Secrets of the Words You Know
Blog 16: Proto Indo European Sonorant Consonants: *w, and the secret of wisdom
Now to the first of the final two sonorant consonants in PIE, the ‘semi-vowels’ *w and *y, which default to their matching vowels *u and *i respectively in zero grade.
(i) *w at the start of a word
Both sounds are conserved in English. Indeed English – often not thought of as in any way a conservative language – is, with Dutch, almost unique among contemporary Indo-European languages in conserving the ‘w’ sound rather than changing it to a ‘v’. Some examples of initial *w:
- English inherited ‘wain’ versus German ‘wagen’ as in Volkswagen, where written ‘w’ is of course pronounced ‘v’. Our word ‘wagon’ is borrowed from Dutch, which as you can see conserves the ‘g’ which has been fronted in ‘wain’ to ‘i’, but like English also conserves the ‘w’ sound.
- English ‘worm’ versus ‘vermin’ (borrowed from Latin);
- English ‘water’ versus Russian ‘vodka’(the actual Russian for ‘water’ itself is ‘voda’).
While Ancient Greek shows evidence of retaining the inherited *w sound in the earliest texts (with a special letter for the sound) it had been lost by the ‘Classical’ period, which is the usual source of English borrowings from Greek. This explains why the science of (English-inherited) ‘work’ is known as ‘ergonomics’ rather than ‘wergonomics’ and why (Latin-derived) ‘vomiting’ is caused by an ‘emetic’. Similarly the first element of ‘economy’ (which is from the Greek for ‘house’, ‘oikos’) is a doublet of the Latin-derived term for a settlement ‘wick’.
(It is interesting comment on the instability of vowels to note that the pronunciation of ‘economy’ and ‘economics’ in English has evolved significantly over my lifetime from ‘eeconomy’, the ‘long’ initial vowel reflecting the Greek diphthong, to a near-universal ‘short-e’ ‘eckonomy’. ‘Ecology’ is now following a similar path.)
Words with ‘hydro-’ are also borrowed from Greek. Here the first syllable of the PIE root *wodr-, the source of the ‘water’ words in almost every Indo-European language group, appears in zero grade *udr-. In Greek a ‘u’ in initial position is always ‘aspirated’ (preceded by an ‘h’), so the Greek stem is ‘hudr-’. For the later development of ‘u’ in Greek to a written ‘y’, see the discussion of ‘nymph’ under *n in Blog post 13 above.
In Latin, the shift from ‘w’ to the sound ‘v’, which took place over several centuries, was largely complete by the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century AD, so that most inherited ‘w’- sounds have been replaced by ‘v’ in English borrowings from Latin and its daughter languages. However, some of the earliest such borrowings into Proto Germanic do reflect the earlier pronunciation: that’s why we say ‘wall’, not ‘*vall’, ‘wick’ (mentioned above) and also ‘wine’, while using the later borrowing ‘vine’ for its source.
Clear matches between ‘w’ in inherited English words and ‘v’ in words borrowed from Latin include:
‘will’ and ‘voluntary’
‘wain’ and ‘vehicle’; and also ‘way’ and ‘via’, all from a root *weĝh- ‘to go in a vehicle’
‘wake’ and ‘vigil’
‘wan’/’wane’ and ‘vain’
‘wasp’ and the buzzing Italian scooter ‘Vespa’
Some need a bit of explanation.
- ‘Virile’ derives from the Latin for ‘man’. The Latin word goes back to a PIE root *wiHros, whose only remaining representations in English are hidden in compound words such as ‘werewolf’ (a person who changes into a wolf, so literally a ‘man-wolf’) or more surprisingly ‘world’. This word is a pan-Germanic construction, whose second element is Proto Germanic *-ald, meaning ‘age’, as in modern English ‘old’, so something like ‘man/age’, evolving to ‘human race’ and then to where that race lives.
A Celtic product of the same root is seen in the Scottish name ‘Fergus’ (literally ‘man-strength’), showing that in Gaelic and Irish the original *w has changed to an initial ‘f’.
- A ‘wether’ sheep (a male sheep castrated before sexual maturity, literally ‘a yearling’) matches Latin-derived ‘veteran’, both words going back to a root *wet-, meaning ‘year’, which is also thought to underlie the Latin word for ‘calf’(‘vitulus’) from which we have borrowed via French the word ‘veal’.
- ‘Widow’ and Latin-derived ‘divide’ both incorporate a PIE preposition *wi, meaning roughly ‘asunder’.
- ‘West’ is thought to be linked to words for ‘evening’ (from the Latin word for which comes the word for the evening service ‘Vespers’ and from the Greek equivalent the ‘Hesperides’), though it is difficult to distil a clear PIE root from the apparent matches.
