Secrets of the Words You Know
Blog 32 Labio-Velars 3 *kʷ
To complete our coverage of labio-velars, we now look at the Voiceless stop: *kʷ
(i)*kʷ at the beginning of a word
As far as *kʷ is concerned, Latin takes the prize for simplicity, as in initial position it comes near to conserving PIE *kʷ but as ‘kw’, with the spelling ‘qu’ or ‘cu’.
This Latin reflex of PIE *kʷ is readily seen in the ‘question words’ or ‘relative pronouns’, some of which have been taken into English as ‘learned borrowings’, for example in the legal phrase ‘Cui bono?’ (literally ‘to whom good?’, that is, ‘in whose interest is it?’) and the phrase at the end of a mathematical proof, ‘QED’ or ‘Quod erat demonstrandum’ (‘Which has [now] been proved’).
We have seen (Blog post 20) that Grimm’s Law tells us that initial voiceless consonants changed to voiceless fricatives (so *k to Proto Germanic *h). We would therefore expect the Proto-Germanic form derived from *kʷ to have been something like *hw. Its pronunciation may have been close to the strongly-breathed voiceless ‘Fwat?’ of Scottish dialects. In old English, such sounds would indeed have been spelt ‘hw’, as in the very first word of the poem ‘Beowulf’, ‘Hwaet’ (‘What’).
The modern English equivalents to these question words/relative pronouns almost all start with the unusual spelling ‘wh’. In most cases this is pronounced in standard English as a simple ‘w’, though a pronunciation with an initial breath, the last trace of the aspirate, was maintained even in some forms of standard English into the Twentieth Century.
A few examples such as ‘who’ or ‘whose’ take the opposite course by losing the labial element and thus being pronounced with an initial ‘h’. This is the result of the labial element falling away when followed by the vowel-sound ‘u’/’oo’. As noted in Blog 30 this is a form of ‘dissimilation’ between two lip-rounded sounds. ‘How’ goes a step further in having the ‘w’ dropped in spelling as well as pronunciation. This is because in this word the consonant was followed by what had become a ‘u’/’oo’ sound several centuries earlier than was the case for ‘who’ and ‘whose’.
Before a consonant, Proto Germanic initial *hw is lost (just as we have seen with ‘h’ on its own). An example, which we mentioned under *p, is ‘midriff’, the English match for Latin ‘corpus’, a body, from PIE root *kʷrep-.
In Greek, as you will expect from the discussion under *gw, the picture is more complex. Before both the ‘back’ vowels ‘a’ and ‘o’, the velar element is lost, so giving ‘p’. However, before the ‘front’ vowels ‘e’ and in this case also ‘i’, the Greek reflex is a ‘t’. This explains why we see a p/t oscillation in our well-used Greek-based prefixes for ‘far away’ in both time (‘paleo-’) and space (‘tele-’). Both word-elements come from a root *kʷel-, which is about distance.
Finally, as mentioned under *gʷ, before (and after) ‘u’, Greek – like many other PIE language groups – simply loses the labial sound altogether under the ‘Boukolos Rule’: we shall indeed look at that very case below.
In the ‘satəm’ languages, and so in modern Hindi or Russian, for example, question words generally begin with a plain velar. We find the same in the very word ‘Sanskrit’, where the ‘kr’ comes from a root *kʷer-, meaning ‘to make’ as mentioned under *s. The word ‘karma’ (‘deed’, but also the principle that deeds have consequences) also comes from this root, as does the Greek word for ‘monster’, which forms the first element of borrowed or invented words about monstrous size like ‘terabyte’.
The Celtic languages are often defined by the way that they have developed *kʷ.
One group, including Welsh, Breton and Cornish, lost the velar element so that *kʷ evolved to ‘p’, just as common Celtic had developed *gʷ to ‘b’, thus filling the ‘gap’ left by the loss of *p in the Celtic languages as a group (another good example of how such gaps are often not left for long). This is often indeed known as the P-Celtic group.
