ of Greek ‘ch’ = Latin ‘h’ = Proto-Germanic ‘g’ is very normal. Other examples of Proto-Germanic initial ‘g’ becoming English initial ‘y’ include ‘yard’ (in the sense of a measure of length), ‘yester-’ as in ‘yesterday’; and ‘yearn’. In all these words, including ‘yarn’ and ‘yard’, the initial consonant was followed by a front vowel at the time of fronting.
There are a few exceptions where ‘g’ has been conserved before a front vowel, typically as a result of either borrowing or influence from Old Norse: most importantly ‘give’ and ‘get’, but also ‘guest’ (already mentioned in Technical Note 2) and ‘gallows’, where the first vowel was again a front vowel at the crucial time.
*k and *g in other positions
Although we are concentrating on initial consonants, it’s worth looking briefly at the effects of English fronting on inherited PGmc *k and *g in the middle or end of words.
In these positions, where fronting takes place (which differs slightly between the two sounds) you will see for inherited *k the same shift to ‘ch’ as in initial position, as for example in ‘bench’, ‘breeches’ or the second ‘ch’ of ‘church’. Doublets reflecting different vowel environments in Old English include ‘drench’/‘drink’, and ‘stitch’/‘stick’.
When medial or final *g is fronted the sound is represented either by ‘i’ before a consonant (eg ‘nail’ or ‘rain’) or by ‘y’ in final position, as in ‘day’ ‘say’ or ‘way’. We will see in the next Blog the conservation of the inherited *g in such words in modern German.
To complete the story of Proto-Germanic *g, a later and unrelated change took place in Middle English for surviving examples of *g after ‘o’ or ‘a’. In these phonetic contexts, the sound evolved to ‘w’. Examples include ‘bow’, ‘saw’ (the cutting tool), ‘tow’ and ‘barrow’ in the sense of a hill or a mound of archaeological interest. (It is not related to a frame for carrying items as in ‘wheelbarrow’). In all these cases other Germanic languages conserve *g, as we will see for ‘tow’ in the next blog.
To conclude this blog:
- If a modern English word that one might expect to be in ‘basic vocabulary’ starts with a written ‘y’, it may represent one of two PGmc sounds: *g or *y. Depending on which it is, modern Germanic counterparts are likely to start with either ‘g’ (German ‘gelb’ for ‘yellow’) or ‘j’ (German ‘ja’ for ‘yeah’).
The next blog makes some comparisons between English and German. But first, here is a final question on the implications of fronting in English to end this Scandinavian excursion.
Question: Søren Kierkegaard was a famous nineteenth-century Danish philosopher and theologian: what, perhaps appropriate, doublet to ‘Kierkegaard’ exists in English?
[1] Gut has been used for the strings of musical instruments from ancient times, though usually now replaced by other materials: hence terms like ‘harpsichord’. ‘Cord’ without the ‘h’ is from the same origin, but lost its ‘h’ in the transition from Greek via Latin to French and finally to English.