- ‘Win’ goes back to a PIE root *wen-, which seems to have a core meaning of ‘to desire or strive to gain’. Other words inherited from the same source include ‘winsome’ (desirable or lovely) and the final elements of proper names like ‘Edwin’ (literally ’friend of wealth’) and ‘Melvin’ (‘friend of the Moot or Council’, with an unusual modification of the second consonant to which we will return in a later blog post). The Latin borrowings from the same root include the ‘venerated’ ‘Venus’, goddess of love, ‘venom’ (originally a love-potion) and hunting-terms like ‘venery’ and ‘venison’.
A PIE root *weis-, meaning ‘to flow’, is visible in the names of several European rivers, such as the Weser (in Germany) and the Vistula (in Poland). In English, the same root gives inherited ‘ooze’, the initial ‘w’ being lost as a result of ‘dissimilation’ (Technical Note 3, Box 7) before what became a ‘u’ sound. (Note that the name of the River Ouse does not come from this source, but from a Celtic descendant of the PIE root *wodr- mentioned above as the ancestor of ‘water’.) A possibly-linked root *wis- meaning ‘poison’ is the source of the word ‘virus’, a straight borrowing from Latin.
The PIE root *wal-, meaning ‘to be strong’ can be seen in borrowings from Latin like ‘valour’, ‘valid’ and ‘invalid’. With a dental suffix, it also lies behind English ‘wield’ as in ‘wield power’ and the name ‘Oswald’ (‘God’s power’). This combination is also the source of the Slavic name ‘Vladimir’/Volodymyr (the second element is sometimes cited as ‘great’, though a very similar word ‘mir’ means ‘peace’ or also ‘world’ in many Slavic languages), showing the expected equivalence of English ‘w’ and Slavic ‘v’. And congratulations if your name is Donald – you too are ‘the ruler of the world’, from a Celtic *dubno-walos. (The first element is a match of ‘deep’, as we will see under *b, with the meaning of ‘world’.)
Another Celtic match from the same root is Welsh ‘gwlad’, meaning ‘land’ in the sense of a national realm. This is visible in the motto on Welsh £1 coins, meaning ‘loyal am I to my country’, taken from the Welsh national hymn ‘Land of my Fathers’. We’ll see other examples of PIE initial*w> Welsh ‘gw’ shortly.
Sanskrit, like most Indo-European languages, also shows ‘v’ for PIE*w. The term ‘bustee’ for a shanty town comes from a Sanskrit verb ‘vasati’ (he/she dwells), which goes back to the same root as ‘wick’.
There is an interesting class of words where an initial ‘w’ in English-inherited words is matched by a hard ‘g’, often spelt ‘gu’, in words borrowed from French. Examples include:
- wage/wager versus gage (a pledge): PIE root *wadh- ‘to pledge’, also seen in ‘wed’
- ward versus guard: PIE root wer- ‘watch out for’, also source of ‘aware’ and ‘beware’
- warranty versus guarantee: an identical PIE root wer- ‘to cover’, also source of ‘warn’ and of other borrowings from French such as ‘garage’, ‘garret’ and ‘garrison’
This root is also the source of the word ‘barbican’ for a defensive structure in a mediaeval castle. The word comes from a French term borrowed ultimately from Old Iranian pari-va:raka, ‘protective’, the first element being a preposition meaning ‘around’
- wile versus guile: PIE root weik- ‘consecrated’, but here with the sense of ‘cunning’
- war versus guerrilla (in this case via Spanish): PIE root wers- ‘to confuse’, from which we also derive ‘worse’ and ‘worst’, while in German it gives the word for ‘sausage’ (mixed meat): ‘wurst’.
These doublets go back to Germanic words beginning with what was still at the time a ‘w’, and imported into French under Frankish or Burgundian rule. French had no initial ‘w’ sound, as Late Latin, as we have seen, had changed all inherited *w sounds into ‘v’. Native speakers of Old French for the most part used the combination ‘gw’ as the nearest familiar equivalent, though in the North, where Frankish (Germanic) influence was strongest, the ‘w’-sound was conserved – hence ‘warranty’. Subsequently, French lost the ‘w’ element altogether in speech – hence ‘guarantee’.
While *w shows some staying power in initial position, if usually in the form of ‘v’, it is often lost before *r. Take for example the PIE root *wraHd-, meaning ‘root’ or ‘branch’, visible in English as the inherited ‘wort’ (now largely confined to medicinal plants as in ‘St John’s wort’ or ‘lungwort’). The *w is lost not just in Greek but also in the three other main languages supplying English with words: Old Norse, from which English has borrowed ‘root’; Latin, from whose word for ‘root’ we get ‘radical’; and Old French, which has given us ‘radish’. It is also routinely lost in modern English in the same situation: compare the spellings ‘wreak’, ‘wrath’, ‘wrong’ with the pronunciation, in which ‘w’ has disappeared.
