The Great Vowel Shift: One Reason Why English Spelling is Weird

Whether you're an English native speaker or just learning the language, you must've noticed that English spelling is absolutely mad at times. Why doesn't meat rhyme with great, for example?

One reason for this is something known as the Great Vowel Shift, which took place between the mid-14th century until the end of the 15th century.

If you spoke English in the 1300s, bite sounded like beat does today. The word meet sounded like mart, boot like boat, and boat sounded a bit like bought. In fact, during the Great Vowel Shift, every long vowel in Middle English changed its pronunciation.

Pronunciation tends to change over time in  most languages without causing too many problems. However, around the time of the Great Vowel Shift, the printing press had made its way to England and was in the process of standardising English spelling.

Some English spelling follows how words were pronounced in Old and Middle English and wasn't really changed to keep up with Modern English. Though some, such as room, no longer uses its Middle English spelling, roum.

At a time when people finally decided how words should be spelled, the language underwent a significant pronunciation change.

Think of it as getting your passport photo taken and then immediately shaving off all your hair (or growing it, if you're bald)!

Polysemy and Homonymy: Words and their Meanings

I find words and all their different meanings really interesting. Whenever looking a word up in the dictionary, there is rarely just one explanation or definition. Sometimes all the meanings are similar and sometimes the meanings seem to have absolutely nothing in common. In linguistics, these meanings can be classified as either polysemy and homonymy.

Similar Meanings

Polysemy is when a word has a variety of different meanings that are etymologically related. Consider the word soft, for example. In Old English it meant "gentle" and "mild-natured". This etymology led "soft" being used to describe pillows, voices, drinks, and even people.

The word man is another example of polysemy. We can use the word to either describe the entire human race, "Man, not beast", to specify a male, "Man, not woman", or specify an adult "Man, not boy".

Different Meanings

When a word is written the same but has various different and unrelated meanings, we call this homonymy. You may have heard of homonyms before as words with different meanings but that are written the same.

For example, what does bow mean? This word has different meanings and pronunciations. When pronounced as /bəʊ/ (to rhyme with "low"), it refers to the device used to play a violin, or the thing used to fire an arrow, or a type of knot in a ribbon or shoelace.

When the word is pronounced as /baʊ/ (rhyming with "how"), it can either mean to lower your head or bend your body as a sign of respect or to thank an audience after a show. It can also be a noun that refers to the front part of a ship.

The Etymology of the Olympics: Part 2

Before the weekend, we started looking at the etymologies of Olympic events. Today we'll finish up with the remaining events.

Pentathlon

Much like the Olympics themselves, this term has Greek origins. Since the pentathlon includes five events, it's a merger of the Greek word pente (meaning "five") and athlon (meaning "contest"). However, it used to be called the pentathlum, using the Latin name.

Rowing

This event gets its name through Proto-Germanic roots and lent itself to a variety of Northern European languages. When it arrived in Old English, the verb "to row" was rowan.

Rugby

Like "badminton", this sport gets its name from where the sport was first played. Rugby should really be called "rugby football". Rugby is a town in Warwickshire, England, if you were wondering.

Sailing

Like rowing, this sport's name also originates from Proto-Germanic. In Old English, the word was seglinge, but became sailing when the Old English word for "sail" changed.

Shooting

Shooting comes from Proto-Indo-European roots, and was scotung in Old English before referring to the sport as of 1885.

Swimming

Interestingly, the verb "to swim" was swimman in Old English, but "swimming" comes from making "swim" a verbal noun.

Taekwondo

Like judo, taekwondo is a way of doing something. In Korean, do is "a way or manner", tae means "to kick", and gwon means "to punch", so taekwondo is literally "the way of kicking and punching".

Tennis

Tennis comes from French; Old French, to be precise. In fact, it comes from the Old French verb tenir, which means to hold, receive, or take. The imperative form of this verb was tenez, which entered Middle English as tenetz and tenes. This evolved into the "tennis" we know today.

Triathlon

Remember pentathlon? The term triathlon is almost the same, but with pente being replaced by tri, meaning three, instead of five. It only has three events, rather than five.

