More Suffix-fu Part I

A long time ago (in a former life, almost), I was writing a research paper on the origins of the English word smile. I had wanted to find out why it was that English, unlike other European languages, had completely different words for laugh and smile. Compare, for instance, French rire et sourire, German lachen und lächeln.

I don't believe I turned up an answer, but I did find out something very interesting. Our smile never made an appearance in English until the 13th century (as a loan from Scandinavian); previous to that, the Old English smearcian (now our smirk) had served.

Now, it so happens that smile and smirk are both related to Latin mirari, "to wonder at." I found this out by looking at Eric Partridge's Origins: A Short Etymological Dictionary of Modern English. (There are many very surprising cross-references to be encountered in this volume. Look up walk, for example, and you'll be directed to "See VOLUBLE, para 7." Check out gymnasium and you'll be asked to "See NAKED, para 4.")

But if smile and smirk are cognates of mirari, where does the -k in smirk come from? It is a diminutive suffix known in Germanic philological circles as "k-diminutiva." This pair, smile and smirk, has parallels in tell and talk; steal and stalk; and even well and walk.

I'll write more about well and walk in my next post, but it's worth noting that k-diminutiva also lies behind the suffix -ock, as found in hillock, bullock, buttock, and, yes, bollocks.
 

Asphalt and Groceries

A few years ago, my friend Veronica started ranting at me about Americans' pronunciation of grocery. "They all say groshery," she said. Since then, I can't help but hear this pronunciation everywhere, even on National Public Radio. I'm not sure how widespread it is or that it is just American; I think I have heard it in Canada too, but in a city like Toronto it's hard to say where people are from.

I don't know how this pronunciation arises. Perhaps in moving from a back vowel [o] through an alveolar sibilant [s] and in preparing itself for the liquid [r], the mouth can't help but tend towards producing a palatal fricative. Or perhaps the e after the c is "fronty" enough to produce palatalization. I don't know. But once you notice people saying "groshery," you start to hear it everywhere. And it begins to strike you as a form of gaucherie.

No better is "ashphalt." But here I think we are seeing folk etymology at work. In other words, some folks are a little stymied by the word asphalt (it is rather opaque), and since the stuff is sort of black and smelly, they have decided that the first syllable is really our friendly and familiar English word ash.

Incidentally, asphalt has been around in English since the 14th century, which is much earlier than I would have guessed. The OED cites John Trevisa's 1398 definition of Asphaltis: "glewe of Iudea is erthe of blacke colour and is heuy and stinkynge."

Folk etymology is a fairly common agent of linguistic change. Sometimes it happens when a word is introduced from a foreign language—the above is an example of this, as is sparrowgrass from asparagus.

At other times, a native word has an obsolete element no longer understood by speakers and another, more transparent form is substituted—for instance, bridegroom, from Old English brydguma (compare German Bräutigam), where the second element guma, meaning "man, hero," had ceased to be understood by the 16th century and was replaced by groom, meaning "lad." We might still be toasting the bride and goom if this hadn't happened!

Excrescent -t in Amongst and Whilst Part II

Against is one word in which the excrescent -t has become entirely standard. The Middle English form of the word had been aȝænes or aȝeins; thereafter, according to OED,

     Late in the 14th century, after the -es had ceased
     to be syllabic, the final -ens, -ains developed in the
     south a parasitic -t as in amongs-t, betwix-t,  
     amids-t, probably confused with superlatives in -st
     and c. 1525 this became universal in literary English.

This theory that prepositional forms were modelled after superlatives, i.e., that excrescent -t developed by analogy with -est forms, is interesting. 

In particular, I'm inclined to think that the word next may have had an important role to play in this process. Most English speakers are now unaware of this, but next is a superlative. The Old English for "near" was neah; our positive form near is in fact the comparative form of neah; our present next developed from the superlative form neahst.

Next is also an adjective. But its meaning, having to do with relations of space and ordinality, is sort of quasi-prepositional. Perhaps the excrescent -t that became standard in the preposition against was bolstered by the example of next, especially as awareness of next's superlative nature waned in the minds of speakers.

So while (or whilst) it bugs me perennially that amongst and whilst are preferred by some writers over the manifestly briefer and morphologically "cleaner" among and while, I can certainly see why these forms were an inevitable outgrowth of amongs and whiles, especially as speakers of English began to lose their intuitive grasp of the adverbial genitive -s.

In sum, there were two (maybe three) factors that drove the development of forms like amongst and whilst. One, the tendency to sound a homorganic plosive after the [s]; two, the analogy of superlative forms, especially, perhaps, next; and, three, a grammatical uncertainty about  -s endings and an impulse to make these words align with a better understood form.

Incidentally, the process continues today. I have heard a number of people say acrosst for across.