Secrets of the Words You Know
Blog post 23: PIE Stop Consonants *p
(i) *p at the start of a word
Proto-Germanic is unique within PIE languages in the evolution of PIE *p to ‘f’. In most other language groups it is conserved in initial position.
This is the cause of the many cases of ‘f/p matches’ which we have seen from ‘footpedal’ in Blog post 1 and onward, demonstrating that English has conserved the Proto-Germanic innovation.
We start with three roots, all of the form *pelH-, though with different laryngeals in at least two of the cases, which lie behind some of the words we have met earlier:
- The core meaning of the first (with the ‘neutral’ laryngeal) is apparent from English inherited words like ‘fill’ and ‘full’ and borrowings from Latin like ‘plenary’ and ‘plus’, which go back to the zero grade of the root. Greek-derived words like ‘polymath’ have a similar origin. The well-known Himalayan mountain ‘Annapurna’ (note Indic ‘r’ for PIE *l) is named after the Hindu goddess of food and nourishment. ‘Anna’ means ‘food’ or ‘grains’, and ‘purna’ means ‘full’ or ‘complete’.
- The second, with an a-coloured laryngeal, appears as so often with a variety of suffixes:
- With a suffix *t: English ‘flat’ and ‘field’ and the first element of Greek-based ‘platypus’ (meaning ’broad’ in Greek, the ‘pus’ element, as in Octopus, showing the nominative form of the Greek for ‘foot’ that we saw earlier). A familiar Greek name comes from the same source: the broad-shouldered philosopher Plato, a nick-name apparently given him by his wrestling coach. Many other words derive from the same root, such as ‘plant’ and its various derivatives, from a Latin word with an infixed ‘n’ meaning ‘sole of the foot’, as well as Latin-derived ‘piazza’ (from Italian, which routinely changes Latin ‘pl-’ to ‘pi-’), ‘plaza’ (Spanish) and ‘place’ and ‘plateau’ (French). The same root gives rise to names for two flatfish, the inherited word being ‘flounder’ and the borrowed one (from French) ‘plaice’. It is also, via the Slavic word for a field, the origin of Poland and its country dance, the Polka.
- With a suffix *n: borrowings from Latin like both ‘plane’ and ‘plain’, from French ‘esplanade’, and from Italian ‘piano’ (Its original adjectival sense in Italian is ‘flat’, ‘smooth’ or ‘quiet’, then applied to the keyboard instrument known for both soft and loud sounds, the fortepiano, subsequently abridged to ‘piano’).
- With a suffix *dh: borrowings from Greek like ‘plaster’ and plasma’, Greek changing *dh to ‘s’ before a now-invisible ‘y’-sound.
- With a suffix *k: Scandinavian borrowings like ‘flake’ and ‘floe’, and from Latin, with a nasal infix, ‘plank’.
- The third, whose laryngeal is less certain, has a core meaning around a ‘citadel’, and is the source of our borrowings from the Greek for ‘city’ such as ‘acropolis’ ‘police’ and ‘politics’, and can be seen also in the names of from well-known cities in the Indian sub-continent and South East Asia like Kanpur, Nagpur, or (in the traditional English spelling) the ‘lion city’ of Singapore, all with Indic ‘r’ for PIE ‘l’.
Beyond this trio, the preposition *per-, conserved as such in Latin, gives rise to a vast family of words including those built around the idea of ‘going across’, such as English ‘ford’ (and its well-known Nordic cousin ‘fjord’) and Latin-derived ‘port’, as we saw in blog-posts 1 and 2. English ‘ferry’, ‘fare’ and German ‘führer’ (‘leader’) come from the same general sense. The ‘well-fordable’ River Euphrates shows the same sense in a Greek borrowing from Old Persian. A related but different sense of *per- is ‘forward’, as wecan seein the first syllable of the word ‘purdah’, a borrowing from the Persian for a curtain (something literally ‘put forward’, or ‘put in front’). See also under *dh in a later blog-post for the second element of the word.
Under *b we noted that ‘path’ was thought to be a Germanic borrowing from Iranian. The root of this word is *pent-, and its meaning seems to have been about movement on foot, as in the Iranian ‘pathi’, meaning indeed ‘path’. The o-grade is well represented in Latin, where it gives the word for a bridge, which is visible in the first element of the borrowing ‘pontiff’, literally ‘bridge-builder’, now applied to the Pope, but originating in the titles of the Roman High Priest, the ‘Pontifex Maximus’ or ‘Supreme Bridge-Builder’. Slavic, like Iranian, uses this root to make a word for a path or way, so that in Russian a travelling companion is termed a ‘sputnik’, the initial ‘s’ meaning ‘with’ or, here, ‘together’, and ‘-nik’ (as in ‘refusenik’ and the like) being used to denote a person.