Volleyball

The word volley comes from Latin volare, meaning "to fly", and then French volée. It eventually referred to the act of volleying the ball in tennis in the mid-19th century before combining with the word "ball" to give us the term "volleyball" that we use today.

Water Polo

The word for the game "polo" came from the Balti word for "ball", polo. Polo was played in Asia long before it made its way to England and was adapted for the water, at which point it became known as water polo.

Wrestling

Wrestling came from the Old English term wræstlung, while referring directly to the sport itself was the verbal noun of wræstlian.

Well, that's the remainder of our Olympic etymologies! We hope you enjoy the games as much as we surely will.

The Etymology of the Olympics: Part 1

As we said on Wednesday, we're pretty excited for the Olympics. With that in mind, we thought we'd look at the events in the competition and how their names made their way into the English language.

Archery

The term "archery" came from the Anglo-French archerye and Old French archerie. These words, of course, came from the word for "archer". All the words surrounding archery inevitably have their roots in the Latin for bow, arcus. The root of arc comes from Proto-Indo-European (PIE) and meant "bowed" or "curved".

Athletics

Linguistically, "athletics" refers to the events in which "athletes" participate. In Greek, athlos was a contest and athlon was a prize. So basically, athletes compete in a contest to win a prize. Sounds about right, doesn't it? The term athletes in Greek was a prizefighter. This made its way into Latin as athleta and into English in the early 15th century.

Badminton

The racket sport of badminton takes its name from where the sport was first played. Badminton House was in Gloucester, United Kingdom. Its name came from the Old English Badimyncgtun.

Basketball

It's a sport using balls and baskets, what more do you want?

Boxing

Boxing takes its name from box, a 14th-century verb that meant "to beat" which later meant "to fight with the fists" and gave us "boxing".

BMX

BMX is short for "Bicycle Motocross". We'll get to "cycling" in a bit.

Canoe (Slalom and Sprint)

The sport is named after the boat used. The word for that boat, canaoua, came from the Arawakan language used in Haiti in the mid-16th century. Many variants made their way into English, but by the 17th century it was established as "canoe".

Cycling

The term "cycling" refers to riding a bicycle, but "cycle" comes from Latin and Greek. In Greek, the work kyklos referred to many circular things and motions. This became cyclus in Late Latin.

Equestrian

Equestrian events involve horses, and the term itself means "relating to horses". However, the term eques in Latin was a horseman or a knight, and equus, of course, means "horse".

Fencing

"Fencing" is technically a shortened form of "defencing", the act of defending oneself. Just like you have to do in this swordsman's sport.

Football

Football obviously comes from putting the words "foot" and "ball" together. However, if you're from one of the countries that calls it "soccer", the term comes from the shortening of "association football".

Golf

After a century out of the Olympics, golf is back. The sport gets its name from Scottish in the mid-15th century; the term gouf came from the Middle Dutch term colf meaning a "stick", "club", or "bat". Nowadays, you can only play golf with a club, though.

Handball

Another obviously named ball sport. "Hand" + "ball" = "Handball".

Hockey

The term for hockey is thought to have come from a Middle French term for a shepherd's staff, the hoquet, since hockey sticks are thought to resemble the staves and crooks used by shepherds.

Judo

The martial art of judo, which originated in Japan, unsurprisingly has a Japanese name. In Japanese, judo means "gentle way", as ju means "gentle" and do means a "way" or "art". What you see is what you get.

As we're halfway through the Olympic events, we'll continue our look at the rest of the games on Monday, when we'll be even more excited as the competition will be in full swing!

Valentine's Day and the Etymology of Love

With Sunday being Valentine's Day, we thought we'd look at our 5 favourite love words, their etymology, and the words and languages they evolved from. Without further ado, here they are.

Adore

If you're familiar with the French language, you can probably guess where this word comes from. In Old French, the word was aorer, which came from the Late Latin adorare, which meant to worship. Without being blasphemous, if you adore someone, you basically do worship them.

Hug

While the origins of hug are unknown, it is known that it didn't originally mean the same as it does now. At the beginning of the 17th century it referred to a wrestling move, but later referred to squeezing someone with affection. In many English-speaking countries, "hugs" are often represented by the letter "O" in greeting cards.

