HISTORY OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE
The roots of English run deep into the past and reach all around the world. Today English is the first language of over 350 million people all over the globe, and the great diversity of English speakers is matched by the great diversity of English words. This diversity has arisen through a variety of historical processes, and in order to illustrate these processes vividly, this book traces all the twists and turns taken by over four hundred words on their journey into modern English.
When we examine the origins of English words, even the words we use everyday, we find that English has drawn its vocabulary from a great variety of sources, and readers can discover in these pages a representative sample of these wide-ranging borrowings. However, English also has a considerable number of words that have been in continuous use for thousands of years, inheritances from the prehistoric ancestor of English spoken many thousands of years ago, Proto-Indo-European.
The Prehistoric Ancestors of English
All around us as we speak, we can observe the kinds of linguistic change that have transformed Proto-Indo-European into English. In this century, most of the inhabitants of the United States speak English, but many regional differences in American speech can be heard easily. Some of these regional differences reflect the different areas of Britain and Ireland from which settlers arrived, but after all these years, it would be difficult to find a dialect back in the old country that sounds exactly the same as an American dialect.
Linguistic change is continually at work transforming people’s speech. Occasionally we hear an elderly person use an old-fashioned word or expression, and we have to ask them what it means. I, for example, cherish a vivid memory of hearing my grandfather jokingly use the word moxie and asking him what it meant. Or we find that older people have a slightly different accent. Parental complaints about the incomprehensibility of young people’s slang are a cliché. Over time, the differences that we can hear in our daily lives accumulate and eventually transform a language utterly. I spoke to my grandfather, and he spoke to his grandfather, and he spoke to his grandfather, and that’s halfway to Shakespeare. The results of thousands of years of such change have led to Modern English as we know it today. The story of English begins far from the shores of the United States, and even far from England. English belongs to the Indo-European family, one of the largest language families, which includes the languages of most of Europe and much of Asia, ranging from Ireland and Iceland to Iran and India. Linguists have demonstrated that such languages as Irish Gaelic, Welsh, English, German, French, Polish, Russian, Albanian, Armenian, Persian, Hindi, and a hundred more are descended from a single language spoken at least six thousand years ago, most probably in the region of the Black Sea. Linguists call this language Proto-Indo-European. We have no written records of this language, and we never will have any, since it must have been spoken long before the invention of writing. Nevertheless, many of the most common words in English are inherited from this prehistoric ancestor. Proto-Indo-European was notable in that many of its words could be broken down into roots, the minimal meaningful units from which larger words are built. Many roots had the basic shape of consonant-vowel-consonant. For example, the Proto-Indo-European root meaning “woman” was *gwen–. As another example, the basic form of the root meaning “bright” or “bright sky” was *dyeu–, which can be seen in the name Zeus, originally the god of the bright sky. From this root, speakers of Proto-Indo-European could also make other words by rearranging the sounds of the root and adding suffixes. The derived noun *deiwos meant “god” (that is, a “sky-dweller”) in Proto-Indo-European. (The w in this word is the consonantal form of the u— notice that the lips are rounded when making both the consonant w and the vowel u.) In English, this noun *deiwos shows up in the first part of the word Tuesday. Most of the words of Indo-European were formed in ways similar to *deiwos, by being derived from roots with suffixes.
The asterisk (*) in front of the roots and words mentioned above indicates that these words are not attested—that is, there is no written document or sound recording in which these words exist as such. Instead, such words are reconstructed, or recovered by linguists through the comparison of words in related languages. Linguists are sure that reconstructed words as *deiwos once existed because of evidence from attested languages, such as Sanskrit devas, Avestan dae¯uuo¯ , Latin deus, and Irish día, all meaning “god.” These languages are widely separated in time and space, as well as by cultural differences, so it is unlikely that the similarity between these words for “god” represents borrowing between the languages. Instead, they must have inherited the word from a common source. On the evidence of the different words for “god” above, linguists reconstruct the word *deiwos. All of the other reconstructed forms marked with an asterisk in this book are supported by similar evidence.
