I'm linguist, Gareth Roberts.

Let's answer your questions from the internet

about the history of English words.

This is Etymology Support.

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ShakesyGG asks,

Is anyone else as fascinated by etymology,

the origin of words,

and the historical development of its meaning as me

or am I just a sad old man?

How very dare you.

If you are, it's not because of loving etymology.

It's a kind of offshoot of historical linguistics,

the study of language over time, how it changes.

And it's really fascinating,

because it lets us lift up the lid

of the simple words we use.

Take the word gossip.

A godsib was originally someone who had a godfather

or godmother relationship with you.

They were related to you by those means.

They would be people you might confide in,

you might share social, personal information in.

And so from there, we get the word gossip

as a person who shares gossip.

From there, we get the verb gossip.

And this would have been in the Old English period

that god and sib would have come together

to form the word gossip.

Lunaris says, Dude and bro are gender-neutral terms.

Thoughts?

This is actually quite common.

Words becoming less or more gender-neutral.

So we can think of the word bro.

Bro comes from brother.

But then maybe they use it in a way

that just includes friends.

Maybe a woman uses it to refer to a female friend

and suddenly it doesn't have that gendering anymore.

Sometimes the same thing happens in reverse.

In Old English, the word man was a general word for people.

The word for man as in male was wer.

Wer really only survives in English in the word werewolf.

Man has taken its place,

because this was a society

where men were the default people.

And if you refer to a default person,

they tended to be male.

Man ended up being associated in particular with males.

The Old English word for man

is also related to the word weraldi.

The word weraldi in Proto-Germanic

comes from word meaning man and word aldiz meaning age.

Age of man.

This gives us some insight

into how Germanic speakers saw themselves

and their universe.

There's another word in this area

which has an interesting history.

That's the word guy.

So guy actually comes from the name of Guy Fawkes

who was captured in the Gunpowder Plot

and executed horribly.

And every year after that in Britain,

people celebrated catching and killing him

by burning effigies of him on a big bonfire.

And these effigies were known as guys.

Kids would go around asking for a penny for the guy.

People sometimes started using this

to refer to someone who was disheveled,

a sort of grotesque looking human,

a sort of insulting term for a man.

Might call him a guy.

And in America, interestingly,

around the same kind of period,

you get examples of people using the word

just to refer to man generically.

LiftedNGifted0 asks,

Who the [beep] came up with the silent letter?

English spelling is weird.

Take the word knight or gnaw.

Once upon a time, people genuinely did pronounce the K

at the start of knight, they'd say knight,

or they would pronounce the G at the start of gnaw,

they'd say gnaw.

Over time in English, these things changed.

People stopped pronouncing those,

but we didn't update the spelling.

We actually did used to say wolde and sceolde,

the ancestors of would and should.

We stopped pronouncing those Ls, but we kept the Ls in.

But could never actually have the L in the first place.

We just added that L

because we wanted to make it match up with would and should.

And we find this kind of thing also happening quite a lot

with words that have been borrowed into the language.

There was no B in the word doubt,

either in English or in French.

But the word came ultimately from the Latin word dubitare,

which has a B.

So at some point in the Middle Ages,

both French and English strived to decide

that perhaps we should put the B back in.

Jenna Sivy, Someone just used the word unalived

on BBC News.

The news, and my dad turned to me and was like,

'I didn't know that was a word.'

This is one of those places

where you have an effect of taboos.

You have a taboo, which is actually, if you like,

implemented via social media.

And so we end up trying to skirt around the words

we're not meant to use

and come up with words like unalived.

And this happens quite a lot.

We think, for instance,

that the reason the English word bear

isn't cognate with the word for bear in Latin

or Welsh or Greek

is that people didn't want to refer to bears

because it felt to them, perhaps,

as if they might invoke the horror

of this big, scary creature in using the word.

So you'd expect modern English word for bear

to be cognate with the French word ours,

which comes from this Proto-Indo-European word,

pronounced something like hzrtkos.

Instead, bear seems to trace back to bherH

in Proto-Indo-European, meaning brown.

This is not the only theory.

