Name: 言語学者だけど「言葉の成り立ち」について質問ある？ | Tech Support | WIRED Japan
Uploaded: 2025-03-22T09:26:26.000Z
Duration: 24 min 30 s
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Let's answer your questions from the internet about the history of English words.

Is anyone else as fascinated by etymology, the origin of words and the historical development of its meaning, as me?

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.

A god-sib was originally someone who had a godfather or godmother relationship with you.

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.

And this would have been in the Old English period, that god and sib would have come together to form the word gossip.

Words becoming less or more gender-neutral.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

And in America, interestingly, around the same kind of period, you get examples of people using the word just to refer to man generically.

Who the f*** came up with the silent letter?

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.

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.

Someone just used the word unalived on BBC News.

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

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.

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.

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.

For example, here are some words in English.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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言語学者だけど「言葉の成り立ち」について質問ある？ | Tech Support | WIRED Japan

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