Where then is the expected Germanic descendant of this root? Quite hard to find in terms of meaning, you may think, when I tell you that it is indeed ‘find’! Perhaps the evolution is on the lines of ‘coming upon’ something.
The numeral ‘five’ is likewise matched with words like ‘pentatonic’, from the Greek version of the number, and with two words from Hindi – ‘punch’, a drink based traditionally on five ingredients, and Punjab, the land of the Five Rivers, both languages conserving the *p of PIE. Our five ‘fingers’ and our ‘fists’ may also derive from this numeral.
All the words for ‘5’ go back to a PIE *penkʷe. They contain good examples of assimilation (Technical Note 3, Box 4):
- Proto Germanic assimilated kʷ>p, as seen clearly in German ‘funf’ (English ‘five’ as usual shows the loss of inherited ‘n’ before a fricative). Latin, from which we have borrowed words like ‘quinquennial’, has instead assimilated p>kʷ, so *kʷenkʷe, which has evolved to ‘quinque’. The same is true in Celtic.
- Indeed both Latin and Celtic routinely assimilate p>kʷ in roots with *p-vowel-kʷ, one of a number of arguments for a close historic link between Celtic and Italic languages. However, several Italic languages such as Oscan, which was spoken South of the original Latin-speaking area of Italy, assimilated kʷ>p, as we can see from the city of Pompeii, whose name is clearly based, for whatever reason, on the number ‘5’, perhaps because of its having five districts. The same goes for Caesar’s opponent Pompey, whose name parallels the Latin ‘Quintus’ (from an earlier ‘Quinctus’), presumably going back in both cases to an ancestor who was a fifth child.
- A further example of assimilation of p>kʷ in Latin is to be seen in the root *pekʷ-, ‘to cook’, as the two velars in our word ‘cook’, borrowed from Latin, show. This time it is Greek that has assimilated *kʷ>p, as in words about digestion like ‘peptic’ ulcers or ‘dyspepsia’. Hindi ‘Pakora’, the first element of which comes from ‘pakva’ (‘cooked’), conserves the original form of the root, as it contains both the ‘p’ and the velar. The word ‘pukka’ (Hindi ‘pakkā’) also comes from this root, its original meaning of ‘cooked’ or ‘ripe’ having evolved to ‘solid’ or ‘substantial’ and so ‘the real deal’.
Now to the language group that, as indicated in blog post 21, has completely lost initial *p. This is Celtic, where the sound seems to have weakened to some sort of labial fricative which was then lost in most contexts.
An example is visible from the name of the Orkney Islands. The Viking settlers gave the islands their present name, which means ‘Seal Island’ in Old Norse. But they very probably built it on a pre-existing Celtic name, since the islands were known as the ‘Orcades’ by Mediterranean writers long before any Viking settlement. This would have meant ‘Pig Islands’ in the ancestor of Gaelic, the old Irish for ‘pig’ being ‘orc’[1], clearly related to our borrowing from Latin via French, ‘pork’. Indeed, without the loss of the inherited ‘p’ in Celtic, the islands could now well be known as ‘Porkney’. (At a later date, Welsh and related Celtic languages developed a new ‘p’ from *kʷ: see under that sound below.)
What is the inherited English word from the root *pork-? You will expect that it starts with an ‘f’, and indeed it does: it’s ‘farrow’, originally ‘a piglet’. An Afrikaans doublet is the insect-eating ‘earth-pig’ or ‘aardvark’ (the written ‘v’ pronounced ‘f’), thus explaining the first word in most dictionaries to complement our earlier explanation of ‘zygote’ – Blog post 17 – at the other end of the alphabet!
The loss of *p in Celtic has also affected the words for the island of Ireland. The name Éire, as well as the words Ireland and Hibernia, all go back to a goddess named Ériu, whose name in turn derives from a PIE root that begins with *p. The root in question is *peiH-, which means ‘to be fat’ or ‘to swell’ (indeed the English inherited term from the root, with a dental suffix, is ‘fat’). So all the names attached to the ‘Emerald Isle’ pay tribute to its exceptional fertility. In Greek, the ‘Pierian Spring’ (from the same root, and also with an ‘r’ suffix) was sacred to the Nine Muses.
