Secrets of the Words You Know
Blog 13: Proto Indo European Sonorants: *n and the secrets of the ‘gym’ and of ‘nimble’
Much of what is said in Blog 12 about *m applies to its next-door neighbour *n.
(i) *n at the start of a word
Let’s start with the word ‘new’. Across the Indo-European world, the word with this meaning starts with an ‘n’: novel (from Latin), Novgorod (Russian: ‘New City’), Naples (from Greek Neapolis: also ‘New City’), Navapur (a town of 30,000 inhabitants in Maharashtra State in India: also ‘New City’). The same can be said of ‘now’, which may indeed have a common origin with ‘new’, and words like ‘night’ (think ‘nocturnal’, borrowed from Latin,, or the Welsh ‘Nos da’, meaning ‘Goodnight’) and ‘nose’ (not just Latin borrowing ‘nasal’ but also ‘nark’ (police informer) from Romani ‘nak’, meaning ‘nose’ and going back ultimately to Sanskrit).
Three sets of borrowings that illustrate how Latin and Greek have conserved initial *n are:
- ‘Nerve’, from Latin; and words staring with ‘neuro-’ from Greek. The PIE root is *(s)neHu-, but the *s is not maintained in either language, much as we saw in *(s)mer- in the previous Blog.
- ‘Nubile’, from Latin; and ‘nymph’, from Greek. As we will see later, it is normal for words with ‘u’ in the Greek alphabet, as is the case with ‘nymph’, to be represented in Latin by the special letter ‘y’. The sound had evolved in Greek in the direction of the French ‘ü’ by the time of Latin borrowing, but Latin had no equivalent sound.
- ‘Naval’, from Latin; and ‘nautical’ from Greek.
Another case is provided by the PIE root *nek-, which has the basic meaning of ‘die’ or ‘disappear’. Here English has imported a variety of words from both Latin and Greek. From Latin, these include ‘noxious’, ‘internecine’ and the less dramatic (via Old French) ‘nuisance’, as well as the opposite terms such as innocent and innocuous. From Greek one borrowed word reflects the PIE root exactly. This is ‘nectar’, along with ambrosia the choice drinkof the Gods, with the first half of the word meaning ‘death’ and the second half of the word from a root *terH-, meaning in this context ‘overcome’. So you can think of nectar as an early oral vaccine against death. More common are borrowings from the Greek word for ‘corpse’, which is derived from the same root but with an *r suffix, giving us all our words beginning with ‘necro-’
A Secret in the Gym
In Box 1 (see Technical Note 3), we mentioned metathesis (the swapping of sounds) as a not uncommon feature of sound change. You may have spotted another example just above with the n-r-v of ‘nerve’ and the n-u-r of ‘neuro-’. A more extreme example for initial *n can be found in looking for matches for the inherited English word ‘naked’.
The word ‘naked’ itself goes back to a PIE root *nogʷ – with a dental suffix, which in Latin has evolved into the adjective that we have borrowed as ‘nude’. But there is also a well-known borrowing from Greek that seems at first sight completely unrelated. The ancient Greeks exercised in the nude, and hence a ‘gymnasium’ was derived from the Greek for naked. In this case, Greek has switched the *gʷ and the nasal (which then also shifts from n>m), so from *nogʷ- to ‘gʷom-’ and then to ‘gum’, with the lost labial element colouring the vowel to ‘u’. The ‘u’ is then represented by Latin ‘y’ as noted above.
Another suffixed form of the same root, *ne/ogʷ-no-, is the origin of our borrowing of the plain ‘bare’ flatbread ‘naan’ from Indo-Iranian (it is the generic word for ‘bread’ in Farsi, the language of modern Iran).
The sound ‘n’ is particularly prone to be lost (or in a few cases added) as a result of mistaken word division – another example of how phonetic context can alter sounds – when preceded by the indefinite article. See Box 5.
