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I keep clawing at the bars of the cage I built for myself. But first a digression. Walter W. Skeat wrote numerous notes on English etymology, some of which he eventually put together and published in book form. Much to my regret, not too many kl-words attracted his attention. But I was amused to discover that the verb clop means not only the sound made by shoes or hoofs but also “to cling, adhere to.”

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You just lost your job. Your partner broke up with you. You’re late on rent. Then, you dropped your iPhone in the toilet. “My life’s in shambles!” you shout. Had you so exclaimed, say, in an Anglo-Saxon village over 1,000 years ago, your fellow Old English speakers may have given you a puzzled look. “Your life’s in footstools?” they’d ask. “And what’s an iPhone?”

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By Anatoly Liberman

Question: How large is an average fluent speaker’s vocabulary?
Answer: I have often heard this question, including its variant: “Is it true that English contains more words than any other (European) language?”  The problem is that “an average fluent speaker” does not exist.  Also, it is important to distinguish between how many words we recognize (our so-called passive vocabulary) and how many we use in everyday communication (active vocabulary). The size of people’s active vocabulary depends on their needs, but it is rarely large.  Thus, five-year olds can say everything they want, but if they are read to and if grownups speak to them all the time, they understand complicated tales and the content of their parents’ conversation amazingly well (oftentimes much better than one could wish for).  Some people cultivate their conversational skills and make an effort to use “sophisticated” words in their dealings with the outside world; others are happy to remain at the level of first-graders. One of the most memorable events in my teaching career happened about thirty years ago when a student approached me after a lecture and, having complimented me (they always do in such cases), added: “But I don’t understand half of the words you use.”  Ever since that day I have worked systematically on reducing my “public” vocabulary but sometimes still forget myself.

Our passive vocabulary depends on our reading habits.  Since “great classics” are being frowned upon as elitist, the younger generation has trouble understanding even 19^th-century English (Jane Austen, Dickens, Thackeray, and so on, through Henry James and the utterly forgotten Galsworthy), while publishers promote books written more or less in Basic English.  Students get tired of following those authors’ synonyms, idioms, and convoluted syntax (their greatest compliments are matter of fact and down to earth, while all digressions are castigated as rambling).  The same is true, to an even greater extent, of their attempts to read Defoe, Fielding, and Swift.  For some Americans of college age even the vocabulary of Mark Twain poses difficulties.  It is hard to believe that Mark Twain, like Jack London and Charles Dickens, was self-taught.  Yet quite a few of our best and brilliantly educated writers did not make use of an extensive vocabulary.  Oscar Wilde is a typical example.  Others, like Dickens and Meredith, let alone James Joyce, made a heroic effort to use as many rare and learned words as possible.

Good dictionaries of English, French, Spanish, Italian, German, Swedish, etc. seem to be equally thick.  In a dictionary containing about 60,000 words one can find practically everything one needs.  Webster’s Unabridged features seven or eight times more.  Obviously, none of us needs to know so much.  But perhaps two features distinguish English from its neighbors: an overabundance of synonyms (because of the partly unhealthy influx of Romance words) and the ubiquity of slang.  French also overflows with argot, but English dictionaries of slang (British, American, Canadian, Australian) are almost unbelievably thick.  This makes it harder to master current English than, for example, German, but each language has its difficulties.  English resorts  to all the usual international words (music, radio, antibiotic, and the like), while Icelandic prefers native coinages for such concepts.  It appears that whether you want to learn a foreign language or your own you have to make a sustained effort.  But then this is what the sweat of one’s brow is for.  Only Adam had an easy life: none of the objects around him had a name, and he was instructed to call them something (presumably he remembered his own neologisms).  His offspring ca

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A BRIEF ­­HISTORY OF THE WORDS AGAIN AND AGAINST,
WITH AMIDST, ACROSSED, AND WHILST BEING THROWN IN FOR GOOD MEASURE

By Anatoly Liberman

There are two questions here.  First, why does again rhyme with den, fen, ten rather than gain?  Second, where did -t in against come from?  I’ll begin with against.

