The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll through the Hidden Connections of the English Language

Coincidences and Patterns

The Chinese for pay is pei, and the Farsi Iranian word for bad is bad. The Uzbek for chop is chop, and in the extinct Aboriginal language of Mbaram a dog was called a dog. The Mayan for hole is hole and the Korean for many is mani. When, in the mountains of the Hindu Kush, an Afghan wants to show you something, he will use the word show; and the ancient Aztecs used the Nahuatl word huel to mean well.

Any idiot can deduce from this that all the languages of the world are related. However, anyone of reasonable intelligence will realise that they are just a bunch of coincidences. There are a lot of words and a lot of languages, but there are a limited number of sounds. We’re bound to coincide sometimes.

To prove that two languages are related you need to show a pattern of changes. It’s not enough to say that the Latin word collis has a double L in it and so does hill. That wouldn’t convince anyone of anything. But it’s possible to show that hundreds of Latin words that begin with a hard C have German and English equivalents that begin with an H. Moreover, you discover that the rest of the consonants are pretty much unchanged. So the Latin cornu translates to Old German and English as horn. If you can show a pattern of changes, then you can be pretty damned sure that the languages are related. Let’s give it a go.

So the English horn of hounds would be the cornu canum and the horn of a hundred hounds would be the cornu centum canum and the hundred-headed hound with horns would be canis centum­ capitum cum cornibus. And the …

Well, you get the idea.

The C to H shift that separates Latin from German is part of a group of shifts known as Grimm’s Law, because they were set out by Jacob Grimm, who was one of the Brothers Grimm and who spent most of his time collecting fairy tales.

There are other parts to Grimm’s Law; for example, Ps in Latin turn to Fs in German (and hence in many English words), which is how paternal pisces became fatherly fishes.

It’s easy to see how this happens when you consider how it still goes on today. In the East End of London, people don’t pronounce their Hs and haven’t done for at least a hundred years. The house of a hundred hounds in Hackney would be pronounced the ’ouse of an ’undred ’ounds in ’Acne. Nor do East Enders pronounce the G at the end of participles, so instead of humming and hawing, a Londoner would find himself ’ummin’ and ’awin’.

The important thing is that people do this consistently. Nobody listens to ’ip hop, or even hip ’op. You either pronounce your Hs or you don’t. Once one H has gone, they all disappear.

Of course, East London English is still English, for now. But if somebody built a big wall around the East End and didn’t let anyone in or out for a few hundred years, the captives would probably make more and more changes until their language became utterly incomprehensible to the rest of the English-speaking world.

Can that still happen?

Nobody is quite sure how transport and communication will affect the splitting of languages. On the face of it, you’d expect accents to stop developing as everybody adjusted to the tyranny of television, but that doesn’t appear to be the case. In the US, for example, there’s a thing called the Northern Cities Vowel Shift, whereby people in Detroit and Buffalo have started pronouncing block as black and cot as cat. That, in turn, has pushed the A sound, so that cat is pronounced as cee-at: so folks in Detroit would call the famous children’s book The Cee-at in the Hee-at.

And accent changes are unpredictable. In Jamaica they don’t drop their Hs, they pick them up. A Jamaican with a strong accent will hadd han haitch honto hany word that begins with a vowel. In New Zealand E has become I, so they have six. And though in Britain a medal is made of metal, in America a medal is usually made of substance that’s pronounced medal.

These laws are not absolutely consistent; but they’re an awful lot better than you might expect. Also, words change their meaning and get shortened so you can’t just take an English word, apply some transformations to it, and come out with perfect Italian. But all the European languages are closely enough related that for the basic words – like father, eyes, heart – there’s probably a recognisable cousin.

This is particularly amazing when you consider how Europe has been overrun again and again by hordes of barbarians speaking barbarian languages like Frankish.