A Shambling Magnificence
How the English language evolved.
John McWhorter
December 26, 2008
People are given to asking we linguists where a word came from: "What is the origin of fork anyway?" The truth is most of us have to look it up in a dictionary like anyone else. Modern linguistics examines the workings of grammar; enthusiasts preoccupied with the origins of words are regarded with genial disdain, as an entomologist might look upon amateur butterfly collectors.
That isn't really fair, as tracing the origins of words
combines deductive reasoning, detailed engagement with
the intricacies of sound change, command of several
languages ancient and modern, and an awareness of
history. The words five, finger, fist, foist, Pentecost, and
quintessence can all be traced back, for example, to the
word for five, penkwe, in a language spoken by nomads
who migrated from southern Ukraine or Turkey into
Europe about eight thousand years ago. Linguists have
reconstructed that language, termed Proto-Indo-European,
by comparing words in its dozens of descendants in
Europe, Iran and India. Little did its speakers know that
their penkwe would also provide the word for what we
know as the drink punch: it originated with five ingredients,
you see.
Nevertheless, more than occasionally, one finds a
word's etymology given as "origin unknown," as if the
descent of the word were as baffling as the enigma of
Stonehenge. In the introduction to his peculiar but fascinating
An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology, Anatoly
Liberman points out that typically a great deal of
serious research has been devoted to the origin of such
words. But when no single hypothesis has become accepted
as canonical, compilers of etymological dictionaries tend to
apply the "origin unknown" stamp. Only diehard specialists will
recognize how misleading that label can be.
What enables this is the very fact that etymology is not academicized. "Its practitioners do not meet at special conferences, few manuals summarize the latest contributions to the subject, and
it is taught (when at all) only as a component of other
courses," Liberman notes. Hence there is no ongoing contest,
driven by careerism, to pick a winner among competing
accounts of how words emerged. Liberman points out
that since the early 20th century, authors of etymological
dictionaries have often not even followed current work.
Liberman shows that the words designated as "origin
unknown" in English actually have recoverable histories.
His Analytic Dictionary takes up a compact 55 words, surveying
everything written about their histories over the
past few centuries. In each case he shows that the inconclusive
verdict now standing in conventional sources is a
matter of inattention, and that responsible conclusions
can be drawn on cases long considered to have hit a wall.
For example, where did the word yet come from?
Okay, in the dictionary you'll find that the Old English
word was giet. But that is essentially a matter of "origin
unknown": you could find that in an Old English dictionary.
The question is what word of different meaning did
yet begin as—etymology interesting in the way that makes
laymen ask linguists where a word "came from." That
interest is satisfied by stories like why we call certain
drinks "punch," or that bring began in Proto-Indo-European
as two words: bher "to carry" and nek "to reach," i.e.,
carrying something as to effect its reaching a destination.
Bher-nek became bhrenk, and hence today's
bring (while elsewhere, nek became part of the word
enough, which connotes that something has reached
sufficiency).
There has been no smoking-gun account of how
we got yet that reaches that far back. This has left
space for athletic surmises such as that yet originated as
a command "Get!", or that it began in Hebrew, where
the equivalent happens to be the wanly similar
'od (upon which one commentator noted, "it
must have had a long journey northwards").
This kind of thing makes us forgive
those who have decided
it is better to just classify
yet's origin as "unknown," as does the dense thicket of
more scientific but notready-for-prime-time
speculations over the years.
Liberman takes a machete to the
overgrowth and reveals that yet is a
fascinating shard of random accretions. Namely, of
the three sounds that comprise yet, y is the spawn
of a mistake; e is the shadow of what started as a
whole word with a different meaning; and t is the
remnant of a suffix now extinct.
Yet began as a word with two pieces: a word ei
meaning there and a suffix -ta appended to it that
meant roughly to. This ei-ta was in Proto-Germanic,
the language that spawned English, German,
Dutch, Icelandic, and Swedish. Ei-ta meant
"there-towards."
