Secrets of the Words You Know
Blog 2 Introduction 2
So first, some words you may or may not have identified from the list of eight English words starting with ‘f’ or ‘p’.
Starting with ’f’
- Father
- Ford
- Fish
- Fear
- Fill/Full
- Fire
- Flat
- Feather
Starting with ‘p’
- Paternal/Patriarch(y)/Patriot(ic)
- Port
- Pisces/Piscatorial/Piscine
- Peril
- Plenary/Plenitude
- Pyre
- Platy-pus
- Ptero-dactyl
(‘Ptero-’ means ‘wing’ in the original Greek as well as ‘feather’, and the sense of the term is ‘winged-finger’.)
Reflecting on these, you can see that ‘l’ and ‘r’ seem to be quite stable sounds between the two lists, and ’r’ shows stability also as a third consonant in ‘father/paternal’ and ‘feather/ptero-‘. Also ‘sh’ in ‘fish matches an ‘sc’, pronounced ‘sk’ in ‘piscatorial’. We will return to these preliminary findings later.
Now, what did you make of the two questions in the first blog? Here is Question 1:
Do you see any broad difference in character between the words beginning with ‘f’ and the words beginning with ‘p’?
Perhaps you may have felt that the ‘f’ words (except perhaps ‘ford’) were very routine English words, whereas the ‘p’ words were (except probably ‘port’) more restricted in meaning (as with ‘pyre’, used mainly for a ritual fire at a funeral, while ‘fire’ is much more of a general term) or quite technical, even obscure (as in ‘piscatorial’ or ‘ptero-‘). If so, that’s a good observation, and it gives us an important clue to Question 2:
Why would a single language have two sets of words that have a general similarity in meaning and sounds, even if each has its own more specific usage?
A partial (and true) answer that fits with the answer to Q1 is that all the ‘f’ words are inherited from Old English, and all the ‘p’ words have been borrowed at different dates, from ‘port’, going back a long way, to ‘pterodactyl’, a term coined by a French naturalist in the early Nineteenth Century to describe a newly-discovered species.
The ‘p’ words in the first 5 sets above are from Latin (except ‘piscine’, which is from its daughter-language Italian, coming into English via French); those in the last three from Greek.
But this does not of itself explain the consistency of the matches: there must be some additional factor that explains this.
A fuller answer is that the ‘f/p’ matches can be explained only on the astonishing hypothesis that English, Latin and Greek, despite being mutually unintelligible, are in some way related. This means that they must go back to a common origin a very long time ago. All this, from just the word ‘footpedal’!
The realization of this common origin, covering also many other language groups, however came not from an analysis of the sort that we have just carried out, but from a revelatory insight gained far outside Europe. It was most famously set out in the Eighteenth Century in a country thousands of miles from England, Italy or Greece. If you don’t know which, have a guess before the next blog.