Irish and Scots Gaelic, along with Manx, however, lost not the velar but the labial element, so are known as the Q-Celtic group. The difference is clear from the number 5. We saw above under *p that Celtic, like Latin, changed the inherited PIE word for ‘five’, *penkʷe. to *kʷenkʷe. In Welsh, this gives ‘pump’ (pronounced ‘pimp’), while Modern Irish has ‘cúig’. Similarly Q-Celtic ‘kin’, with the meaning ‘head’, so that Scottish ‘kinloch’ means the head of a loch, matches P-Celtic ‘pen’, seen in many hills not only in Wales but in England like Pendle Hill in Lancashire or Pen-y-ghent in Yorkshire.
The sound-code for English written ‘wh’ is as follows:
English wh may go back either to PIE*kʷ or in a few cases to PIE *kw (Blog 29). Here we give the sound code for the former:
- English initial wh in inherited words = PIE*kʷ = Latin qu = Greek p (before a/o)/t (before e/i) = Irish/Gaelic c/k = Welsh/Breton p. PIE*kʷ = Balto-Slavic/Indo-Iranian k before original back vowels, but palatalized before original front vowels.
(ii) Secrets of the wheel
We can see a wide set of matches across Indo-European languages if we examine the widely-used root *kʷel-, (not to be confused with the identical root underlying ‘paleo-’ and ‘tele-’) whose core meaning appears to be ‘to turn’.
In Latin, this root gives the verb that means, and is also the origin of, ‘cultivate’, perhaps from the notion of turning the soil. (The initial consonant appears as a simple velar under the ‘Boukolos Rule’.) This leads to words like ‘colony’ and its various derivatives in English. The shift in meaning from something like ‘farm’ started in Roman days when it became the term used for an area for re-settlement, originally for Roman army veterans, as we see in place names like ‘Köln’/‘Cologne’ and ‘Lincoln’.
Because our heads turn on our necks, the root also provides us, again via Latin, with ‘collar’, and with ‘col’ for a neck of a mountain. This is often called a ‘saddle’ in English, but in Scotland and Northen England it is a ‘hause’, from a pre-existing form starting ‘hals-‘, the last vestige of the ‘l’ shown by the ‘u’ of ‘hause’, and thus from the same root. The initial ‘h’ of the word for a neck-protector in mediaeval armour, ‘hauberk’ (again with ‘u’ reflecting a lost ‘l’), similarly shows a Germanic origin for this word which entered English via Norman French.
Also from this root is the Greek word-element we see in ‘palindrome’, which means ‘back again’. And our word ‘pole’ as in ‘Pole-Star’, which comes via Latin from a Greek derivative of the o-grade *kʷol-, similarly shows *kʷ evolving to a Greek ‘p’ before a back vowel.
For a relevant borrowing from a Greek derivative of *kʷel- which demonstrates the alternative Greek reflex of ‘t’ from the initial labio-velar before a front vowel, I have to turn to theology and philosophy and offer you the word ‘teleology’, or the ‘study of final causes’. Here the first element is from a Greek word meaning the outcome or accomplishment, perhaps through the idea of completing a cycle.
The third Greek reflex of *kʷ, a plain velar, is as we know visible in the second element of the word ‘Boukolos’ (‘cowherd’), and similarly derives from this root, the logic presumably being that the cowherd ‘turns’ the cow. This is of course the origin of our borrowing ‘bucolic’.
In addition there is a reduplicated version of the root, *kʷekʷl-. This, literally ‘a turn-turn’, is one of the main PIE words for a wheel – a lovely example of a language adapting to a brand-new technology thousands of years ago. As you may guess, the ‘wh’ in English does indeed show that the word ‘wheel’ itself derives from this source, the ‘wh’ from the second *kʷ being lost between vowels as we shall see in the next blog. The Greek match lies behind our word ‘cycle’, with both the ‘c’s being hard ‘k’ sounds in Greek. Thanks to the Boukolos Rule the consonants have lost the labial element of the root, though it is reflected in the ‘y’, which as usual indicates an original Greek ‘u’.
The word for ‘wheel’ in Sanskrit comes from the same source: ‘chakra’. The changes are characteristic for Sanskrit: the palatalization of the first *kʷ to ‘ch’ before what was originally the front vowel *e, while the second *kʷ remains as a velar before the *l, which as often has shifted to an ‘r’.
In this case I have run out of good examples of PIE roots to test your understanding of initial *kʷ. Instead, your test will come in the next Blog on a non-initial example.