Secrets of the Words You Know
Blog 31: Labio-Velars 2 *gʷh
Voiced Aspirate: *gʷh
This sound combines two complexities, the ‘double articulation’ of labio-velars AND aspiration. Perhaps not surprisingly, it has not survived in its original form in any of the Indo-European language groups, and was probably the least common stop consonant after *b. However the sound is not limited to PIE: the name Gbagbo (not that long ago broadcast quite widely as the name of a controversial military figure in Cote d’Ivoire) is a West African example of just such a sound, combining the simultaneous closure of lips and a velar stop with a breathy articulation.
(i)* gʷh at the beginning of a word
In initial position, we might expect the sound to lose its aspirate and give *gʷ in Germanic, just as PIE *gh gave Proto-Germanic *g. This sound is not however preserved as such in any known Germanic language. It seems to have given ‘b’ in most of the few cases that exist, of which only a very few appear to still survive in English.
The first is ‘bid’, a word of different origin from its identical twin that we looked at under *bh (Blog 22).
This ‘bid’ comes from a PIE root *gʷhedh-, whose descendants in most Indo-European languages have the sense of ‘pray’ or entreaty, of which sense we can see a vestige in the phrase ‘bid farewell’. So this is another case, rather like ‘law’ and ‘legal’ (Blog post 27), where two words of different origin have come close in their meaning, but in this instance with the further fact of complete phonetic merger.
The second is ‘bane’, which goes back to Old English ‘bana’, a ‘killer’, and which may have descended from a root *gʷhen-, to strike (a blow).
German ‘bahn’ as in ‘autobahn’ – a road that strikes across the country – is a surprising doublet.
Note that in zero grade the root would have appeared as gʷhn̥, with the sonant n̥ giving PGmc *un. This ‘u’ following the labio-velar would have triggered the ‘Boukolos Rule’, discussed last week (Blog post 30), under which the labial element would have been lost, and the sound developed to a simple ‘g’. That’s why there is also a Germanic word for ‘battle’ that appears in Old Norse names like ‘Gunhilda’ (‘warrior maid’), and which in turn seems to have given rise to the word ‘gun’.
In Latin, initial *gʷh gives an ‘f’, as we can see in borrowed words like ‘defend’ or ‘offend’, where the second element comes from this same root.
In Greek, *gʷh gives, as you will by now expect, a ‘ph’ before a back vowel – as in the name of the goddess ‘Perse-phone’ (‘she who beats’ -second element – ‘the sheaf’ – first element), with the second element nothing to do with the identical-looking Greek-based borrowing about ‘voice’ from *bheH-, discussed in Blog 22, *bh.
A root with more evident connections is *gʷher-, meaning ‘to heat or warm’.
We will come back to the English words derived from this root later. Cognates of this root borrowed from other Indo-European languages are well-known. They include words borrowed from Latin like ‘furnace’, from Greek like ‘thermal’ and ‘thermos’ (with the expected Greek ‘th’ before an *e), and the Hindi ‘garam’ in your ‘hot’ Garam Masala, from Sanskrit ‘gharma’ heat, with the expected ‘gh’. ‘Ghee’ (butter melted by heating) is believed to have a similar origin.
It’s perhaps worth mentioning two other borrowings from Latin to show the variety of such words. ‘Forceps’ is a direct borrowing of a Latin word, the ‘for-‘ element coming from this root, and the ‘-ceps’ element from the root *kap- (‘to grasp or take’) that we mentioned in Blog post 29 as the source of inherited ‘have’ and many Latin borrowings like ‘captive’ and ‘intercept’. So its original meaning was ‘fire-tongs’.
The meaning of ‘Fornicate’ appears to have come about originally from a word for a brick oven. These were arched, so the same word came to be used for any arch or set of arches, and specifically – for whatever reason – for a brothel. It is another remarkable reminder that meanings are very unreliable as a basis for deducing word-associations, as compared to the relative reliability of sound-changes!
The Celtic languages, like Germanic, merge *gʷh into *gʷ, which as we have seen (Blog post 30) gives ‘b’ in modern Celtic.
The sound code for the relatively few English inherited words beginning with b which go back to PIE *gʷh is as follows:
English initial b from PIE *gʷh = PIE*gʷh = Latin f = Greek ph before a/i/o; th before e = Celtic b. PIE*gʷh = Balto-Slavic/Iranian g = Indic gh (all before original back vowels) and palatalized sounds before original front vowels.
(ii) *gʷh in the middle or at the end of a word
In non-initial position, *gʷh gives three different outcomes in English, depending on the phonetic context.
- In most cases, for example between vowels, Proto-Germanic lost the velar element, so that we have ‘snow’ – the earlier form would have had a vowel after as well as before the ‘w’ – from a root *(s)neigʷh -. Latin does likewise, which is why we see the trade name ‘Nivea’ for a snow-white hand-cream (as mentioned in Blog post 18, Latin never shows an initial ‘s’ before a nasal or liquid).
- *gʷh, like all velars, as mentioned under *ĝ/*g, yielded Proto-Germanic *h before ‘t’. This is why the PIE root *Hlegʷh- is represented in English by ‘light’ (in the sense of ‘weighing little’). From the same root come Latin borrowings ‘levity’ and ‘levitate’.
- Finally, after non-initial velars (including the velar element of an inherited labiovelar), English and other west Germanic languages lose ‘w’. That is why we have ‘sing’ from the root *sengʷh -.
‘Sing’ is however itself somewhat unusual. The velar survived here only because of the preceding ‘n’, without which the *gʷh would have been intervocalic and so given ‘w’. This is another example of the fact that the rules for tracing individual sounds can become complex, notably away from initial position.
(iii) What’s an inherited English word from a PIE root beginning with *gʷh?
This time, we will return to a root already mentioned above: *gʷher-, meaning ‘to heat or warm’. What might be one or more English words inherited directly from this root, to match borrowed ‘furnace’ etc from Latin, ‘thermal’ and similar words from Greek, or ‘garam’ and ‘ghee’ from Hindi?
As usual, concentrate on the first two consonants. Remember that there may or may not be a vowel between them: there are in fact examples with an intervening vowel and also some without.