There are some other theories

about where the modern English word bear comes from,

but we know for sure it does not come from the same place

as most of the other Indo-European languages

got their words bear from.

Xndi Lou, Reading about Grimm's Law for the nth time

and I still ain't understanding [beep].

So Grimm's Law refers to a set of sound changes

which happened to occur in the Germanic languages

like English millennia ago

in the emergence of Proto-Germanic from Proto-Indo-European.

P became F in the Germanic languages.

K became H.

For example, here's some words in English.

Fish, father, hound, head and their cognates in Latin.

Piscis, pater, canis, caput.

The Ps in Latin correspond to Fs in English

and the Cs in Latin correspond to Hs in English.

You can get an idea about how certain changes happen

by imagining pronouncing the same sound

over and over again.

P, P, P, P, P, P, P.

And you might notice if you do this a lot

that the P, maybe you slip slightly,

and you end up rather than with a P sound

with a F sound.

This is essentially what happened

in the history of the Germanic languages.

Lights For Fit F says, It's 6:00 a.m.

and I can't stop thinking

about how swear words were invented.

Like who said the word [beep] one day

and decided it was forbidden?

There's a whole bunch of things

that people don't really like talking about.

Sex is one of these things.

Defecation is another.

We sometimes feel odd talking about death

and very often we'll introduce a euphemism.

For example, at some point,

people didn't want to use whatever word

they had at the time to refer to urination.

So they started imitating the sound

that people make when they urinate, pss.

And that's the origin of the word piss in Latin, pissiare.

More recently, the word piss itself

stopped feeling so euphemistic.

So we ended up using the word pee

simply by taking the first letter of piss

and using that to refer to urination.

Similar to F for [beep], F off.

Tonya MJ_ writes, 'You'll just be making up words.'

Yes, quite literally that's what we did

as humans to create language.

Or do you think a man in the sky

just dropped the Oxford English Dictionary

on a Neanderthal on his way back to his cave?

Yes, we make up words all the time.

What's interesting though

is we very rarely make up words from nothing.

Let's say you have a pet frog

and you make a house for your pet frog.

You're unlikely to invent a completely new word for that.

You'll probably just call it a frog house.

You'll take the words frog and house

and combine them and make a new word.

The other thing people sometimes do

is they will use iconic forms

to refer to something

when they don't think they have enough in common

with the person they're talking to

for an existing word to work.

For example, let's imagine

you're trying to convey to someone

who doesn't speak your language that you want cow's milk.

Maybe what you'll do is mime milk your cow.

You'll go glub, glub, glub, glub, moo.

What you've done there is created an iconic form

and maybe you'll meet this person

multiple times in the future

and you probably won't go through the whole charade

every time of glub, glub, glub, moo.

Maybe the next time you meet them,

you'll say something like glub, moo.

And that is not dissimilar from what's happened many times

in the history of language.

Another example, the word but in English

originally meant outside.

Outside implies physical separation.

It implies that something is not within the other thing.

It's a short step from there to meaning without.

You have something without the other thing

because that thing is now outside it.

That's shifted to be used in an abstract sense

to mean except, everything except that tree,

everything except this book.

And over time, this meaning of without or except

shifted even further to mean but,

to make a contrast between two parts of a sentence.

VLVTRSE_, one thing that fascinates me

about the human experience is the development of language.

Like how did each language form?

Was there one common language at one point?

Mind-blowing.

Languages have quite likely been around

for at least 100,000 years,

if not hundreds of thousands of years.

We actually don't know whether all vocal languages

have one common ancestor.

They could have arisen all in one place

and then spread out,

or it could be that actually languages arose

in different places.

Most European languages and a number of Asian languages

do belong to the same family.

They have the same common ancestor,

which for convenience, we call Proto-Indo-European.

So Proto-Indo-European would have been spoken

around 6,000 years ago.

The people who spoke it

were quite possibly nomadic pastoralists.

They lived in the Pontic-Caspian Steppe,

a bit north of the Black Sea,

around where part of modern Ukraine

and southern Russia are.

Based on what we can infer

from the words they had for things,

we can trace backwards for different dairy products,

for cows.

We can trace backwards for wheels, for wagons,

for houses, for doors with roofs

and pegs to hold the doors closed.