The Old English Period
The distant ancestor of English, Proto-Indo-European, broke up into several branches. The branch in which English developed is called the Germanic branch. The first Germanic tribes speaking early dialects of Old English began to move into Great Britain in the middle of the fifth century of our era. The medieval scholar Bede gives the exact date as A.D. 446, and from around this time we can begin to trace the history of English separately from its Indo-European and Germanic cousins. Many of the most common words in English today are inherited from Old English and are the direct descendants of ancient Proto-Indo-European terms as well. Such basic words as fire and water, or heart and tooth, have been used continuously over six thousand years in the course of the development of English from Proto-Indo-European. Many Modern English terms relating to religious beliefs, such as bless, Easter, god, and Yule, have their roots in the ancient paganism of the Germanic peoples. A great deal of Old English vocabulary has not survived into Modern English, however. Much of the vocabulary of Modern English is borrowed from other languages, many of which also happen to be Indo-European languages. Greek, Latin, and the Romance languages have been the most important sources of new words grafted onto the stock of Old English. After many centuries of borrowing, English now contains words that have originated in, or at least passed through, most of the major branches of Indo-European. In this way, English has been lucky enough to reacquire many of the Proto-Indo-European roots that it had previously lost during the course of its development. The earliest major source of these “non-English” English words is Old Norse, and specifically the dialect of the Danes who began to make permanent settlements in the northern half of England in the middle of the ninth century of our era. The Old Norse word for settlement was byr, and this is continued in the Modern English word bylaw. Another Old Norse contribution to legal vocabulary is outlaw. The Danes who settled in England fought intermittently with the English, even gaining control of theEnglish throne for a few years, and during the long interaction between Old English and Old Norse, almost one thousand words of Norse origin entered the English language. These are found in all areas of culture and include such common items of vocabulary as fellow and window. In fact, the fellowship between the two languages even led to the replacement of some of the most basic, everyday Old English words by their Old Norse equivalents. The verb take and the pronoun they offer interesting cases of such borrowing.
The Middle English Period
The conquest of England by the Normans in 1066 is traditionally used to separate the Old English Period from the Middle English period, even though features characteristic of Middle English began to appear in Old English texts before this date. There were already several dialects of Old English, and in Middle English dialectal developments increased. Standard Modern English today contains a mixture of elements from these Middle English dialects. Bury, kale, and raid provide examples of such mixture. The Middle English period was also marked by increasing borrowing from French, and such borrowing has continued since this period into modern times. The earliest French words borrowed into English often aren’t immediately apparent as French. They may not sound French anymore, unlike more recent borrowings such as nonchalant or chagrin. In words borrowed from French at an early date, English sometimes preserves sounds that have since disappeared. from the word in French in the intervening centuries. The ch sound of chase (see catch) is an example of an English word preserving such sounds, since ch in French chasser is now pronounced like English sh. However, French words that have been in English for only a few centuries, such as envelope, sometimes hesitate between Anglicizing pronunciations on the one hand and pronunciations that attempt to approximate the French sounds on the other. The Normans who conquered England spoke a dialect of French different from that used in Paris, and a dialect of French called Anglo-Norman or Anglo-French based on their speech, with an admixture of other elements, became the second language of England for a while. Especially characteristic of Anglo-Norman was the preservation of the Latin consonant c before the vowel a. In the French of Paris, however, c before a had developed into ch. Many of the earlier borrowings from French into English were from Anglo-Norman, but later it sometimes happened that the same word was borrowed again in a form closer to the standard Parisian form. This has led to a certain number of doublets (words derived from the same historical source by different routes of transmission) in English, such as chattel and cattle (see cattle). French has also made a notable contribution to English vocabulary describing the good things in life, with words such as banquet, beef, and victual that tellingly illustrate the relationship between the culture of the ascendant Anglo-Norman aristocracy and that of rest of the population, which spoke English.