Old English had a ramified system of endings.  The most common ending of the genitive was -s, which also occurred as a suffix of adverbs, or in words that, by definition, had no case forms at all (adverbs are not declined!).  It is easy to detect the traces of the adverbial -s in such modern words as always, (must) needs, and nowadays, and its obscure origin will not interest us here.  Some adverbs ending in -s were used with the preposition to before them, for example, togegnes “against” (read both g’s as y) and tomiddes “amid.”  They competed with similar and synonymous adverbs having no endings: ongegn and onmiddan.  As a result, the hybrid forms emerged with -s at the end and a “wrong” prefix: ageines and amides.  Initial a- in them is the continuation of on-; hence our modern forms against and amidst.  So far, everything is clear.  The tricky part is final t.

Obviously, this -t has no justification in the early history of either against or amidst.  According to the usual explanation, both words so often preceded the definite article the that -sth- was simplified (“assimilated”) to st.  This explanation is plausible.  By way of analogy, it may be added that a similar process has been postulated for the verb hoist.  It surfaced in English texts in the 16^th century in the form hoise, and all its native predecessors and cognates elsewhere in Germanic look like it.  Perhaps the infinitive was changed under the influence of the preterit and the past participle (as in the now proverbial to be hoist with one’s own petard), but, not inconceivably, in the phrase hoise the flag the same process occurred as in ageines the/amides the.  (I have seen the conjecture that -st goes back to the superlative degree of adjectives.  This reconstruction is fanciful.)

However, t also developed in words that did not always precede the definite article.  Thus, earnest “pledge money,” a noun with a long an intricate history, was first attested in the form erles.  Here the influence of the all-important adjective earnest, from Old Engl. earnost, should not be ruled out.  Tapestry is another borrowing from French (tapisserie; compare Engl. on the tapis, literally, “on the table cloth,” a calque of French sur la tapis: tapis and tapestry are of course related).  The inserted t in tapestry is called a parasitic sound that developed between s and r—not much of an explanation, even though it is possibly true.  Whilst is from whiles, which, like against, had no historical -t.  Both words seem to have developed along similar lines, but the troublesome consonant may be �

By Anatoly Liberman

In an old post devoted to the role of luck and serendipity in etymological research, I mentioned the word yeoman, with the implication that one day I would return to it. After much procrastination I am ready to make good on my promise. Naturally, the origin of this word is debatable—naturally, for otherwise I would not have chosen it for discussion.

Everything, beginning with its spelling, is odd about yeoman. Today the digraph eo occurs in some bookish borrowings (neo-, etc.) and a tiny group of French loanwords like feoff (an exotic synonym of fief “a feudal estate”) and people. However, since yeoman replaced French valet in the 14th century (valet, I am sorry to say, is another word of obscure origin), there must have been a need for a native (English) noun of comparable meaning. Surprisingly, it left no trace in Old English. We can assume that yeoman turned up in our texts soon after it became known. The component -man occurs as part of several compounds with an unclear first element, such as leman “lover,” chapman “itinerant salesman; huckster, badger” (now current only as a family name), and henchman. Modern speakers of English have forgotten the meaning of le-, chap-, and hench-, but the rather easy etymology of all three has been discovered. By contrast, the element yeo- is opaque. Although if yeoman was a neologism, its inner structure must have been transparent to those who coined it, yeo- turns up in neither Old nor Middle English extant manuscripts. The researchers who tried to explain the derivation of yeoman referred to Frisian, German, and earlier English words. Their attempts presuppose that at one time yeoman made good sense to the speakers but has come down to us in an altered form. Why then do we have no record of it before the 14th century? If the institution of yeomanry had existed much earlier, some mention of it would almost certainly have been discovered in the extant texts.

