Secrets of the Words You Know
Blog 6 English as a Germanic Language 3: the fronting of ‘sk-’ concluded
First, let’s fill in the table in Blog 5.
Inherited words with ‘sh-’ ……………….
shave
shriek
shear (‘cut’ as in ‘shear sheep’)
shell
Borrowings from Old Norse with the sound ‘sk-’…………….
scab
screech
score
scalp
For clarification, the many meanings of ‘score’ in English all go back to the idea of cutting, including counting say sheep in batches of 20 (perhaps scratching a line for each 20 on a stone or a wooden tally-stick) and notching up points in games/sports by ‘scoring’ a piece of wood.
In some cases the Old Norse word seems to have simply replaced the Old English ‘sh-’ word: ‘scant’, ‘scare’, ‘scathe’ (as in ‘unscathed’), ‘scold’ (from ‘skald’, the Norse for ‘poet’, which maybe says something about the perceived power of verse), ‘scorch’, ‘scrap’, ‘scrape’, ‘skill’ and ‘sky’.
In some other cases, Old or Middle English texts show no examples of a Scandinavian-looking word beginning with ‘sk’ which is in use in modern English. In such cases the word – unless just happening to have escaped mention in the surviving texts – may have been borrowed:
- from a Scandinavian language later: ‘scoff’; ‘scoot’ (doublet of the inherited ‘shoot’: indeed one can still say ‘Why did you shoot/scoot off so quickly?’ with no real difference in meaning); ‘scowl’; ‘scree’; ‘scuff’ (as in ‘walk through without raising one’s foot’), doublet of ‘shove’; ‘skid’ (and of course ‘ski’); and ‘skip’.
- from Dutch (where the sound is now a strongly aspirated ‘skh’, spelt ‘sch’): we have already met ‘scone’ (from ‘schoon brood’, literally ‘fine bread’, ‘schoon’ being a doublet of ‘sheen’ and of German ‘schön’); other borrowings include ‘scoop’; ‘scour’; ‘scud’; ‘scum’; ‘skate’ (in the sense of ice-skates: this word was apparently brought into English at the time of the restoration of Charles II in 1660 after his years of exile in the Netherlands); ‘scrub’ (doublet of ‘shrub’, plants like broom being used to scrub the body); and ‘skipper’ (doublet of ‘shipper’).
- from a Germanic source via a third language: ‘scarp’ (doublet of ‘sharp’) comes to us via Italian, while ‘scarf’; ‘scorn’; ‘skim’; and ‘skew’ (doublet of ‘shy’: think ‘shy away from’) all come from French words that have similarly been imported from a Germanic source.
‘Skirmish’ (via ‘scrimmage’ the origin of ‘scrum’) has a similar history, and is also an example of one of the four less predictable changes that reflect the phonetic context of sounds, which we highlighted in Technical Note 2. See Box 1 below:
Box 1: Phonetic Context (1): Metathesis
‘Metathesis’ is Greek for placing something somewhere different, or, more pithily, ‘sound-swapping’. Here, the first four sounds appear in the order ‘s-k-i-r’ in ‘skirmish but ‘s-k-r-i’ in ‘scrimmage’, the ‘r’ and the ‘i’ swapping places.
A similar example, also swapping the order of an ‘r’ and a vowel, is the word ‘third’ as opposed to ‘three’.
The sound ‘r’ is particularly prone to be involved in sound-swapping, though you will see later examples involving other sounds as well.
You will find several more text boxes of this kind, illustrating types of sound change identified in Technical Note 2, as you read later Blogs. Each time such a box occurs, it will be added to a ‘living’ Technical Note (no 3), so that you can easily refer to it if you wish.
- From a non-Germanic language (most frequently via French): These include from Old French, for example, ‘scandal’ and ‘scar’, both ultimately from Greek; ‘scout’ (in the sense of ‘observe’) from Old French ‘escouter’ (modern French écouter, to listen to); and ‘scald’ and ‘scan’ from Latin.
English is not alone among Germanic languages in having changed an original ‘sk’ to ‘sh’. As we can see from ‘schadenfreude’ (the enjoyment of someone else’s discomfort being literally ‘harm-joy’, with the first element related to the English borrowing from Old Norse ‘scathe’), German itself has made the same change, though with a different spelling. This is a good example of parallel but entirely independent changes in two separate languages. We will see more as we proceed.
So, to conclude on words beginning with an ‘sk’ sound:
- If a modern English word begins with this sound group (it may be written either ‘sc’, before ‘a’, ‘o’, ‘r’ or ‘u’, or ‘sk’), it has been borrowed rather than inherited;
- If a modern English word that one might expect to be in ‘basic vocabulary’ begins with ‘sh’ (so ‘sheep’ rather than ’shampoo’[1]), there’s a good chance that it goes back to at least a Proto-Germanic *sk, and that you will find:
- matching words in Scandinavian languages that still start with ‘sk’;
- in Dutch, words with an aspirated ‘skh’ sound, spelt as ‘sch’; and
- in German, words also spelt ‘sch’, but pronounced with a ‘sh’ sound.
In the middle of words, a similar shift is normal, as we saw with ‘fish’ as opposed to ‘piscatorial’, as we saw in Blog 2. However, English does conserve ‘sk’ in final position, as in ‘ask’.
In the next blog, we will turn to how fronting affected words beginning with ‘k’ or ‘hard c’.
To get you thinking, why might ‘cold’ and ‘chill’, both in the same broad category of meaning, have related but different initial consonants?
Finally, Technical Note 2 posed the question ‘What might be the original concept that gave rise to two such oppositional terms as ‘guest’ and ‘hostile’?
Given the spread of meanings in the word-family, which also includes ‘host’ and the first elements of ‘xenophobia’, ‘hospital’ and ‘hospitality’ (all linked by normal sound-rules), the original concept is usually taken to be ‘a stranger’, someone outside one’s family or clan group, towards whom one might well have the obligations of hospitality but also concerns about ‘strangeness’ or even possible hostile intent.
[1] An Anglo-Indian word drawn from Hindi ‘champo’, imperative of the verb champna, meaning ‘massage!’