By Francesco Perono Cacciafoco/The Conversation
The labeling process, the work of naming the objects of the world, is as old as the first phrases spoken by our ancestors. Through derivation, which examines the lexicon’s traditional development, we can recreate the stages of this procedure.
Speaking words tell a lot of tales. To get back to their roots, linguists apply the quantitative process. Languages are not singular institutions; rather, they are part of verbal families, such as the Indo-European family’s English and West Germanic languages.
In the analytical approach, linguists compare cognates ( the exact words in different-but-related language, like family in English, māter in Latin, and whisper in German ) and replicate the way these words were pronounced by old speakers.
Scholars go back in time, to the prehistoric eras without any written data, by doing so to give voice to our ancestors. It’s difficult and complex, but really cool things.
However, the process does n’t always work. Some of the terms that are known as “proper words” are now reportedly only used in English, according to the English vocabulary. They may be attributed to them in any other speech.
Although these words are quite simple and frequent, we cannot use the comparative method to compare them and thus reconstruct their origins because they are unique. These “proper phrases” represent an interesting issue of the English language. These are five cases.
1. Bird
” Bird” sounds Germanic, but does n’t have cognates in any other Germanic language. It is a uncommon version of bridd, which denotes a “young parrot” in Old English.
Old English listeners used fugel, as in “fowl”, as a common term for birds. Up to the 15th century, “bird” was used not only to illustrate a fresh bird, but even a young creature in general – even a tuna or a youngster.
2. Boy
Who ( or what ) was, actually, a “boy”? No single knows. In the 13th centuries, a boie was a slave, but now in that time the origin of the term was mysterious. The phrase began to be used to refer to a female child a century afterwards. The word does n’t sound Germanic, but it’s not clear whether it was imported to England by the Normans either.
The term is traced back to an untested vulgar Latin verb, *imboiare ( in etymological notation, the apostrophe indicates a phrase that has been reconstructed using the comparative approach rather than the source material ), which is thought to have something to do with the Latin boia, which means yoke or neck, and the idea of slavery.
We do n’t know the origins of’ boy’ or’ girl’. ( Royal MS 10 E IV f. 311v / The British Library )
3. Lady
Since the 14th century, gyrle was a term used to show a youngster, with no female difference. No one has been able to reconstruct the term’s causes despite how obvious it is to be. Some scholars have connected it with the Old English word gierela, meaning garment, with a semantic transition presumed from” child’s apron ( garment )” to, simply,” child”.
Some people believe that the term “girl” belongs to a collection of words that also includes “boy,” “lass,” and “lad,” and that can have come from different conditions that are no longer directly related to them. Whatever the truth is, the secret of “girl” endures.
4. Dog
” Dog” comes from Old English docga, a quite unusual word afterwards used in Middle English to describe a specific, solid type – the mastiff.
In Old English, hund was the common German word until the name docga replaced it almost entirely in the 16th centuries. Then, “hound” is conceptually specialised and indicates a looking dog. No one has been able to find the linguistic origin of docga thus far, and no old English term appears to be related to it.
” Dog” is thus a genuine lexicological secret of the English vocabulary. Although it was initially believed that the breed became well-known enough to be associated with the idea of a “dog” in itself, this does n’t explain the definition of “dog.”
The same strange roots are shared by other veterinary terms in the English vocabulary, like “pig”, deer “and” hog”, which are all semantically unclear. Incidentally, the common term for” dog “in Spanish, perro, is also entirely mysterious in its roots.
5. Record
Because we are aware of its provenance,” Record” is somewhat of an intruder in this collection of linguistic oddities. It comes from the Middle French word” recorder”, which meant to connect, follow or understand, which in turn comes from the Latin recordārī.
A Spanish medieval trumpet ( early 14th century ). ( Manessische Liederhandschrift 848, fol. 423v. )
However, the microphone I am referring to is not the system used to report but the” immediately flute”, a music equipment. Despite its really recognized roots, no one knows why in English, the” right trumpet” – flauto dior, in Italian, flûte à bec in French, and blockflöte in European – is called a” microphone”. It certainly does n’t record anything.
Historical sources have been confused since its first attestations. The word’s earliest use dates back to 1388, when it appears in a list of musical equipment owned by the upcoming King Henry IV. There, it’s documented as” i. fistula nomine Recordour” (” a pipe called Recordour” ). This makes it look like a proper noun, with the initial character capitalised. In 15th-century England, the word” recordour”, with a lowercase initial, meant a chief legal officer of a city.
There are some theories. The sound of the recorder was compared with that produced by birds ‘ songs, which are repetitive and, therefore, would develop a” recording “loop – but that feels far-fetched.
In the past, I have worked on the etymologies of the words” ocarina” and” gemshorn”, and my focus is now on” recorder”. The reconstruction of these “proper words” ‘ origin stories could reveal a lot about our ancestors, their mental models, and their cognitive methods for identifying what was happening around them.
Top image: Detail from Tacuinum Sanitatis, a 14th-century handbook of medieval health. Source: Public Domain/The Conversation
The Conversation originally published this article under the title” Five Common English Words We Do n’t Know the Origins of- Including” Boy” and” Dog,” which Francesco Perono Cacciafoco republished under a Creative Commons license.
