Let's answer your questions from the internet about the history of English words.

This is Etymology Support.

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Shadesy Gigi 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 off the simple words we use.

Take the word gossip.

A god-sib 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 world.

The word world in Proto-Germanic comes from word meaning man and word alt 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 f*** came up with the silent letter?

English spelling is weird.

Take the word knight or gnor.

Once upon a time, people genuinely did pronounce the K at the start of knight.

They'd say knicht or they would pronounce the G at the start of gnor.

They'd say gnor.

Over time in English, these things changed.

People stopped pronouncing those, but we didn't update the spelling.

We actually did used to say Walder and Scholder, the ancestors of wood and should.

We stopped pronouncing those L's, but we kept the L's 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 wood 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 and decided that perhaps we should put the B back in.

Genocivi.

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 roos, which comes from this Proto-Indo-European word, pronounced something like roodus.

Instead, bear seems to trace back to ber 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.

xndlu, reading about Grimm's Law for the nth time and I still ain't understanding s***.

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 are some words in English.

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

Piscis, patad, 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.

Puh, puh, puh, puh, puh, puh, puh.

And you might notice if you do this a lot that the P maybe slips slightly and you end up, rather than with a Puh sound, with a Fuh sound.

This is essentially what happened in the histories of Germanic languages.

Lights for Fit F says,

It sits there and I can't stop thinking about how swear words are invented.

Like, who said the word f*** 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 the time to refer to urination, so they started imitating the sound that people make when they urinate.

Psss.

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 P simply by taking the first letter of piss and using that to refer to urination.

Similar to F for f***.

F off.

Tonya MJ underscore writes,

Y'all 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 my milkier cow, you'll 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 accept.

Everything except that tree.

Everything except this book.

And over time this meaning of without or accept shifted even further to mean but to make a contrast between 2 parts of a sentence.

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.

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 back words for different dairy products, for cows.

We can trace back words 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 can 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 father 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 pater bit is from the same place, means father.

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

So what we have is deus pater, sky father.

People essentially worshipping 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 to these language families, these reconstructed languages because the noise-to-signal ratio gets too high.

We can no longer feel confident about our reconstructions.

Sargacasm. 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 going to 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.