Box 5: Phonetic Context (3): False Word-Division
As we know, the English indefinite article ‘a’ adds an ‘n’ when the following noun starts with a vowel. This opens the way to misinterpretation of the word-boundary.
Here’s a case in point.
The manufacturers of a well-known chocolate biscuit called ‘Penguin’ enliven the product by including on each packet a riddle about penguins. The other day, I faced the question, ‘Why was the penguin popular?’ The answer (apologies if you are about to open one) is ‘Cos he was an ice guy’. The joke works because ‘an ice’ sounds just like ‘a nice’.
Here are some more straight-faced examples where changed word-division involving ‘a’ and ‘an’ has either subtracted an original ‘n’ from the start of a word, or added one to it.
- The French word ’nappe’ (which means ‘tablecloth’) has provided two words in English, each referring to a textile product also related to food. These are ‘napkin’ and ‘apron’. The former shows the expected initial ‘n’, but ‘apron’ has lost it because ‘a napron’ was misconstrued as ‘an apron’.
- We talk of ‘an adder’ when the inherited word for ‘snake’ was actually ‘nadder’ (as in the River Nadder – ‘Snake River’ – in Wiltshire).The grass snake’s species name is ‘Natrix Natrix’, from the Latin for water snake, showing the initial ‘n’ that English has lost.
- The word ‘navel’ is related to the now seldom-used word ‘nave’ in the sense of the hub of a wooden wheel. In Proto-Germanic, the tool for making the vital hole in a nave for the axle was given the very logical description of *naba-gaizaz, which means literally ‘nave-piercer’. This developed into Old English nafo-gar, and should have given modern English ‘nauger’. However ‘a nauger’ became wrongly thought of as ‘an auger’, which is how the tool is currently described.
- It’s the same with the ‘orange’. The name of this fruit ‘should’ have started with an ‘n’, as conserved in Spanish ‘naranja’, a borrowing from Arabic (and indeed earlier borrowed by Arabic from sources in Asia). However, French, which like English has an indefinite article ending in ‘n’, mis-divided the word so that ‘un norange’ became ‘un orange’, and that’s the form that English borrowed as this exotic fruit arrived in Britain.
- As a contrary example, we talk of ‘a newt’ when the inherited word for this amphibian was ‘an eft’.
This kind of change is more likely when the word in question is imported, as with ‘apron’ and ‘orange’, or not very often used, as with ‘adder’ and ‘newt’, or indeed ‘auger’. It would be much more surprising if ‘nice’ were ever to go the same way!
Finally, even where word division is not an issue, not every initial ‘n’-sound in an English word inherited from PIE goes back to a PIE root beginning with *n. Take the word pronounced ‘nī’. Its spelling ‘knee’, as with ‘know’, ‘knave’ and ‘knight’, fortunately gives the game away: the first sound in the PIE root in such words will be a velar, not an *n. We will return to this in a later blog.
So the basic sound-code for English initial n is:
Initial written n in an inherited word = PGmc *n= PIE *n = Latin/Greek/Celtic/Balto-Slavic and Indo-Iranian n
(ii) *n elsewhere
In Blog 9, we noted that inherited nasals (in practice usually ‘n’) were routinely lost in English before a fricative, such as ‘th’, ‘f’ or ‘s’. This accounts for mismatches not only with modern German, as shown in that chapter, but with other language groups. We have already seen Latin-derived ‘dentist’ with the inherited ‘n’ and English ‘tooth’ without it. Similarly, English ‘mouth’ contrasts not only with German ‘Mund’ but also Latin-derived ‘mountain’ and Welsh ‘maen’ (‘stone’: see Box 6). This last group of words go back to a PIE root *men-, meaning ‘to project or stick out’, with in the case of Latin and the Germanic languages a *t suffix, which gives English ‘th’.
