By Madeleine Higgins
The story of English etymology (the study of the origins of words) is a muddled one. The linguistic ancestor of English is Germanic, which comes from Proto-Indo-European, a semi-theoretical linguistic ancestor of most European and some South Asian languages. It is believed to have originated in Southeast Europe some 5,000 years ago. Technically, English is part of the West Germanic language family, which spans German, Dutch, and Flemish. English is not one of the Latin languages, which originate from Ancient Latin (which itself is also Proto-Indo-European), including French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and more. To non-linguists, these facts may seem out of place—for one, English isn’t all that similar to German or Dutch. In some common words, it’s quite obvious, for example, “good” in English is “gut” in German and “goed” in Dutch. But there’s a whole library of common English words, like “person”, “part”, “place”, “beautiful”, and “fact” which aren’t Germanic at all.
What makes English so unique is its near grocery list of centuries-old linguistic influences. During the 9th or 10th century, during the height of the Viking Age, Vikings, composed of both Danes and Norwegians, began attacking the coast of the British Isles and seizing land. The people living there at the time were speaking Old English, while the newcomers were speaking Old Norse, part of the North Germanic language family, which had branched off from the other Germanic languages a long time before. The Vikings left behind heavy linguistic traces, most noticeably in Norse place names where they had set up villages. The pronoun “they” is Norse, along with many combat-related words such as “slaughter”, “club”, and “ransack”, which makes sense given associations with frequent Viking raids.
The Norse also solidified the English plural “s”. When they arrived, most Old English nouns were using the “s” ending for plurals, but there were a few old words left which used archaic plural markers, such as the old plural of “egg” which was “eggru”, and the old plural of “book”, which was “beek”. Some of these forms are still with us in unusual plurals like “mice”, “geese”, and “children”. The Norse, when they began intermarrying with English people and learning the language, must have found the multiplicity of plural endings too complicated, preferring a universal “s”, which remains with us today.
There’s another, still greater linguistic influence on the English language, also emerging from war and conquest. Let’s go back to the year 1066, when William the Conqueror, crossing the channel from Normandy, France, took over England. Among other things, he imposed the French language on the English elite and administration. The common farmer, however, would still be speaking English. If you’ve ever heard someone speak about the Latin etymology of an English word, chances are, it’s French. (Either that or it’s legal or ecclesiastical.) An interesting thing is that words that we consider fancier or higher class are much more likely to be French compared to their Germanic counterparts, a remnant from this period. The word “beautiful”, for example, is French, while “pretty” is Germanic. “Fraternal” is French while “brotherly” is Germanic. English took on an astounding 10,000 new words. The Norman occupation lasted 116 years, long enough to leave a lasting imprint on the English language, but not quite long enough for them to start calling it “sixty-ten” instead of “seventy”.
The etymology of words sometimes follows a sort of mini-story. The word “ok” is particularly fascinating. It comes from an old New York slang custom of purposefully misspelling words and then creating acronyms out of the misspellings. For instance, “no use” became “know yuse” which became “K.Y.” O.K. stands for “all correct”, misspelled “oll korrect”. Interestingly, “okay”, which to some is a more correct or official spelling of the word, is not the original form. “Ok” is the only surviving word in use coming from this odd, momentary linguistic fad, popularized and entrenched in the English language by the political slogan “O.K. Club”, used by New York supporters of President Martin Van Buren, his nickname “Old Kinderhook” shortened to “O.K.”
“Vaccine” has a completely different, but still fascinating, story behind it. It originally meant “pertaining to cows”, from Latin “vacca”, which meant “cow”. In 1796, the English doctor Edward Jenner discovered that women who milked cows would often have mild bouts of cowpox, which, true to its name, was a disease spread between cows. These women also rarely contracted the much more common and dangerous disease, smallpox, which led Jenner to believe that catching cowpox could prevent someone from catching smallpox, or, in other words, vaccinate against it. He coined the usage of the word “vaccine” as we refer to it today.
And finally, we get to my personal favorite English etymology story, exemplifying all the English weirdness we’ve seen thus far. “Stand”, to me, on first brush, seemed almost certainly to be French. I recognized the Latin word “sto, stare” in it, and as we’ve learned, Latin in English is almost always the result of a French word-crossover. However, there doesn’t seem to be a clear French counterpart. Interesting. Upon further investigation on etymonline.com, an excellent resource for learning etymologies, I learned that “stand” actually comes from Old English “standan”, Proto-Germanic “standanan”, and Proto-Indo-European root “sta-”. But didn’t we just learn that Latin is also Proto-Indo-European? Indeed, “sto” comes from the same ancient root. But wait, there’s more! The word “stance”, which seems like it should come from “stand”, really comes from the same French word, which does come from Latin “sto, stare”. Therefore, “stand” and “stance” aren’t related in the way you’d think they were, but they are, in fact, derivatives of the same word, retaining similar meanings.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/English-language
https://www.britannica.com/topic/West-Germanic-languages
https://www.britannica.com/video/186425/look-words-some-language-English-Norman-Conquest
https://www.antidote.info/en/blog/reports/the-norse-epic-of-the-english-plural-s