ETYMOLOGY OF ENGLISH WORDS

 

Etymology is the study of the history of the form of words and, by extension, the origin and evolution of their semantic meaning across time. The meaning of a word isn’t set in stone. Instead, it’s fluid and malleable, and essentially, the people who speak a certain language can change the current meaning of a word, usually unknowingly. This process of semantic change goes on every day.

 

The early stage of Modern English (the kind spoken by William Shakespeare in the 1500s), borrows heavily from Latin and Ancient Greek, as well as other nearby languages such as French, German and Dutch. The English language freely imbibed the Greek and Latin words and with time their usage has both modified and multiplied as you can see in this chart:

 

Root Word	Language	Meaning	Modern Examples
Bio	Greek	Life	Biology, Biography
Phobos	Greek	Fear	Claustrophobia, Arachnophobia
Photo/Phos	Greek	Light	Photography
Demos	Latin	People	Democracy, Demographic
Bon	Latin	Good	Bonus, Bonanza
Aud	Latin	Hear	Audio, Audience
Mir	Latin	Amazement, wonder	Mirage, Miraculous

 

 

The English then went on to colonize countries in Asia, Africa, Australia and America and these cultures also added words and phrases which are art and parcel of the English language today. Thus words like Bunglow, Bundobast, Cachmere, Chutney from India, Domkop, Robot, Howzit and Bongo from Afrika are today used freely in English without even realizing their origin. I have, in the past written two blogs on the influence the Indian and African languages had on English and you can read them by clicking the following hyperlinks:

https://surajitbrainwaves.blogspot.com/2021/07/indian-influence-on-english-language.html

https://surajitbrainwaves.blogspot.com/2021/07/african-continent-and-english-language.html

As if that was not enough newer technology added newer words like blog, workaholic etc. as did the new generation of English speakers with words like ‘selfi’!.  This means that the English that we use today is a unique blend of many kinds of influences. It’s only when we look closely that we can see the roots.

 

Words, like facts, are difficult to remember out of context.  Remembering is greatly facilitated when you have a body of information with which to associate either a word or a fact.  For words, interesting origins or histories will help provide a context.  For example, a hippopotamus is a "river horse," from the Greek hippos, meaning "horse," and potamos, meaning "river."

 

Not only words, even phrases are easy to understand if you understand the story behind them. If you were offered a Hobson's choice, would you know what was meant?  Thomas Hobson owned a livery stable in seventeenth-century England.  He loved his horses, and to prevent any one horse from being overworked, he hired them out in turn, beginning with stall number one.  Customers had to take the horses they were given.  Thus Hobson's choice means no choice at all.

Tracing the origin of words

Etymology thus is the study of the origins of words.  The English language is living and growing.  Although many of our words have been part of our language for many years, new words are added all the time.  The English language is influenced by many sources and by various processes:

 

• Derived from Foreign Words - English, in many cases, has been commonly expanded by incorporating foreign words into it.  Most of our language has ancient Anglo-Saxon or Latin origins.  Other languages have also added to our vocabularies. In the last century the English colonies like India, Nigeria, South Africa and Australia are adding words to enrich it. Thus many words have crept into English from foreign cultures such as slogan (Gaelic), coyote (Nahuatl), and avatar (Sanskrit)

 

• Modifications: Once people begin to use a word, they may change it, perhaps to make it easier to say. They may also form new words by modifying old words.  ‘Selfie’ is a good example. How else would you describe photographing yourself?

 

• Semantic shift: Change of words and their meaning wich cnanging times as in Mood comes from Old English mod, which meant mind or spirit and Dream in Old English meant a festive atmosphere. Certain other significant semantic shifts are:

Euphemisms: what are socially acceptable changes.

·         Housecleaner instead of maid.

·         Server instead of waiter or waitress

Functional shift: how words get new parts of speech.

·         A soldier > to soldier on

·         A load > to upload

·         To drive > a drive

Generalization: extending the particular to the general.

·         Fanatic (religious zealot) to sports fanatic

 

• Additions through Technology & Products - Our words often reflect current interests, trends, and innovations.  One of the most recent contributors to our language has been computer technology, which has created words such as bytes, key-board, monitor, and disk. Another way new words come into our language is through the development of products.  Some examples include: Kleenex, Walkman, Scotch tape, Xerox, and Linoleum.