Other Languages That Have Influenced English
Widespread direct borrowing from Latin has also characterized the history of English, from the Old English period onwards. In medieval times, Latin was the preeminent language of religion, scholarship, and government in western Europe. Dirge, hearse, patter, and short shrift find their origins in the Medieval Latin of the Church. In more recent centuries, thousands of scientific terms of Greek and Latin origin have poured into the dictionary. Some scientific and medical words of Latin origin with unexpected etymologies include oscillate and testis. Since the medieval period onward, Arabic has also made a substantial contribution to the vocabulary of English. Words of Arabic origin include alcohol, average, racket, and zero. Many other languages began to add to the wealth of English words as British mercantile interests stretched around the world and the British Empire began to emerge. Borrowings from Dutch are especially numerous and include such words as bumpkin, pickle, walrus, and yacht. British ships brought ketchup, tea, and typhoon back from China. Recently the word tea has been imported again in the form of its doublet chai. Irish and Scottish Gaelic have given English such words as galore, slogan, and spree. As another example of the varied sources of English words, we may recall a borrowing from Romany (the language of the Gypsies), pal. And we must not forget the many loanwords from Yiddish found in American English, such as glitch. However, borrowing is not the only process that has brought new words into the dictionary. Many linguistic processes like clipping (shortening or abbreviation) have made new words out of old, such as cute from acute or za from pizza. Avoidance of taboo words has led to the appearance of newer, less offensive-sounding words, such as donkey. The glossary at the end of this book will help readers explore more of these processes in depth. All of the processes outlined above have been working together over thousands of years to give us the English words that we use today. If you open the dictionary, you will find that we know the history of most of these words quite well. But still a certain number remain mysteries. Often it is the most recent words that remain the most obscure, such as gremlin. Legions of scholars pore over old newspapers, dime store novels, and photographs of nineteenth-century cityscapes and billboards, searching for the attestation that will clear up the remaining mysteries. English speakers are uniquely privileged by the variety of their linguistic heritage, from Indo-European and from other language families. And since English is now the first truly global language in the history of humanity, as well as the language of the majority of webpages, English can expect to grow even richer with new words.
HISTORY OF SOME INTERESTING WORDS
Artichoke
Those who have been warned to watch out for the small, sharp-tipped leaves toward the innermost part of an artichoke may wonder whether the name of this vegetable has anything to do with choking. Originally it did not. Our word goes back to an Arabic word for the same plant, al-h arsˇ uf.
Along with many other Arabic words, it passed into Spanish during the Middle Ages, when Muslims ruled much of Spain. The Old Spanish word alcarchofa was variously modified as it passed through Italian, a northern dialect form being articiocco, the source of the English word. It was further modified in English, where a potpourri of spellings and explanations are found since its appearance early in the sixteenth century. For example, people who did not know the long history of the word explained it by the notion that the flower had a “choke,” that is, something that chokes, in its “heart.”
Asparagus
The history of the word asparagus is a good illustration of one of the peculiarities of English etymology. After the rebirth of classical learning during the Renaissance, Greek and Latin achieved a lofty status among the educated. As a result, etymologists and spelling reformers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries tried to give English a classical look by Latinizing or Hellenizing the spelling of words that had Latin or Greek ancestry (and even some that didn’t). For example, Medieval Latin had a word sparagus,
The history of avocado takes us back to the Aztecs and their language, Nahuatl, which contained the word ahuacatl, meaning both “fruit of the avocado tree” and “testicle.” The word ahuacatl was compounded with others, as in ahuacamolli, meaning “avocado soup or sauce,” from which the Spanish-Mexican word guacamole derives. In trying to pronounce ahuacatl, the Spanish who found the fruit and its Nahuatl name in Mexico came up with aguacate, but other Spanish speakers substituted the form avocado for the Nahuatl word because ahuacatl sounded like the early Spanish word avocado (now abogado), meaning “lawyer.” In borrowing the Spanish avocado, first recorded in English in 1697 in the compound avogato pear (with a spelling that probably reflects Spanish pronunciation), we have lost some traces of the more interesting Nahuatl word.
