Tracing the origins of kanji in Japanese to Chinese characters has been super interesting, but I found it surprising that characters that were borrowed so long ago still retain the same form and meaning today. Understanding English from the same time period (say Middle Ages, 500-1500 A.D.) requires a whole college degree.
So I’m taking a short break from Japanese today to look at some English etymology. English is primarily Germanic with Romantic conquests1, but it also borrows extensively and broadly all over the place.
Text: This excerpt from Boy, by Roald Dahl
When I was seven, my mother decided I should leave kindergarten and go to a proper boy’s school. By good fortune, there existed a well-known Preparatory School for boys about a mile from our house.
Select Interesting Etymologies
Most of this excerpt can be traced back to Old English aka Anglo Saxon, a Germanic language that was spoken in Great Britain in the 5th-7th centuries. But there are a few interesting standout “non-native” words, as well as a couple that show why English is so irregular.
Decided – This is a Norman conquest addition, and can be traced back to Latin “dēcīdere“.
Kindergarten – This is quite a recent acquisition from German, lit. meaning garden (garten) of children (kinder)”. It first appeared in English around 1850.
Go – “Go” seems simple until you remember that the past tense is “went”. Why? Because English used to have two words that mean “to go” – “go” and “wend”. (Back then it was “gan” and “wendan”). Why did the past tense of “wend” get attached to “go”?2 ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Fortune – In Latin, fortuna means luck. The plural, fortunae, meant “possessions”. That’s why we can have the good fortune to be worth a fortune.
Known – Silent k’s are one of the quirks that drive English students crazy. The k was voiced in the Middle English “knowen” (1100-1500 AD). And then something called the Great Vowel Shift happened, which apparently also silenced some consonants. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Resources
Wiktionary
Oxford English Dictionary
IPA Chart
1 My understanding of the history of languages spoken in Great Britain is that it “started out” as Common Brittonic, which is a Celtic language. In the 5th century, the Germanic language we call Old English was brought to GB by Anglo Saxons, which then was replaced in ~1000 A.D. by a Romantic language called Anglo-Norman. These two – Old English and Anglo-Norman – fused to become Middle English, which takes us up to around 1500 AD and the printing press.↩
2 Up until the 15th century, the past tense of “go” was “yode”.↩
Etymology Adventures 