In Latin, initial *wl- is similarly simplified to ‘l’. The classic case is the PIE root *welH- which gives the word for ‘wool’ *wl̥Hnā-. As we saw under *l, we inherit ‘wool’ itself from this word. In Latin, with loss of initial *w, it is the source of the first element of the word ‘Lanolin’ (a word made up from the Latin words for ‘wool’ and ‘oil’). ‘Flannel’ is from the same root, and is a borrowing from Welsh ‘gwlan’.
English has many important words beginning with the letters ‘wh’. These do not however go back to PIE *w, as we will discuss later.
Finally in this section, here is the sound code for English w:
Initial w in an inherited word = Proto Germanic *w (but modern Germanic v except Dutch w) = PIE *w = Latin/Celtic/Balto-Slavic and Indo-Iranian v = lost in Greek
No other PIE sound yields English inherited w.
(ii) *w elsewhere
In the middle of words *w is prone to disappear, particularly between vowels. This is universally so in Greek, which explains why there is no hint of a ‘w’ or ‘u’ in words beginning with ‘neo-’ (contrast Latin-derived ‘novel’, from the same root).
Latin lost *w before rounded vowels (dissimilation again), which is why we have the borrowing ‘second’, not ‘sequond’ from the verb visible in ‘non sequitur’. And in late Latin, *w is lost between identical vowels, which is why we have the contrasting words, both of Latin origin, ‘lavatory’ (from Classical Latin), with the reflex of the inherited *w, and ‘latrine’ (from late Latin) without, both from a root *leuH-, meaning ‘to wash’.
(iii) Secrets of ‘wisdom’
English has a set of words about knowledge, as in ‘wise’, ‘wisdom’ and ‘wit’ and also seeing, as in ‘witness’. All descend from the important PIE root *weid-, which provides the word for ‘see’ and/or ‘know’ (as in ‘know something’, rather than ‘know someone’) in many languages.
It is the basis for the Latin word ‘I saw’ as in Julius Caesar’s pithy despatch ‘Veni, vidi, vici’ (‘I came, I saw, I conquered’). Our borrowed words like ‘vision’ and ‘visible’, and via Italian ‘belvedere’ and French ‘view’, all go back to Latin derivatives of this root. In Sanskrit it provides the word describing early Hindu texts of sacred knowledge, the Vedas.
In Greek (which as we have seen loses the initial *w) ‘something that is seen’ gives us our words ‘idol’ and ‘kaleidoscope’. Our words ending in ‘-oid’ from ‘anthropoid’ to ‘thyroid’ derive from a Latinized form of a Greek ending meaning ‘-shaped’, also from the same root. More surprisingly perhaps, ‘History’, the product of a ‘wise man’, is also based on the same root, with a suffix -tor-, the *d of the root becoming ‘s’ before a following dental. English ‘story’ is a reduced version of this borrowing from Greek via Latin.
In the Celtic languages, the same root provides the second element of the word druid with the sense of a ‘seer’. (We will discuss the first element, which carries both a broad meaning about steadfastness and a more concrete one as a ‘tree’ or sometimes more specifically an ‘oak’, in a later blog.) A zero-grade form with an infixed n (so *wind-) gives a Celtic adjective for ‘white’, the most visible colour, or fair of hair or complexion, which can be seen in the personal names ‘Gwen’ (Welsh, again showing *w>gw), Fiona (Gaelic) and ‘Finn’ (Irish), showing *w>f in Irish and Scots Gaelic. ‘Penguin’ is often thought to mean ‘white head’ (‘pen’ being ‘head’ in Welsh or Breton), even though neither the penguin nor indeed the Great Auk, to which the word was linked before penguins were known in the Northern hemisphere, have white heads.
(iv) What’s an inherited English word from another PIE root beginning with *w?
Root: wē-, meaning ‘to blow’ (originally HweH-, which looks to be a combination of sounds well suited to the meaning!). One descendant of this root features in the Sanskrit word ‘Nirvana’, for the extinction or dying out like a fire of the soul, leading in Buddhist teaching to a state of bliss. (Sanskrit ‘vāti’ means ‘he/she/it blows’ and ‘nir’ means ‘out’.)
Borrowed words (from Latin) include ‘vent’, ‘ventilate’, with an -nt- suffix. What’s the English inherited word with a not dissimilar structure?
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