 

• Generational changes - As words are used, subtle differences become permanent changes and even new words, themselves:

·         Baby talk: Jammies, bye-bye, tummy

·         Coinages (purposely invented words): Workaholic, blog

·         Combining forms: Mini, clipped from miniature and added to everything: minicomputer, minivan

·         Compounding: Do and Undo

·         Nonsense words: Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, jabberwocky

·         Onomatopoeia (words that sound like their meaning): Slam, crack, bump

·         Phrasal verbs (getting by, down, in, off, on, over, and out): Tune in, clean up, buzz off

·         Prefixing and suffixing: Pre-heat, post-prandial, legal-ize, re-educate-ion

·         Reduplication (the doubling of a syllable or word element to strengthen or emphasize meaning): Flip-flop

 

• People's Names - sometimes when a person invents or introduces something, that thing becomes associated with the person's name.  The person, through time, is forgotten while the name lives on in our language.  Examples include:
• mesmerize - F.A. Mesmer, an Austrian doctor and hypnotist.
• sideburns - an American English alteration of burnsides, Ambrose E. Burnside, a Union general.
• Gandhian – The philosophy of non violent protest practiced by Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi in Indis’ freedom struggle
• Alzheimer’s Disease

 

• Words from Letters - The initials for the names of things may actually come to replace the names.  The initials become the words that represent the thing, concept, or group.  The following are examples of words that have developed from initials.
• TV - TeleVision
• COLD- Chronic Obstructive Lung Disease
• COD - Cash On Delivery
• VIP – Very Important Person

 

• Word Histories - Some words also have interesting histories.  Learning the stories behind the meanings is a good way to learn those words.  The following examples will give you an idea of how history can affect language.
• footman - It was once thought to bring bad luck if a person stepped on the door threshold when entering a house.  Rich people hired a servant to stand at their doors.  His job was to guard against a guest's stepping on the threshold.  The guard became known as a footman.
• hooker - A synonym for prostitute.  The term became popular during the Civil War.  The women involved were camp followers.  General "Fighting Joe" Hooker approved their presence in order to boost the morale of his men.

 

Interesting history of some English words       

Let us trace a few of these English words that have a pretty peculiar history and stem from ancient words that used to mean something very, very different.

 

1. From 'Salt' to 'Salary': Our monthly earnings can be described by the English word 'salary', familiar to most English speakers, as it's been part of the English language for more than 200 years. Surprisingly enough, though, this very word stems from an ancient Latin word 'salarium', which was the pay Roman soldiers were given to purchase salt, both a necessity and a luxury at the time. The root of the word 'salarium', in turn, is the Latin word 'sal', which means 'salt'.

 

2. From 'Ignorant' to 'Nice': If you were to wish a nice day to an English speaker in the 13th century, they surely wouldn't like it. This is because the word 'nice' used to mean 'stupid' back then. In fact, for centuries, 'nice' and its earlier versions have been used to describe all kinds of derogatory human characteristics, such as being frivolous, poor, silly and clumsy, but the origins of the word date back to the Roman times, where the Latin word 'nescius' used to mean 'ignorant'. In fact, it wasn't until the 15th century that this word came to mean something positive, more specifically, someone who is delicate or dainty.

 

3. From 'King' to 'Check': We routinely use the verb 'check' to say we examined or validated something, but the ancestor of this term isn't even a verb. The beginnings of this word date back to Middle Persian, where the word 'šāh' meant ‘king’ remember the Shah of Iran! From Persian, it had jumped to Arabic, and eventually, to European languages, where it was first used in the game of chess to denote a situation in which the king is threatened. Only by the 19th century, the word 'checker' came to mean 'a person who checks or controls' in English, and with time, it gained widespread use and transformed into a verb. The 'checker fabric pattern' and 'checkerboard' also originated from this Persian term.

 

4. From 'Ninth' to 'Noon': Another word with a Latin origin, the word 'noon', confusingly enough, used to refer to 3 PM. More specifically, the Latin term 'nona (hora)', literally translated as 'the ninth hour (from sunrise)'. From Latin, the term was borrowed into Old English through Ecclesiastical Latin, and somewhere around the 12 century, it came to mean midday instead of 3 PM, likely due to a shift in the customary midday meal schedule. So essentially, we have our lunch break to thank for the word 'noon' as we know it.

 

5. From 'Star' to 'Disaster': In the olden days, humans used to blame catastrophes on the unfavorable alignment of stars, and both astrology and the word 'disaster' are remnants of those days. Until the 16th century, English didn't have the word 'disaster' in its vocabulary. The word was borrowed into English from Italian, where it literally meant an ill-starred event, with the Latin word for 'star', 'astra' being its base. With time, the relation to the stars was erased and the word turned into a synonym for 'catastrophe', as we use it in Modern English to this day.

Etymologies can be simple or complex. Much like the lives of people, it depends upon how much a word has traveled and what adventures it has had.  I will end this presentation with etymology of the word ‘English”. The root of ‘English’ is ‘Engl’ which came from the ancient Germanic tribe, the Angles, who spoke a language that later became English.  The -ish is just a suffix that means “language of”!