Some of those questions will remain unanswered, but I think I can explain yeo-. However, first a brief overview of the previous attempts to etymologize it is in order. Perhaps, it was said, yeo- is related to Middle Engl. yemen “to care” (Old Engl. ieman, Gothic gaumjan “to observe.”) Were the original yeomen overseers or caretakers? As the OED and historical documents inform us, in the 15th century yeomen were guards and gentlemen attendants in a royal or noble household. German has the noun Gau “region, area” (memorable to some from Gauleiter, a high-ranking official under the Nazis). Its English cognate has not been recorded, and the reconstructed form ga-man or gea-man (a suspicious creation under the best of circumstances) has little chance of survival, because yeomen were not responsible for ruling any areas, and the tentative meaning “villager” is both strained and ill-suited to the role yeomen played in society. However, Skeat and several other distinguished scholars failed to propose a better etymology of the recalcitrant word. Old Engl. iuman “forefather” (from iu “of yore”) is an even worse candidate for the etymon of yeoman. Tracing yeoman to an adjective related to German gemein “mean, common” (its Old English cognate exists) carries no conviction either; separating -man in yeoman from the word man deprives us of the only foothold we have in our search for the word’s origin. Besides this, what was so “common” about the early yeoman? Yeoman never functioned as a synonym for a common man.

According to the derivation that won the guarded approval of the first editors of the OED, yeo- is a variant of young-; in their analysis, yeoman emerged as young man. The semantic leap is unobjectionable, and there are good parallels for servants and attendants being called young men, but the phonetic change from Middle Engl. yeong- to yeo- does not inspire confidence. However, the OED almost guessed the origin of yeoman when it cited the British English dialectal (southern and southwestern) word yeomath “a second crop of grass in the same area; aftermath” (-math in yeomath and aftermath is akin to the verb mow) and concluded that yeomath also means “young grass,” with the same unusual phonetic development from young- to yeo-. Today we know more about the history of yeomath, and this is where luck and serendipity came in. I was reading an old book on Dutch etymology and ran into an exact Dutch equivalent of yeomath. It turned out that yeo- is related to a prefix with respectable Indo-European ancestors meaning “additional.” In several languages, including Old English, it occurs in the form of a, o (the vowels are long), and uo (the latter goes back to long o), for example, Old Engl. owaestm “shoot” (that is, “an additional branch”), Old High German amahd “yeomath, aftermath” and uowahst “crop; additional growth” (the root is wachsen “grow”; cf. the English verb wax), Middle Low (that is, northern) German oherde “a shepherd helper,” and many others. The Dutch scholar, whose book appeared in 1859, the noted German dialectologist, who also knew that prefix, and the author of a recent dissertation on the words for “second crop” in modern German dialects missed Engl. yeoman, though, obviously, yeo- in yeomath and yeoman have the same etymology, as the OED suggested in the first place. This is where my luck came in: my learned predecessors left something for me to do.

Thus, yeoman means “an additional man.” However, as mentioned above, several questions have not received an explanation. Neither recorded form of the prefix should have yielded yeo-: ee- or yea- could be expected, and indeed, the pronunciation “yeeman,” a variant of “yoman,” continued into the 18th century. Yet it is not the form we use today. It also remains a riddle who coined yeoman, for the prefix yeo- never had wide currency, and why, despite this handicap, the word gained popularity. Yeomath makes the etymology of yeoman secure; it is with its history that we are still in the dark. As time went on, the connotations of yeoman vacillated between the dignified (“a gentleman attendant; landowner”) and the ignoble (“beefeater”), but those vagaries of its semantic history have nothing to do with the process that in the 14th century resulted in the rise of the word.

By Anatoly Liberman

I would rather write about prisms and prunes, but those words are ultimately of Greek descent, and I try to stay on Germanic soil as much as possible, though sometimes the spirit of adventure (not to be encouraged in a serious etymologist) makes me trespass on Romance territory. The origin of spoon is well-known, but the story is instructive and deserves repeating.