For a Welsh example, take the PIE root *pel- that gives English its borrowings from Latin like ‘pale’ and ‘pallid’, from Greek like ‘poliomyelitis’ (inflammation of the ‘grey’ tissue of the spinal chord) and its inherited term for the lightly-coloured ‘fallow’ deer. A Welsh descendant of this root is the familiar name ‘Lloyd’, meaning roughly ‘grey’, and as expected showing no trace of the original *p.
Another consequence affecting place-names is given by the Italian city that is named for sitting in the middle of the plain of the Po basin, which was in Roman days the Celtic-speaking area of ‘Gaul this side of the Alps’ (‘Cisalpine Gaul’). Thanks to the loss of *p in Celtic, including in the word for ‘plain’, ‘Medio-planum’ was known as ‘Mediolanum’, which is why there is no ‘p’ in modern ‘Milan’.
So here is the sound-code for English initial ‘f’:
English initial f in an inherited word = PIE *p = Latin, Greek, Indic, Balto-Slavic p. The sound is lost in initial position in Celtic. Celtic and Latin change initial *p>k in words beginning with *pekʷ-
No other PIE initial sound yields English ‘f’.
(ii) Quite a few secrets of ‘few’
The word ‘few’ goes back to a PIE root *peHu-, with its a-coloured laryngeal giving a basic form *pāu-, meaning indeed ‘few’ or ‘little’.
As so often, we will find that different suffixes have been added to the basic root, from which we derive, just from Latin, a variety of words around smallness or lack of resources. These include the name ‘Paul’, which means ‘small’; ‘poor’, ‘poverty’, and ‘pauper’; and ‘paucity’. Italian ‘poco’, much used in music with the meaning of ‘slightly’, also belongs here.
Children are small. The zero grade *pū-, with a suffix in ‘r’, gives us (again from Latin) ‘puerile’, whereas the full-grade form *peHu-, with a dental suffix, lies behind the Greek term for a child, familiar from ‘pediatrics’ and ‘encyclopedia’ (not to be confused with the ‘foot’ word that we find in Greek-based ‘podiatrist’ or Latin-based ‘pedal’, with its short ‘e’ still audibly different from the long ‘e’ in ‘pediatrics’ – a nice example of how a long-defunct laryngeal still makes a difference thousands of years after its disappearance).
The young of animals are also small. That’s why our words for a young horse start with an ‘f’: ‘foal’ and (via Old Norse) ‘filly’, both from this root with a suffix in ‘l’.
By now you will probably expect English to have imported other such terms with this suffix that begin with ‘p-‘, and you would be right: think ‘pullet’ (and indeed more generally ‘poultry’), from Latin via Old French, and also ‘pony’, from the same source, the ‘l’ having been dropped before the ‘n’ in this word.
And finally, a Nineteenth Century coinage by a German chemist. Karl von Reichenbach managed to isolate a substance from wood tar, that burned with very low reactivity with other chemicals, and was thus comparatively safe. He therefore invented for it a Latin-based name meaning ‘low-affinity’ – ‘paraffin’! (The Latin adjective ‘parvus’ means ‘small’ and derives from a form of the root with an ‘r’ suffix, with metathesis [Technical Note 3, Box 1] of the ‘u’ and the ‘r’, so a development from *pāu-ro > *par-wo > parvus.)
(iii) What’s an inherited English word from another PIE root beginning with *p?
We’ll start with the root *pleu-, meaning ‘to flow’ (a word which, as you will quickly see, is indeed derived from exactly that root). It’s also the source of the borrowing from Latin about ‘rain’, ‘pluvial’, and with a dental suffix also the name of the ruler of the Greek underworld ‘Pluto’, rich in the resources of the earth, and so ‘overflowing’ with ‘plutocratic’ wealth.
This time your task is to find an inherited verb in English which comes from this root with a PIE suffix *k, so *pleuk-. Its meaning is definitely different from ‘flow’, but not totally remote from the concept either. I can also tell you that in this case, for a reason that I will explain in a later Blog post, the *k gives PGmc *g (think how that might have evolved), and that the verb has three letters, though a very similar four-letter verb would also be an acceptable answer.
Answer as usual, to Subscribers next week.
[1] For Tolkien enthusiasts, I should point out that the name of his ‘orcs’ derives from an old Anglo-Saxon word which has no reference to pigs.