Beef
That beef comes from cows is known to most, but the close relationship between the words beef and cow is hardly household knowledge. Cow comes via Middle English from Old English cu¯ , which is descended from the Indo-European root *gwou–, also meaning “cow.” This root has descendants in most of the branches of the Indo-European language family. Among those descendants is the Latin word bo¯s, “cow,” whose stem form, bov–, eventually became the Old French word buef, also meaning “cow.” The French nobles who ruled England after the Norman Conquest of course used French words to refer to the meats they were served, so the animal called cu¯ by the Anglo-Saxon peasants was called buef by the French nobles when it was brought to them cooked at dinner. Thus arose the distinction between the words for animals and their meat that is also found in the English wordpairs swine/pork, sheep/mutton, and deer/venison. What is interesting about cow/beef is that we are in fact dealing with one and the same word, etymologically speaking.
The buffalo is so closely associated with the Wild West that one might assume that its name comes from a Native American word, as is the case with the words moose and skunk. In fact, buffalo can probably be traced back by way of one or more of the Romance languages through Late and Classical Latin and ultimately to the Greek word boubalos, meaning “an antelope or a buffalo.” The buffalo referred to by the Greek and Latin words was of course not the American one but an Old World mammal, such as the water buffalo of southern Asia. Applied to the North American mammal, buffalo is a misnomer, bison being the preferred term. As far as everyday usage is concerned, however, buffalo, first recorded for the American mammal in 1635, is older than bison, first recorded in 1774.
Cattle
Arancher driving his cattle to market could technically say that they were his chattels or his capital, but he would be unlikely to realize that all three words go back to the same Latin adjective capitalis, “of the head, principal.” Cattle and chattel go back through medieval French to the Medieval Latin word capitale, “property,” which comes from the Latin word capitalis. Cattle is derived from Anglo-Norman catel, which in medieval times meant “movable property” in general. The word became restricted to animals because livestock was then one of the most important forms of wealth. The further narrowing of cattle to refer only to bovines occurred in the nineteenth century. The current English word Chattel descends from the form used in central France, chatel. The alternation between the c and ch sounds in this case is the same as that illustrated in catch and chase above, reflecting dialectal differences in northern (Norman) and central France. Chatel was adopted in medieval England as a legal term for “movable property,” supplanting cattle. Capital was also borrowed from French in medieval times. It represents not the regular French development of Latin capit¯ale, but instead a direct borrowing of the Latin adjective capit¯alis into French. The original use of capital in English was as an adjective, first meaning “relating to the head” and later meaning “principal” or “chief.” Capital came to denote wealth when it was used to mean someone’s principal substance or property. The further developments of word are quite recent: capitalist, “one who possesses wealth,” dates from the eighteenth century, while capitalism, denoting the economic system in which the means of production and distribution are privately or corporately owned, first appears in the nineteenth century.
Caviar
Although caviar might seem to be something quintessentially Russian, the word caviar is not, the native Russian term being ikra. Caviar first came into English in the sixteenth century, probably by way of French and Italian, which borrowed it from Turkish havyar. The source of the Turkish word is apparently an Iranian dialectal form related to the Persian word for “egg,” kha¯yah, and this in turn goes back to the same Indo-European root that gives us the English words egg and oval. This rather exotic etymology is appropriate to a substance that is not to everyone’s taste, giving rise to Shakespeare’s famous phrase, “ ’twas caviary to the general,” the general public, that is.
The confusion of cocoa, the beverage, with coco, the tree, can be traced to Samuel Johnson’s great dictionary, published in 1755. Johnson maintained the distinction between the two words in his own writing, but by some editorial or printing error the definitions for coco and cocoa appeared together under the word cocoa. That was unfortunate, because coco and cocoa are two different words that refer to two different trees. The cacao tree of tropical America produces both cocoa and chocolate. The name cacao comes from cacahuatl, “cacao bean,” in Nahuatl (the language of the Aztec), while chocolate comes from xocolatl, “article of food made from cacao,” an unrelated word in the same language. The word cocoa is simply a variant spelling of cacao, influenced by coco. The coconut or coco palm originated in the East Indies. Its name is not a native name like cacao but comes from Portuguese coco, “goblin,” referring to the facelike appearance of the three holes at the bottom of the fruit
Dinner
Eating foods such as pizza and ice cream for breakfast may be justified etymologically. In Middle English dinner meant “breakfast,” as did the Old French word disner, or diner, which was the source of our word. The Old French word came from the Vulgar Latin word *disiu¯na¯re, meaning “to break one’s fast; to eat one’s first meal,” a notion also contained in our word breakfast. The Vulgar Latin word was derived from an earlier word, *disieiu¯na¯re, the Latin elements of which are dis–, denoting reversal, and ie¯iu¯nium, “fast.” Middle English dinner not only meant “breakfast” but, echoing usage of the Old French word diner, more commonly meant “the first big meal of the day, usually eaten between 9 A.M. and noon.” Customs change, however, and over the years we have let the chief meal become the last meal of the day, by which time we have broken our fast more than once.