Kiss

A kiss was called a coss in Old English, and evolved into cuss in Middle English. As a verb, it was cyssan in Old English. Just like "hugs", "kisses" are often represented by the letter "X" in greeting cards and messages.

Love

The most important word for Valentine's Day is love. Even though love is written identically as both a noun and a verb in modern English, in Old English the verb was lufian and the noun was lufu.

Romance

The story of romance is a fascinating one. The word originally comes from the Vulgar Latin term romanice, which was used to describe writings in Romance languages. This word became the noun romanz in Old French, which meant a "verse narrative".

The term became romance in Middle English around the start of the 14th century, when it described a vernacular story telling the tale of knights and heroes. Even though most of these stories were in French, there were still some in English. It wasn't until the mid-17th century that the word's meaning changed to mean "a love story".

As a verb, romance originally was the corresponding Old French verb romancier, which meant to "narrate in French".

What are your favourite Valentine's Day words? Tell us about them in the comments below.

The Etymology of Colours: Part 1

Today we're taking a trip through the rainbow as we look at the etymology and origins of the names we use for colours. For simplicity, we're going to start today with the classic "rainbow" colours, which Sir Isaac Newton dubbed the spectrum, from the Latin for "apparition". The term later became used to reference the visible light split through a prism, another Latin word meaning "sawed", which originated as the Greek term prisma.

Red

The first colour of the rainbow has origins in several languages and unfortunately can't be traced back to one single language. The word red was written as rēad in Old English. In fact, the British surname Reed is from the Old English for red, and is pronounced in a similar manner to how it was said before vowel shortening occurred in Middle English.

Before Old English, the word was rauthaz in Proto-Germanic, from rewdʰ, a Proto-Indo European (PIE) word. As a result of this origin, a large number of languages have similar words for the colour.

Orange

The word, colour, and fruit called orange, is often subject to a large degree of debate. While many people claim that it is one of the only words that rhymes with no other word, this is not actually true. The word sporange, a sac where spores are made, is one of the few words that rhyme with it that isn't a proper noun.

Rhyming aside, there is also a debate as to whether the fruit was named because of the colour or whether the colour was named after the fruit. Etymologists consider the colour to be named after the fruit since the word's origins are from the Sanskrit word for the tree. नारङ्ग or nāraṅga made its way into Persian as نارنگ, or nārang, before reaching European languages.

While the word nārang remained fairly true to its roots in a number of European languages, when it reached Old French it is thought to have lost its initial "n" due to rebracketing, whereby the initial "n" was thought to be part of the indefinite article "une" so that "une norenge" was heard as "une orenge".

Yellow

Yellow has an interesting etymology that is similar to that of the colour red. Yellow's roots begin with PIE languages. The root of yellow in PIE has retained the same root as yell for several millennia, as both words originate from the PIE root gʰel-. This shared root has resulted in a number of European languages, particularly the Germanic languages, having similar words for yellow. The words for yellow in Dutch, East Frisian, German, Swedish, and West Frisian all have similar origins.

The term ended up in Proto-Germanic as gelwaz before it became geolu in Old English. This Old English term gave us the word we use today for yellow. However, it should be noted that in Middle English, the term also referred to colours and tones that we wouldn't consider yellow by today's standards, including a number of blue and grey colours.

We'll finish the remainder of the rainbow on Friday when we'll cover the colours with shorter wavelengths.

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

The Greek and Shakespearean Origins of Moons: Part 1

Some time ago we had a look at the the astronomical nomenclature and the etymology of the Solar System. However, we came across a piece of trivia that stated that all the moons in the solar system are named after Greek gods, with the exception of Uranus' moons, which are named in accordance with characters from Shakespeare.

We decided to investigate and see just how true this trivia was:

A false-colour image of Mercury

Mercury

The first planet in the solar system has no natural satellites. As a result, is not worthy of our attention today. 