So we can reconstruct an image

of how Proto-Indo-European speakers lived

with implications that perhaps

they led a somewhat nomadic pastoral existence.

And this is a language

which has a number of modern descendants.

We should put these languages on a language tree like this.

And for instance,

we can imagine that this is the Germanic branch here.

And then we have languages like Dutch, Frisian,

English branching out of this.

These languages then are going to be related to each other

and ultimately related to other languages in the same tree.

In this case, the Indo-European language family,

we have languages like French, Italian,

the Romance languages,

Celtic languages like Welsh and Irish.

We have Slavic languages like Russian and Polish.

Languages like Hindi, like Persian and so on.

Words in these languages

which come from a common root would be cognates.

That is they share an ancestor.

Let's take a word like English father.

We can actually compare the words vater and father

in the Germanic branch with other words

in other Indo-European languages,

like the Latin word pater.

And if we compare these,

we find they also sound kind of potentially similar.

And we can trace these words back.

The asterisk here indicates

that this is not a word we've ever actually seen.

This is reconstructed.

So 6,000 years ago, people were calling their fathers

something which sounds eerily similar

to the modern word father.

This root also turns up in other places.

If you take the name of the Roman God, Jupiter,

that piter bit is from the same place, means father.

The first part comes from a word meaning day or sky.

So what we have is dyeu phter, sky father,

people essentially worshiping the sun and the sky.

And this we see all through Indo-European languages too.

We can trace back the Indo-European languages

to Proto-Indo-European.

We can trace back the Afro-Asiatic languages

to Proto-Afro-Asiatic,

which will take us back about 17,000 years roughly.

But we can't, unfortunately,

go back and trace common ancestors

for these language families, these reconstructed languages,

because the noise-to-signal ratio gets too high.

We can no longer feel confident about our reconstructions.

Sagarcasm, Language was first developed

100,000 years ago.

People before that...

So what were people doing before language came about?

Part of the story is that,

while language is quite specific to humans,

communication is everywhere.

Before there was language,

human beings were communicating.

We were making sounds, we were using gestures.

We even see this now in other primate species like chimps.

We evolved to be able to do things like complex syntax,

rules and constraints that organize words into sentences,

complex meanings.

So imagine that you're speaking a language

10,000 years ago,

and you've just encountered an animal

which has claws, little ears,

and it makes a sort of meow sound.

And you want to tell someone about this animal.

You don't have a word for it.

No one has ever named this animal

that you've ever heard before.

What are you gonna call it?

Well, there's a good chance

you might call it something like a meow,

or a mew, or something along those lines.

In fact, if you look at the word for cat

in the ancient Egyptian language,

you actually find that the word for cat

looks quite a lot like the word mew.

Instances of this in modern vocal languages as well.

Onomatopoeia, of course, we have words like bang,

which sounds a bit like a bang.

Animal noises, woof, woof, woof, meow.

They resemble the actual sounds that the animals make.

Words like dada, and mama, and papa.

These are based on the babbling sounds that babies make.

So babies go through a stage where they start babbling.

We parents tend to be fairly self-centered people.

We like to assume that our babies are talking about us.

So this is almost certainly

where the Proto-Indo-European word phter came from,

meaning father.

It would have started off as something like papa.

And these words keep getting reinvented.

So we end up in English with a word like father,

but then we also listen to our babies babbling

and we reintroduce words like dada and daddy.

All over the world, these mama, papa, dada words

keep getting reintroduced

as parents listen to their babies babbling.

Clive Durdle asks, Where did the word orange come from?

The word orange came into English from French

and French got it from Spanish,

which got it from Arabic,

which got it from Sanskrit, and so on.

What's interesting here is the Spanish word is naranja,

starting with an N.

The N became associated with the indefinite article.

So it's like, instead of saying a norange,

you reinterpret that as an orange.

And this actually happened a few times

in the history of words.

So apron originally was naperon, reinterpreted as an apron.

And the old English word for snake, naedre,

was reinterpreted as an adder.

So sometimes mistakes can give birth to new forms of words.

Shaylee says, Shout out to the guy

who invented the word poop.