Farm
The word farm has its origins in an Anglo-Norman legal term ferme, meaning “fixed payment.” This is in turn derived from Medieval Latin firma, a form of the word firmus, “firm, steady,” and the source of our word firm. Because Anglo-Norman was the language of English law during the Middle Ages, it was the source of many words of legal importance (such as curfew) in the history of English. The earliest sense of the English word farm is “a fixed yearly amount payable as a tax or rent,” since it was a common practice to lease agricultural lands for a fixed annual rent rather than a percentage of the crop. The word farm was also applied to land occupied on such terms. Originally, a farmer was “one who collects tax or rent,” not the one who paid it for the privilege of cultivating a given plot of land. The phrase farm out “to send out (work to be done elsewhere)” also derives from the use of this word in medieval systems of leasing land. From the sixteenth century on, farm was used to indicate any cultivated agricultural land, regardless of the circumstances of its tenancy or ownership, and farmer became the occupational name of the tenant or owner.
Hidden in the word garlic is a figurative reference to its appearance. Garlic comes from the Old English word ga¯rle¯ac, a compound composed of ga¯r, “spear,” and le¯ac, “leek, plant of the genus Allium, onion-like plant,” which is the ancestor of the modern word leek. The compound may have been suggested by the similarity in shape between a clove of garlic and a spearhead. This element ga¯r continues the Germanic word for “spear,” *gaizaz, which can also be found in many English names that are ultimately of Germanic origin, such as Gerald, “spear-power,” or Gerard, “spear-hardy.” The figurative expression originally present in Old English ga¯rle¯ ac, “spear-leek,” has lost its point, if not its pungency, in Modern English garlic. For a word that has similarly developed from an old compound, see hussy.
Because the world has eaten countless hamburgers, the origins of the name may be of interest to many. By the middle of the nineteenth century, people in the port city of Hamburg, Germany, enjoyed a form of pounded beef called Hamburg steak. The large numbers of Germans who migrated to North America during this time probably brought the dish and its name along with them. The entrée may have appeared on an American menu as early as 1836, although the first recorded use of Hamburg steak is not found until 1884. The variant form hamburger steak, using the German adjective Hamburger, meaning “from Hamburg,” first appears in a Walla Walla, Washington, newspaper in 1889. By 1902 we find the first description of a Hamburg steak that is close to our conception of the hamburger, namely a recipe calling for ground beef mixed with onion and pepper. By then hamburger was on its way, to be followed—much later—by the shortened form burger, used in forming cheeseburger and the names of other variations on the basic burger, as well as on its own.
Ketchup
The word ketchup exemplifies the types of changes that both words and things undergo when they cross over to a new culture. The source of our word ketchup may be the Malay word kechap (now spelled kecap), “fish sauce,” which in turn is possibly from Chinese (Cantonese) ke¯ chap. This Cantonese compound is the equivalent of Mandarin Chinese qié zhı¯ , “juice, gravy,” from qié, “eggplant,” and zhı¯ , “juice, gravy.” Ke¯ chap, like ketchup, was a sauce, but one without tomatoes; rather, it contained fish brine and spices. Sailors seem to have brought the sauce to Europe, where it was made with locally available ingredients such as the juice of mushrooms or walnuts. At some unknown point, the juice of tomatoes was used and ketchup as we know it was born. But it is important to realize that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries ketchup was a generic term for sauces whose only common ingredient was vinegar. Mushroom ketchup (without tomatoes) is still well known in Britain, and it is a common ingredient in the traditional cooking of the American South. The word ketchup is first recorded in English in 1690 in the form catchup, in 1711 in the form ketchup, and in 1730 in the form catsup. All three spelling variants of this foreign borrowing remain current.
