Hi! I'm Yoïn van Spijk and I make graphics and videos about etymology • linguist • dialectologist • https://www.patreon.com/yvanspijk • https://www.toot.community/@yvanspijk • https://www.twitter.com/yvanspijk
The clergy and the lewd
The Old English ancestor of the word lewd meant ‘lay: non-ecclesiastical’. For example, þā lǣwedan wīfmenn didn’t mean 'the lewd women’ but 'the laywomen’. The current meanings 'obscene’ and 'sexually unchaste’ evolved from the meaning 'lay’ in a downward spiral spanning many centuries. This type of meaning change is called pejoration. Click my graphic for more about lewd and other words whose meaning worsened. Later this week, we’ll look at the opposite type of semantic shift: amelioration.
The word guy comes from the name Guy Fawkes. In the 1800s, guy had a more specific meaning: ‘man of grotesque appearance’. This in turn was a widening of the meaning 'dummy of Guy Fawkes’. In England, these dummies are still paraded through the streets on Guy Fawkes Night in commemoration of the failed Gunpowder Plot of 1605, which a man named Guy Fawkes was involved in.
Click the second graphic in my series about meaning change to learn more about guy and other words whose meanings widened over time. In the next installment, we’ll look at another type of semantic change.
The ancestor of the word girl meant ‘child of any gender’. Its meaning narrowed to 'young female human’ during the Middle English period. The meanings of words change over time. This is called semantic drift. Click my new graphic below to have a closer look at five examples of narrowing. Tomorrow we’ll dive into the opposite semantic change: widening.
Car, to change, piece - English borrowed these words from French, which in turn inherited them from Latin. But they weren’t native Latin words. Latin got them from Gaulish, an extinct Celtic language that was spoken in Gaul, roughly modern-day France, Belgium, Luxembourg, and parts of the Netherlands, Switzerland and Northern Italy. Gaulish was a great-aunt of Welsh, Irish and Breton. Today’s graphic tells you about six common Romance words of Gaulish origin, and their modern Celtic cognates.
English has the word churl, meaning ‘rude, ill-bred, boorish person’. This word is not only related to German Kerl and Dutch kerel ('guy; dude’) but also to the name Charles. Carolus, the Latin ancestor of Charles, was borrowed from a Germanic word meaning 'freeman’, a variant of which became English churl. Click the graphic for more.
Moin! Ik hööp, dat dat okay is, wenn ik di op Plattdüütsch schrieven do? (So as ik dat seh, glööv ik woll, dat du dat verstahn kannst) Ik heff man ok en Fraag om Plattdüütsch (& Engelsch). Ik studeer ok Spraakwetenschop un heff mi dor ok al n beten mit Plattdüütsch befaat (an de Uni heff ik ok Plattdüütsch lehrt, ik bün keen Moderspraaklersch). Un as ik dat seh, is man sik nich so recht enig, op welke Wies Engelsch, Plattdüütsch un Freesch denn nu mitenannder verwandt sünd. De enen seggen dat dat ne proto-noordseegermansche Oorspraak geven deit, de annern seggen, dat dat bloots de rüümliche Neegde is, worüm düsse Spraken sik glieken. Wo sühst du dat? Wat is de gemeensame Geschichte vun Engelsch, Plattdüütsch und Freesch? Un wo is de Verbinnen to Hollansch / Nedderlansch? (Du muttst mi natürlich nich op Plattdüütsch antworden! De Süster(?) is ok okay! 😉)
Moin! Thank you very much for your message. Since the way you write the Low Saxon language suggests you studied it in Germany, I’ll answer in English, although you’d probably also understand my native Dutch.
Before answering your question, I’d like to say that I’m thrilled to read that Low Saxon has second-language speakers!
As for your question, what you often see in historical linguistics is an abstraction of the situation. We often speak about Proto-North Sea Germanic as if it were a monolithic language, separated from the other varieties of Proto-West Germanic, and gave rise to three languages: Old English, Old Frisian and Old Saxon.
You could see the varieties of Proto-West Germanic as one big dialect continuum: a ‘rainbow’ spanning from modern-day Denmark to Switzerland. As in a rainbow, it’s impossible to point out where red starts and stops, it’s very hard to clearly demarcate the West Germanic dialects.
Instead, let’s view Proto-North Sea Germanic as an area roughly covering the shades of red, yellow and orange. This conveys that there was variation within, while these varieties shared certain aspects of 'redness’. It also shows us that in the south, this reddish-yellowish area gradually transitioned into the greenish and bluish dialects that would become Old Dutch and Old High German.
As Old Dutch, Old High German and their descendants demonstrate, there are these transitional areas in the continuum - which still exists - where the regional languages have characteristics of both Saxon and Dutch or any other combination.
The ancestor of Old English used to be part of this continuum too, but as it was transported to the British Isles in the 5th century, it eventually really became its own branch, separated from Continental Germanic.
I hope I sufficiently answered your question. If not, please do tell me!
When learning French, I loved the verbs parler ('to talk') and aimer ('to love') because they were entirely regular. A thousand years ago, I wouldn't have been that happy. At that time, parler was irregular too: people said il/ele parole, not il/elle parle. And it wasn't aimer but amer, yet il/ele aime. Many more verbs that are now perfectly regular, used to have two different stems.
Click the video to hear a selection of these verbs evolve.
These irregularities were due to the regular sound changes that turned Latin into Old French. In Latin, word stress was different in the infinitive than in the third person, as indicated with an underline in the video. This stress difference had consequences for how the vowels developed:
a-MA-re > a-MER
A-mat > AI-me
On my Patreon (tier 1), I tell all about this phenomenon: how it affected vowels in a predictable way, the patterns that emerged (with a discussion of all of the forms in the video), and how the alternations were eventually eliminated. 1500 words, link in bio.
French verbs: all about stress
When learning French, I loved the verbs parler (‘to talk’) and aimer ('to love’) because they were entirely regular. A thousand years ago, I wouldn’t have been that happy. At that time, parler was irregular too: people said il/ele parole, not il/elle parle. And it wasn’t aimer but amer, yet il/ele aime. Many more verbs that are now perfectly regular, used to have two different stems.
Click the video to hear a selection of these verbs evolve.
These irregularities were due to the regular sound changes that turned Latin into Old French. In Latin, word stress was different in the infinitive than in the third person, as indicated with an underline in the video. This stress difference had consequences for how the vowels developed:
a-MA-re > a-MER
A-mat > AI-me
On my Patreon (tier 1), I tell all about this phenomenon: how it affected vowels in a predictable way, the patterns that emerged (with a discussion of all of the forms in the video), and how the alternations were eventually eliminated. 1500 words, link in bio.
The word cheap is a shortening of good cheap, literally meaning ‘good bargain’. Cheap, originally a noun, is related to the now obsolete verb to cheap ('to buy’). This is the cognate of the word for 'to buy’ in the other Germanic languages, such as German kaufen, Swedish köpa, Dutch kopen.
These languages in turn lost their cognate of to buy. If it had survived, it would’ve become German *bügen and Dutch *buggen, for example, but these haven’t been attested in any of the stages of these languages. Click the graphic to learn more.
The words wheel, cycle, and chakra are all distantly related. Via Germanic, Ancient Greek and Sanskrit, they can be traced back to Proto-Indo-European, the reconstructed common ancestor of these languages. Sound changes made these words grow apart. These words are also related to bicycle and Ku Klux (Klan). Click the graphic for more.