That [beep] is deadass.

Poop for real.

The word poop actually probably meant something

more like fart originally.

So it seems to be onomatopoeic,

poo, with a meaning similar to puff.

That is, it represents the sound made by a puff of air.

So it probably meant something a bit like fart,

and then started to be used euphemistically

to refer to other things that come out of your butt.

Critical Stressy asks, Why do Americans say Fall

when Autumn was a perfectly good word for the season?

Neither Fall nor Autumn

was actually the original English word.

Fall seems to be first recorded

some point in the 16th century in English

to refer to Autumn.

But before that,

English speakers actually referred to Autumn as Harvest.

This is cognate with the words

in other Germanic languages,

like German Herbst, meaning Autumn.

In England, that got quite specific,

referring to the gathering of the crops in the Autumn.

So in the 16th century,

both Fall and Autumn were being used to some extent

in Britain to refer to the season.

Fall, the fall of the leaves,

comes from the Old English word fall.

Autumn, a borrowing from Latin via French.

Insane Artistt, Demure was a good word

until everyone started using it.

Good question, very mindful.

The word demure has actually been around

since Middle English,

and probably comes from French meur, meaning mature.

It's actually cognate with the word mature.

We don't actually know where the de part comes from,

no French word demeur as far as we're aware,

but recently it's got kind of popular on TikTok

and people have been using the phrase,

Very demure, very mindful,

to refer to a whole bunch of things.

And I think this is an example

of how people love to have fun with language.

People like to be ironic.

They like to use words like wicked to mean good.

Using expressions that get a good reaction from people.

Aly Padrino, Dude, I'm def getting old.

What is this new slang these kids got?

What's the YNS era?

What the [beep] is FOMO?

Why y'all typing cs for cuz or ts for that [beep]?

I'm so lost.

I think this is something

which happens every single generation.

This is likely something which has happened

since language has existed.

And I think this is two-sided.

Kids on the one hand,

don't want to sound like their parents

or their parents' generation.

Slang words don't tend to come down to us

in the written records of ancient languages,

mainly because those tend to be formal writing

and slang words tend not to get written down

in formal writing very often.

You do see slang words

sometimes written in ancient graffiti,

often sexual slang, things like that.

But we also get hints of other kinds of slang

surviving into modern languages as ordinary words.

In the same kind of way as cool,

which at one point was basically a slang word,

the Latin word for head,

if you look it up in the Latin dictionary, is caput.

This is actually cognate with the English word head.

But if you look at the modern Romance languages,

you don't find the word caput meaning head.

You find words like testa in Italian.

At some point, people started using the word testa,

which originally meant pot or potsherd to refer to skulls.

And from then to use this word

which had come to mean skull to refer to people's heads.

Kaylee Jadaa, who invented the word no?

We don't know.

No goes back ultimately to Proto-Indo-European.

The English word no is actually a shortening of none,

which comes from nan, meaning not one.

And the n part is actually very similar

to its Proto-Indo-European ancestor n.

And that survives in lots of modern Indo-European languages.

We don't know what the origin is of this word,

but one possibility that's been suggested

is it actually goes back to the kind of face

that maybe babies make when they refuse something,

the no face.

Hot Girl Mara says, I'm starving to death.

I'm dying and my girlfriend won't choose a restaurant

because she's too busy telling me

about the great vowel shift.

I really sympathize.

You should never do linguistics on an empty stomach.

But the great vowel shift is really interesting.

To understand it, it helps to understand a bit

about what vowels are and how they work.

This is a model of the human vocal tract.

The mouth at this end, tongue here.

We have the larynx here.

We push air up from the lungs through the larynx,

and then we shape our vocal tract

by moving our lips and tongue and teeth.

Now, linguists are very used to working

with a schematic diagram of this tract

when we talk about vowels.

In the late 14th century,

people started to pronounce these vowels differently.

Where bite was pronounced originally with the tongue

at the sort of mid front part of the mouth,

people started moving it further up

and closer to the top front of the mouth.

It started sounding more like beat.

And this vowel actually became more of a diphthong,

a combination of two vowel sounds, I E,

and we end up with beat and bite.