The lobster and the locust may share a common source for their names, that is, the Latin word locusta, which was used for the locust and also for a crustacean that was probably a kind of lobster. We can see that locusta would be the source of locust, but it looks like an unlikely candidate as the source of lobster. It is thought, however, that Old English loppestre, the ancestor of lobster, was formed from locusta and the suffix –ester, used to make agent nouns (our –ster). The change from Latin locusta to Old English loppestre may have been influenced by Old English loppe, meaning “spider.”
Meat
Meat is an example of a word whose meaning has become narrower in the course of its development. In Old English the word mete denoted whatever was edible. This is the sense of meat in compounds such as sweetmeat, “a piece of candy,” and nutmeat, “the edible part of a nut,” as opposed to the shell. In the fourteenth century, meat came to signify animal flesh in contrast to fish, and at times in contrast to poultry as well, but the general sense persisted into the seventeenth century. A hint of the older meaning can perhaps still be perceived in the proverb, “One man’s meat is another man’s poison.”
Pasta
A meal featuring foods with etymologically interesting names might well include pasties, pasta, paté, and hamburger patties. The noun pasty (pronounced like past plus –ee), “a meat pie,” was borrowed in the fourteenth century from the Old French word pasté or pastée. Pastée is derived from the Vulgar Latin word *pasta¯ ta, “a meat dish wrapped in dough.” Medieval Latin pasta¯ta in turn goes back to the Latin word pasta, “paste,” also the source of Italian pasta. Pâté is the modern French form of paste. Borrowed into English in the eighteenth century as a synonym for pasty, paté now usually means a meat paste or meat loaf without a pastry crust. Patty comes from English or French pâté by association with pasty. The word pastry, another food item made with dough, also belongs to this family. In the United States, pasties remain popular in the Northern Great Lakes region. Originally they were dough-wrapped meals carried to the mines. A pasty well-sealed in the morning would still be warm at lunchtime. Though the pasties of northern Michigan and Wisconsin sometimes included meat among their ingredients, they were often filled with root vegetables, like rutabaga or turnip, whether meat was available or not. The Great Lakes mines are closed now, but one can still buy pasties at diners and roadside stalls.
Pease-porridge hot,
Pease-porridge cold,
Pease-porridge in the pot,
Nine days old.
The need for contrast between singular and plural forms of nouns is so important in English that very few nouns now have identical singular and plural forms. Those that do tend to be long-term survivors rather than borrowings or new formations: sheep and deer are as old as English itself. Many words originally having identical forms for the singular and plural eventually developed new plurals ending with the regular English plural suffix –s: the word daughter, for instance, now has the plural daughters, although it once had a plural dohtor, which was the same as the singular in Old English. Still other words developed new singular forms, and the word pea is an example of this reverse process.
The Old English word for “a pea” was pise or piose. The regular plural of this word had the ending –an. In Middle English the plural suffix changed to –en and new plural forms were developed, such as pese and pease, forms identical to the singular, so that one could request one pease, or two pease. In the sixteenth century people began to interpret the sound represented by s as a plural ending, and a new singular, spelled pea in Modern English, was developed to conform to the usual pattern of English nouns. A similar development also took place in the history of the word cherry, in which the final s-sound of the original Anglo-Norman cherise was reinterprented as a plural ending and a new singular cherry formed.
Prune
The words prune and plum came into English by separate routes from the Latin word pru¯num, “a plum.” Pru¯num was borrowed into the West Germanic languages at a very early date with the sound l instead of the sound r. The Old English form was plu¯me, which becomes plum in Modern English. In Old French, the Latin word pru¯num became prune. English then borrowed prune from French with the specialized meaning “dried plum.”
