Secrets of the Words You Know
Blog 4 English as a Germanic Language 1: Introduction
In the previous blog, I invited you to list English words beginning with the sounds ‘g’ and ‘l’ or a hard ‘ch’ and ‘l’ (either together or with an intervening vowel) that might share some overall meaning with ‘gold’? Here are some:
- Similar to ‘gold’: ‘gild’, ‘Guilder’ (the Dutch currency unit before the Euro, the name stressing, like the Polish Zloty, that the currency was as good as gold)
- Similar to ‘cholera’: borrowings from Greek ‘cholesterol’ (the ‘ster’ element means ‘solid’) and ‘melancholy’ (literally, ‘black bile’ in Greek); but also the inherited English word ‘gall’
- Similar to ‘chlorophyll’: Borrowings from Greek ‘chlorine’ and ‘chloroform’
- Words beginning with ‘gl-’ and having some common link to the concept of ‘shining’: (all inherited from Germanic or in a couple of cases via Old Norse) ‘gleam’, ‘glow’, ‘glimmer’, glitter’, ‘glisten’, ‘glass’, ‘glad’, ‘glee’.
These words are not a complete list. You might like to download the app for ‘Etymonline’, type in ‘gold’ and survey the words offered under *ghel- (2).
We will come on later to the sound-code that explains why Greek words beginning with ‘ch’, Slavic words beginning with ‘z’, and English words beginning with ‘g’ or sometimes ‘y’ may go back to common origins over 5,000 years ago. For now we will start on our journey by exploring some of the ways in which the sounds of English have evolved to make it distinct within the Germanic group.
The original Germanic language, which linguists call ‘Proto-Germanic’, may have been spoken in a more or less homogenous speech community, perhaps in the Baltic area, 2,000 years or so ago. As Germanic tribes migrated, it gave rise to three sub-groups.
- The ‘West Germanic’ group includes English, along with German, and the three closely-related languages of Dutch, Flemish and Afrikaans. The Frisian dialect, spoken mostly in the North East of the Netherlands, bears the closest relationship to English of all surviving Germanic languages: my mother used to recite a rhyme she had picked up on a visit to the Netherlands in the 1930s, “ ‘Butter’, ‘bread’ and ‘green cheese’ are good English and good Fries”, though spellings differ between English and what Frieslanders would call ‘Friesk’.
- The Scandinavian languages form the ‘Northern Germanic’ group.
- There are early records of ‘Gothic’, usually seen as a separate ‘East Germanic’ language, but this has died out, being last recorded in Crimea in the 18th century.
Of these various languages, Old Norse (the language underlying the Scandinavian languages) is the source of a remarkable number of words used in English. This is the result of the many interactions in the Viking era, when large parts of England – and for a time the whole of it – were under Danish control, while their cousins from Norway settled in many places in Ireland, North-West England and Scotland, notably the Western and Northern islands and neighbouring coasts.
Here are 14 words borrowed from Germanic languages: two are from German, two from Dutch and the remaining ten are from Old Norse: ‘troll’, ‘zeitgeist’, ‘ransack’, ‘take’, ‘get’, ‘scone’, ‘law’, ‘egg’, ‘happy’, ‘yacht’, ‘loose’, ‘schadenfreude’, ‘them’, ‘sky’. Two questions for you:
- Can you identify the Old Norse words in the list?
- What characteristics make some of the Old Norse words feel particularly ‘domesticated’ in English, so that it may be a surprise that they are not simply inherited from Old English?
Answers in the next Blog.
In the case of Old Norse, we will concentrate on one important characteristic that distinguishes English from Old Norse and other Germanic languages.
To get into this, let’s start with two similar-looking words (another ‘doublet’) for a couple of very common items of clothing, one worn on the upper body and one on the lower. Both start with ‘s’ and have 5 letters, with only one letter differing between them. Two questions for you:
- What are the two words?
- Can you guess which is inherited and which borrowed from Old Norse?
Again, answers in the next Blog.
But this week is also when you get the link to the first of a couple of ‘Technical Notes’ to assist in clarifying terms that we shall be using in subsequent Blogs. You do not need to memorise what it says, but it will a helpful reference as we go forward. Just go to the Technical Notes page on the website and follow the link to Technical Note 1.