Secrets of the Words You Know
Blog 17 Proto Indo European Sonorant Consonants *y, and the secrets of Youth
(i) *y at the start of a word
As already mentioned, modern English ‘y’ in inherited words can derive either from a PIE *y or a Proto-Germanic *g. We identified some examples of the latter in Blog post 8. Here, we will concentrate on ones that do reflect PIE *y.
Such examples are in fact rather few: while PIE had many roots beginning with *w, there are only a handful that start with *y.
A clear example is ‘Yoke’, which goes back to a PIE root *yeug-, meaning ‘to join’. It has a direct counterpart in Latin, most easily seen in English in the borrowing ‘jugular’. This derives from the Latin for the collar bone, which plays a role like a yoke in the human body. ‘Conjugation’ – the term for how verb endings change – has a similar origin.
English has also borrowed a set of further Latin and French counterparts from the same root, but with an ‘infixed n’, a phenomenon that we noted in Blog post 10. Based on the Latin verb form with the infixed ‘n’ are words like ‘junction’ or ‘conjunctivitis’, inflammation of the membrane that joins the white of your eye to your eyelid.
French has simplified the consonant cluster ‘nct’ to ‘n’ along with adjustments to the previous vowel, giving us many borrowings which include the element ‘join’, and other less obvious examples that include ‘joust’ and ‘jostle’.
In Latin, the sound written ‘j’ would have been pronounced as ‘y’ in Classical times. Later in French, this sound (also written as ‘j’) developed into a fricative which we will notate as ‘zh’, as in the second consonant of ‘leisure’. In English this ‘j’-sound has however become an affricate (‘dge’) as in ‘jugular’ in modern English.
In this case English also shows borrowings from Greek and Sanskrit. The case of Sanskrit is clear:
- Sanskrit, like English, conserves the *y, as we can see in the word ‘yoga’, another descendant of the root *yeug-, which signifies union (or ‘yoking’) with the supreme spirit.
At first sight, the case of Greek also seems clear: here are four examples of English borrowing from Greek of words from a PIE root beginning with *y:
- The rather obscure word ‘zeugma’ is also a descendant of *yeug- , used when a verb links (or ‘yokes together’) two nouns where the sense of the verb is different, or where one is used in a figurative sense: ‘He lost his keys and his temper’;
- A scientific term coined in the Nineteenth Century and not infrequently the final word in the dictionary, is ‘zygote’ – a cell that has been fertilised, and thus the product of joining, yet again from *yeug-;
- The word ’zone’ derives from the Greek word for ‘belt’, which goes back to a PIE root starting with *y and meaning roughly ‘gird’. This was borrowed first by Latin and later by English.
- ‘Enzyme’ is a borrowing of a Greek word meaning ‘leaven’ as is leavened bread from a PIE root *yeuH- with an ‘m’ suffix. (The same root, this time with an ‘s’ suffix, is also the origin of the Latin word we know via French as ‘juice’: its meaning seems therefore to have been about blending ingredients.)
The apparent rule that PIE* gives Greek ‘z’ is not however the full story. In some cases, Greek turns the *y not into ‘z’ but into an ‘h’. Here is an example. The English word ‘Year’ is inherited from a PIE root *(H)yeHr-. You may be surprised to learn that the word ‘hour’ goes back to the same root, but has travelled from Greek (where it meant a time of day, or a season of the year, and was pronounced ‘hōra’) via Latin (where it was more precisely defined as ‘hour’) and then via French. The same Greek word appears also in ‘horology’ and ‘horoscope’. We will see another example shortly.
It seems that the evolution of *y in Greek may depend on whether the original *y was or was not preceded by a laryngeal, with ‘h’ where a previous laryngeal seems to have existed in PIE and ‘z’ where it did not: but this not certain.
There is also a set of words about the law, which English has again taken from Latin via French: ‘Justice’, ‘Judge’, ‘Jury’, which all start with a Latin word derived from a PIE root *yew(e)s-. This is another case where English has not inherited any words from the root in question.
Here is the sound-code for English y from PIE *y
Initial y in an inherited word from Proto Germanic *y = PIE *y = Latin y (spelt j)=Greek z or (if from PIE *Hy) h = Balto-Slavic/Indo-Iranian y. In Celtic, PIE *y is lost (see below).
(For English y from Proto Germanic *g see under *gh below)
No PIE sounds except *y and *gh yield English inherited y.
(ii) Secrets of Youth
The words ‘young’ and ‘youth’, both inherited by English from PIE via Proto Germanic, conserve the initial *y of a PIE root. We also use the word ‘juvenile’ to describe young people, and ‘junior’ to indicate someone less old than another person. Both are borrowed from Latin, hence the initial ‘j’.
The initial *y-sound disappears altogether in Celtic, as in the Irish otherworld of Tír na nÓg, ‘land of Youth’, and the Welsh name ‘Evan’, both from the same root as ‘young’.
The root of these various words about ‘youth’, *yeu-, appears to be derived from a form with a laryngeal *Hyeu-. This in turn is a variant form (metathesis again) of a perhaps more basic root which can be notated as *Heyu- or *Heiw-, depending how the two sonorants ‘y’ and ‘w’ are vocalised. As the laryngeal in this case in ‘a-coloured’, these alternative root variants can be re-stated as *ayu- or *aiw-. Their meaning seems to be about the force of life (hence the link to ‘youth’), and so also eternity (based on the idea of long life).
This widens the field of linked words considerably.
*ayu- is visible in the Indian traditional medical practice of ‘Ayurveda’, which combines the ‘life force’ with the ‘knowledge’ words that we saw under *w. Greek-based ‘hygiene’ is closely related, as it comes from the zero-grade *Hyu-. Greek translates this originally into ‘hu’, the Greek ‘h’ perhaps reflecting the initial laryngeal as in the case of ‘year’ above. The ‘u’ would then be gradually fronted to give Latin ‘y’ as we have already seen. The second element of the Greek word that gives us ‘hygiene’ is from the PIE word for ‘to live’, which we shall meet in a later blog.
*aiw- meanwhile gives us various terms inherited from Proto Germanic including ‘aye’ meaning ‘for ever’ (via Old Norse), and ‘ever’ itself (along with its opposite ‘never’ and also ‘every’). It can also be seen in borrowings from both Greek and Latin. From Greek, which as we saw loses *w between vowels, comes ‘aeon’. From Latin it’s the second element in ‘mediaeval’, ‘primeval’, and with various suffixes ‘age’ (very much boiled down by Old French from the original Latin) and ‘eternal’, where only the initial vowel actually represents the original root.
Links like these have been worked out by scholars over many years: our ‘tacit knowledge’ does take some uncovering at times!
(iii) What’s an inherited English word from another PIE root beginning with *y?
We will take as our root PIE *yes-, meaning to boil or bubble up. Greek has a derivative of this root, borrowed into English as ‘eczema’. The first two letters reflect the Greek particle/preposition ‘ek’, meaning in this context ‘out’, as eczema is a rash that ‘bubbles out’ of the skin.
What’s the English word that also derives from this root, but is used in the different context of baking?
Answer in next email to Subscribers.