Salt was and is such an important ingredient in salad dressings that the very word salad is based on the Latin word for “salt.” Vulgar Latin had a verb *sala¯re, “to salt,” from Latin sa¯ l, “salt,” and the past participial form of this verb, *sala¯ ta, “having been salted,” came to mean “salad.” The Vulgar Latin word passed into languages descending from it, such as Portuguese (salada) and Old Provençal (salada). Old French may have borrowed its word salade from Old Provençal. Medieval Latin also carried on the Vulgar Latin word in the form sala¯ ta. As in the case of so many culinary delights, the English borrowed the word and probably the dish from the French. The Middle English word salade, from Old French salade and Medieval Latin sala¯ ta, is first recorded in a recipe book composed before 1399.
Salt is of course an important ingredient of other foods and condiments besides salad dressings, as is evidenced by some other culinary word histories. The words sauce and salsa, borrowed into English from French and Spanish, respectively, both come ultimately from the Latin word salsus, meaning “salted.” Another derivative of this word was the Late Latin adjective salsı¯cius, “prepared by salting,” which eventually gave us the word sausage.
Sandwich
Our name for “slices of bread with a filling” comes from the title of the English nobleman John Montagu, fourth Earl of Sandwich (1718–1792). An indefatigable gambler, he is reported to have instructed his servant to bring him this easily handled repast (the original filling is said to have been roast beef) so that he might eat without leaving the gaming table. Word of this incident circulated, and the happy meeting of meat and bread, dubbed sandwich, soon became a popular.
Sherbet
Although the word sherbet has been in the English language for several centuries (it was first recorded in 1603), it has not always referred to what one normally thinks of as sherbet. Sherbet came into English from Ottoman Turkish sherbet or Persian sharbat, both going back to Arabic sˇarba, “drink.” The Turkish and Persian words referred to a beverage of sweetened, diluted fruit juice that was popular in the Middle East and imitated in Europe. In Europe sherbet eventually came to refer to a carbonated drink.
Because the original Middle Eastern drink contained fruit and was often cooled with snow, sherbet was applied to a frozen dessert (first recorded in 1891). It is distinguished slightly from sorbet, which can also mean “a fruit-flavored ice served between courses of a meal.” Sorbet (first recorded in English in 1585) goes back through French (sorbet) and then Italian (sorbetto) to the same Turkish sherbet that gave us sherbet.
Among the greatest contributions to world civilization made by the early inhabitants of the Americas are plant foods such as the potato and squash. The tomato, whose name comes ultimately from the Nahuatl language spoken by the Aztecs and other groups in Mexico and Central America, was another important contribution. When the Spanish conquered this area, they brought the tomato back to Spain and, borrowing the Nahuatl word tomatl for it, named it tomate, a form shared in French, Portuguese, and early Modern English.
Tomate, first recorded in 1604, gave way to tomato, a form created in English either because it was assumed to be Spanish or because it came under the influence of the word potato. As is well known, people at first resisted eating this New World food because its membership in the nightshade family made it seem potentially poisonous, but it is now an important element of many world cuisines.
The bird Meleagris gallopavo, commonly known as the turkey and familiar as the centerpiece of the Thanksgiving feast, is a native of the New World. It acquired the name of an Old World country as a result of two different mistakes. The name turkey, or turkey cock, was originally applied to an African bird now known as the guinea fowl (Numida meleagris), which at one time was believed to have originated in Turkey.
When European settlers first saw the American turkey, they identified it with the guinea fowl and gave it the name turkey. There are many other examples of this sort of transference of old names to newly encountered species by speakers moving into a new area. The large thrush called a robin in the New World (Turdus migratorius) is an entirely different bird from the robin of the Old World (Erithacus rubecula), but they both have a breast of a reddish-orange color.
Water
Water is wet, even etymologically. The Indo-European root of water is *wed–, “wet.” This root could appear in several guises—with the vowel e, as here, or as *wod–, or with no vowel between the w and d, yielding *ud–. All three forms of the root appear in English either in native or in borrowed words. From a form with a long e, *we¯d–, which by Grimm’s Law became *we¯t– in Germanic, we have Old English w¯æt, “wet,” which became Modern English wet.
In the book 'Word Histories and Mysteries' from the Editors of the American Heritage Dictionaries, Vice President, Publisher of Dictionaries Margery S. Berube, Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston & New York, 2004, p. ix-xv and compilation of interesting words. Adapted to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.
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