Box 6: Folk Etymology (2)
The Welsh word ‘maen’ lurks behind many apparently English place names like the Old Man of Coniston or some examples of ‘Hangman Hill’, where folk etymology (Box 2, Technical Note 3) has obscured the origin of the term anglicized as ‘man’. The ‘old’ in the former is similarly a misinterpretation of Welsh ‘allt’, related to the Latin adjective meaning ‘high’ seen in borrowings like ‘altitude’. So the shapely fell is not an ‘Old Man’ but a ‘High Stone’.
Loss of nasals before fricatives also explains some apparent losses of *n in English verbs, for example, ‘bring’ and ‘brought’. For reasons we will come on to later, the final velar in the PIE compound root *bhrenk- became an ‘h’ in the past tense, but this was not the case in the present tense. As ‘h’ acts as a fricative, the *n was lost before it, and the vowel was lengthened to ‘compensate’ (a very normal development in most IE languages), yielding ‘brought’, while ‘bring’ preserves the original *n. ‘Think’ and ‘thought’ is a similar example.
(iii) Sonant *n̥
For the evolution of syllabic *n̥, let’s look at the ‘negative particle’, which many Indo-European languages still use at the start of a word, and which we mentioned in Blogs 10 and 11. This was originally an *n, which when immediately followed by a consonant was treated like a vowel. In the Germanic languages this *n̥ developed into ‘un-’, in Latin to ‘in-’ (or ‘im-’ before a labial, as a result of assimilation), but in Greek and Sanskrit, as we have just seen under *m, to ‘a-’ as in ‘ambrosia’ and ‘Amritsar’. Greek maintains the *n before a vowel, as in ‘an-orexia’ (literally ‘un-appetite’)
This is why modern English shows a mix of negatives between inherited Germanic ‘unloved’, Latin-based ‘indifferent’ or ’impossible’ and Greek-based ‘atheist’.
A long sonant *n̥: also existed (originally where a sonant *n̥ was followed by a laryngeal). The resulting vowel sounds are similar in most language groups, but in Latin the result is usually ‘nā’ as in our borrowings ‘native’ and ‘pregnant’, which go back to a root *genH- that we will meet later.
(iv) The secrets of ‘nimble’
‘Nimble’ is a bit of a relic in English. It is one of the few words (‘numb’ is another) that reflect the now obsolete word ‘nim’, originally meaning ‘take’ and then more specifically ‘steal’. ‘Nim’ is inherited from PGmc, and its German doublet ‘nehmen’ remains the main German word for ‘take’. However, in English it was superseded as ‘take’, borrowed from Old Norse…..took over!
These words go back to the PIE root *nem- meaning to assign or take something.
What is assigned to you is your fate, or, in our borrowing from Greek, your ‘nemesis’. What is due to you may be set out in law or custom, and the same root, in o-grade form, gives the Greek word for ‘law’ that features in borrowings from ‘Deuteronomy’ (literally the ‘Second Book of Law’ in the Bible) to ‘astronomy’, the ‘rules that govern the stars’, or ‘economy’, ‘the rules that govern households’.
The notion of ‘allotting’ seems to have had a particular application to the pastoral economy. A ‘nomad’ was in the original Greek someone who ranged about with their flocks as part of a pastoral way of life.
Hindi greetings, familiar in the borrowings ‘namaste’ and ‘namaskar’ have their origin in a Sanskrit word with the sense of giving a person the respect due to them, also from this root.
It is possible that the large group of borrowings from Latin around ‘number’, ‘numeral’ etc are from a suffixed version of this root, but this is less certain.
(v) What’s an inherited English word from another PIE root beginning with *n?
The root this time is *ned-, whose broad meaning of binding or tying is visible in borrowings from Latin such as ‘node’ and ‘nodule’, French ‘dénouement’, where a plot of a play is ‘untied’, and ‘noose’, derived from Old French.
Look for an English noun beginning with ‘n’ and with a dental as its second consonant.
Answer in the next posting.