In the Proto-Germanic branch Old English,
ei-ta fused into a single word, ge¯t. The old - a
ending was usually dropped these days. The g
happened as a copycat phenomenon: at first,
ei-ta had simply become e¯t. But there had been
another short little adverb in Proto-Germanic
that was used with a to-word appended to it. It
was iu, which meant ever, hence iu-ta, "evertowards."
So: to a Proto-Germanic speaker
there were ei-ta and iu-ta, with meanings that
felt similar.
Something happened with iu-ta. The i sound
in iu started being pronounced as a y (yu-ta)
because "ee" and the y sound are close in the
mouth. Then this y sound gradually morphed
into a g sound because the g isn't that far from
a y in the mouth, such that by Old English,
this iu-ta word was now gi¯et. Thus instead
of the old ei-ta and iu-ta, there were now
e¯t and gi¯et.
To Old English speakers, it felt natural to
start pronouncing e¯t as ge¯t since there was that word with a similar meaning gi¯et, just as some people say yourn on the
model of mine: humans have a natural drive to iron out a
language's wrinkles.
If you are wondering why neither "there-towards" nor
"ever-towards" sounds much like the meaning of yet, you
are hardly alone: the problem threw etymologists for centuries.
The "yet" meaning developed because Old English
tended to use gi¯et in two set expressions. Nu¯ meant now,
and pa¯ meant then, so nu¯ gi¯et meant "until now": that is, "now-ever-towards." Meanwhile pa¯ gi¯et meant "furthermore,"
where "ever-towards" lent a sense of movement
beyond then-ness: "then and beyond."
After a while, when saying "until then" or "furthermore,"
people started leaving off nu¯ and pa¯ and just saying
gi¯et. This is what languages do: in French, properly one
negates a verb by placing ne before and pas afterward: Je
ne parle pas "I do not speak." However, in spoken French,
one usually leaves the ne out and uses
only the pas "Je parle pas" which
means that pas, which started as the
word for "step," now carries the whole
burden of negation.
In the same way, the elision of nu¯
and pa¯ left gi¯et carrying the meaning
of both "until now" and "furthermore,"
which is, if you think about it,
what modern yet means: He hasn't
come yet (i.e., up to now); I'll
show you yet (i.e., in the
"furthermore)." Ge¯t, felt as
a variant of gi¯et, took on
this new meaning as well.
By early Modern English,
the g's had gone back to y's,
and gi¯et was yit while ge¯t was
yet: yet won out.
This, then, is where words come
from: two words becoming one, sounds
falling off, sounds popping up, meaning
drifting this way and that, one
word dropping out from a two-word
expression and leaving the remaining
word holding the bag. All of this is
easier to see happening in old documents
for some words than for others,
and Liberman tackles ones where figuring
out what happened is more
challenging. Believe it or not, this
includes staple words like man,
boy, and girl.
A book like Liberman's reveals
vividly that every word in a language
is the end product of eons of heedless
transformation. The lay public
is mesmerized by this process and
endlessly curious about it (so long
as the explication doesn't become
too technical) and yet tends to
view current manifestations of
the same kinds of change as lackadaisical
and repellent. If e¯t
picked up a stray g in early Old
English it's just how language
changes, but if today other picks
up an n (in whole nother, modeled
on another), then the time to
repent is at hand.
The assumption seems to be that
the procession from Old to Middle
to Modern English was a majestic
pageant, but for some reason, about
150 years ago, any further change in
English became inappropriate, as if all
of the morphings of sound and meaning
over the millennia were a targeted process designed to
become, and then forever stay, Modern English.
Each of Liberman's word studies reminds us that the
way we speak now is the result of a conglomeration of
contingencies piling one atop another in a fashion that
can only continue, as it is natural to what human
mouths and minds do to a language when using it rapidly
and unconsciously over lifetimes. There is a shambling
magnificence in this view of language, and it is
unfortunate that there are not more etymologists to
bring it to life with Professor Liberman's diligence.
John McWhorter is the author most recently of Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold Story of English (Gotham).
Copyright © 2008 by the author or Christianity Today International/Books & Culture magazine.
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