Spoons of some sort were invented at the dawn of civilization. Liquid and soft food cannot be eaten with hands, so that spoons, contrary to forks, are a necessity, not a luxury. Human beings have fingers, that is, natural forks, and the Europeans resisted the introduction of “artificial fingers” long and manfully. The English are famous for even ridiculing forks five hundred years ago. However, by the 16th and especially the 17th century the wealthy in Italy, France, and England got used to the newfangled utensil, partly because forks could be made of costly materials and impress guests (the Italians were in the forefront of this important battle). The idea of the monstrous phrase plastic silverware could not have occurred to those nobles. The Old English noun forca ~ force betrays its origin from Latin furca “a two-pronged pitchfork,” “a stake for punishment” (hence furcifer “villain, gallows bird”), “a claw of a crayfish,” and so forth (a word for which no satisfactory etymology exists; the original root can be seen in Engl. bifurcation). In Old English, as in Latin, forca ~ force meant “pitchfork.” The earliest known mention of Engl. fork “eating utensil” traces back to 1463, and the next occurrence in the OED is dated 1554. Furca, despite its obscurity, may have been native in Latin, for such a primitive agricultural implement would have been unlikely to go by a foreign name. The other Germanic words for “pitchfork” (such as German Gabel, related to Engl. gable) and their Slavic counterparts (such as Russian vily) are also opaque from an etymological point of view, though less troublesome than furca.

Spoon is certainly native and can serve as a classic illustration of how the history of words and the history of things are connected. Old Engl. spon (with a long vowel), the etymon of spoon, meant “chip, splinter, shaving,” and this is still the meaning of German Span and one of the meanings of Dutch spaan. In Middle English, the change from “chip” to “eating utensil” probably occurred under the influence of its Scandinavian equivalent in which the same change happened earlier. The ancient spoon was a primitive sliver before it became elaborate silver. Spoons have transparent names in many languages. Latin coclear, the ancestor of French cuiller, Spanish cuchara, and Italian cucchiaio, shares the root with coclea “snail; spiral” (in our dictionaries, coclea sometimes turns up with -ch-, as do its English reflexes derived from Greek) either because of its initial twisted form or because it had pointed ends for eating shellfish. Shells as spoons have been used widely all over the world. Swedish sked (with closely related forms in all the Scandinavian languages) refers to something split or divided, as the corresponding English verb to shed and -shed in the compound watershed make clear. Dutch lepel “spoon” is an instrument for “lapping up” food.

Older than the spoon and the fork is the knife, and the origin of the words for it is sometimes lost. The easiest case is German Messer (with cognates elsewhere in Germanic). Messen “to measure” is related to Engl. mete (out). Apparently, the instrument was used for “measuring.” Meat (but not meet) is also related, for the original sense of meat was “food,” or rather “a portion ‘meted’ to the partaker.” But Engl. knife is enigmatic despite the fact that almost identical forms exist in several Germanic languages (compare Dutch knijf). Old English had cnif (here again with a long vowel); however, the word surfaced late and seems to have been borrowed from Scandinavian. When knife came into existence, k was pronounced in it, as in Modern Engl. acknowledge, for example. Germanic words with initial kn- and gn- are numerous; today the spelling of Engl. knock, gnaw, and the like reminds us of medieval sound values but confuses learners. In the written form of some words, initial k- and g- have been abolished.

Although the nouns and verbs that at one time began with kn- and gn- show some similarity in meaning, their common semantic denominator is evasive. At least some of them refer to a light, quick movement (nudge, for instance). Knife may be part of that group, and Skeat saw no reason for separating it from nip and nibble. Everything depends on the purpose of the original knife. If in the remote past it denoted a stabbing tool or weapon, a kind of bayonet, its name will align itself easily with many other kn- words. But the prehistory of our object is hidden. According to a daring hypothesis, knife is a loan from Basque. (I need hardly remind our readers that linguistic loans are permanent and that the lending language does not become poorer after sharing its riches with a neighbor. Borrow is a remarkably inappropriate term in this context; take over makes better sense.) Words for tools are often “borrowed,” because they travel from land to land with the objects they designate. Thus, foreign axes, adzes, hatchets, and their likes come to new countries, and their names seldom resist domestication. With knives it happens rarely, if at all. In any case, we do not know to what uses the object called knife was put when its name emerged and are likely to remain in the dark forever. It is important to remember that, in order to discover the etymology of a word, we must know exactly what the word means. Plato, or perhaps Socrates before him, already realized this connection, but in our work we are apt to forget it.