Venus

Like Mercury, Venus doesn't have any natural satellites either, with the exception of 2002 VE68, an asteroid that follows a quasi-orbit around the planet. In the 17th Century, it was reported that Venus did have a moon, which was "discovered" by the astronomer Giovanni Domenico Cassini. He named this "moon" Neith, after the Egyptian god. Has this discovery held water, the naming convention and our trivia tidbit would have been disproven after only two planets. However, it was not, and as a result, we may be on to something.

Earth

Our home planet, as many people should know. Has one natural satellite, the Moon, which came from Moone,  from the Old English word, mone. This word came from the Old English mōna, which has its origins in the Proto-Germanic  mǣnōn. Whilst none of these are the name of a Greek god, the term Lunar comes from the Latin word Luna, named for a Roman god, and the satellite was at one point even named for Selene, a Greek god.

Whilst this is a tenuous link and hardly seems definitive that all moons in the Solar System are named for Greek gods, we will soldier on regardless to see if our moon was just an exception.

Mars

The Red Planet has only two moons, Phobos and Deimos. Phobos, written in Greek as Φόβος, was indeed a Greek god. Phobos is in fact the Greek god of horror and the embodiment and personification of fear. This is, of course, is the origin of the word phobia.

Deimos, or Δεῖμος, is the Greek god of terror, Phobos' twin, and the second of Mars' moons. Even though both moons are named after twins, the actual satellites are not particularly similar.

Jupiter and the Galilean moons.

Jupiter

The red giant has 67 natural satellites. We covered the Galilean moons in our previous post on the Solar System. The Galilean moons are evidently named after their discoverer Galileo Galilei. Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto are certainly Greek names. It is whether they are Greek gods or not. Io was a priestess of Hera and nymph. Europa, was a god and as you can guess, is the namesake of both the moon and continent. Ganymede was a mortal who was abducted by Zeus, which appeared to be a hobby of his, and became the cupbearer for the gods. He was granted immortality so was sort of a god, despite Homer referring to him as the most beautiful of the mortals. Callisto was also a nymph abducted by Zeus.

Just from the Galilean moons we can see that whilst the names of the moons are all of Greek origin, they are not all technically gods. The next moons were named with Roman numerals until the International Astronomical Union attributed names to the moons V to VIII and established the nomenclature that future moons were to be named after lovers and favourites of the god Jupiter, or Zeus as he was known in Greek mythology. Once it became somewhat clear that Jupiter had a lot of moons, the IAU decided that all moons after XXXIV were to be named after sons and daughters of Zeus or Jupiter.

Closer inspection at each of Jupiter's moons show that even with this nomenclature, not every moon is named after a Greek god or a character from Greek mythology. Take the catchy "S/2000 J 11", which wouldn't take a Greek specialist to realise that it's neither a god nor from mythology.

Clearly our daily trivia doesn't hold up to scrutiny. Despite this, we'll be back on Friday seeing if Saturn has any Greek gods and whether or not Uranus' moons are indeed named after Shakespearean characters.

The Language Of Law

If you've ever read a contract, had the horrendous misfortune to deal with bureaucracy, or had a run-in with the law, you'll have come across the wonderful linguistic minefield that is legal language and jargon. Today we'll be looking at legal English as it has been used in the United Kingdom.

Once the Romans conquered England, Latin became the de facto language of the law in the country. Though it was later on that Latin would noticeably change day-to-day English, it did take root in the legal system earlier since it was the Romans who ruled and enforced the law.

The opening page of the Law of Æthelberht

After the Romans left England, the Anglo-Saxons brought their own rules and, as a result, law was discussed, explained, and enforced using Anglo-Saxon or Old English. By the beginning of the 7th century, it was the Law of Æthelberht that established the rules of the Kingdom of Kent. These published rules were indeed written in what is now known as Old English. This was the first example of published law in a Germanic language, and one of the earliest examples of written Old English. With the arrival of the Normans, the language of the legal system in England took a turn. Anglo-Saxon was removed and Anglo-French became the language of legal proceedings. Though records were still kept in Latin, English terms managed to find their way into the lexicon of law. In terms of style, since words of French and Latin origin were considered to be of a higher register than those of Germanic origins, French and Latin words were often preferred in a legal setting over their Germanic counterparts. That said, lawyers would still provide word pairings from both etymological roots in order to make things clearer.