Similarly, bought became boat,

and boat became boot,

and boot became bout.

Mars Catland says, Shakespeare just misspelled [beep]

and made words up and hoped [beep] would cope with it,

and they did.

Shakespeare did not invent anywhere near as many words

as people think.

Other writers of the same period

actually had similar or even larger vocabularies.

Lots and lots of people

who were contributing dictionary entries

had copies of Shakespeare.

Shakespeare was the first place they found many instances

of some of these words.

He might, in many cases, have been the first person

who wrote some of these words down,

but that doesn't mean that he invented them.

He came up with many fantastic turns of phrase

like one fell swoop.

Other words like mockable, for instance,

might be that Shakespeare were the first person

to use the word mockable.

These are productive morphemes of language

that are quite easy to combine.

Oh My Lantis asks, Why did we stop saying thee and thou?

Like, I'm honestly not sure how to use them in a sentence.

It's actually kind of interesting

that English stopped using thee and thou

because their cognates, like French tu, Russian tu,

stayed around in those languages.

So thee and thou were originally second-person singular.

You, when you're referring to just one person.

You was originally the plural form,

but around the early medievals period,

people started to use you for singulars as well.

This started in Latin.

You had tu and vos, tu being the singular you,

vos being plural you.

But people started using vos also

when they were talking to one person,

but they wanted to be respectful to them.

Some people have suggested

that this was because there were two emperors.

There was the emperor in Rome, emperor in Constantinople.

There were these two centers

of the Roman Empire for a while.

It's also possible that people just considered

that the word for more people

was somehow the more respectful form.

Around the 17th century, somewhat abruptly,

people, especially the Southeast of England,

started to drop thou and thee.

Also around this time,

you had certain religious groups like the Quakers

using thou and thee for everyone.

And this was not necessarily very popular.

So people might've wanted to distance themselves

from that usage.

Soft Play Band says, Word is a word invented

to call words words.

Word. Weird.

Yeah, it is kind of weird.

The English word word comes from an Indo-European root,

in fact, originally meaning speech

with an ending on it,

which originally meant something like put,

and this was used to indicate completed action.

So word means something like spoken.

It's something that has been spoken.

Benjamin ST25020 asked, Who invented the word pregnant?

Because that's such a weird word to just come up with.

Well, actually, this one turns out to be quite simple.

The pre bit in pregnant, as in prepare,

and lots of other words, just means before.

The gnant bit comes from a word gnasci, meaning give birth.

So being pregnant is the state you're in

before you give birth.

Gnasci is actually a cognate with words like genesis

and generate.

Actually, it turns out there are more interesting words

than being pregnant.

Take, for example, the Spanish word embarazado.

This is clearly related to the English word embarrassed.

It comes originally from an Arabic word,

marasa, meaning rope.

This was brought into Portuguese

and then into Spanish as baraza,

and gave birth to a word meaning entangled.

This is a concrete word originally,

referring to people being entangled in a rope,

but it came quite rapidly

to refer to a more abstract sense of being entangled

or inconvenienced,

which is where we get the word embarrassed, ultimately.

This entangled, inconvenienced meaning

was used as a euphemism for pregnant,

hence the Spanish word embarazado.

Dewi Writes says, Something that always fascinates me.

We don't know where the word dog comes from.

It just appeared in late medievals English

from no apparent root word.

This is actually a mystery in etymology.

We might've expected the word hound in modern English

to be the usual word for dog.

Instead, hound became more specialized

and the general word for dog is dog.

And we don't quite know where it comes from,

but dog is actually one of a set of words

along with pig, hog, frog,

all ending in G in modern English,

which in old English seemed to have had this CGA ending,

so docga, frocga, hocga, picga.

This is a little bit mysterious.

We don't quite know where this came in.

And these are words

which we don't see recorded all that often in writing.

What most likely happened,

is that these were kind of cute, expressive words

that were maybe used in the nursery

or when people wanted to talk in a cute way about dogs.

And so they didn't tend to end up in formal writing.

When people use the word doggo now,

they might be taking the word dog back to its origins.

So that's all the questions.

Thanks for listening.

This has been Etymology Support.

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