When I was growing up, words just seemed random. That was a dog, this was a cat and I just got on with life. It was only much later that I began to notice that the words in other languages seemed strangely familiar. If a word in another language is similar, how did it get like that? Did they take our word? Did we take their word? Or is there another explanation for what’s going on?
Have you ever watched a really old movie? Like a movie from the 30’s or 40’s? Everyone talks differently. Not differently enough that you can’t understand them, but the difference is definitely noticable. Now think about how people spoke in Shakespeares time. “Wherefore art thou Romeo?” Each word is a bit different than you might expect. “Wherefore” is not a fancy way of saying “where”. It actually means “why”. Juliet is asking why Romeo is the way that he is. Why did her love have to be in the family and situation he is in. You can analyse the word as meaning “what is it for”, like “What is this thing for”.
“art” is only used with the second person “thou”. Over time people started using “you” more because “thou” implied a certain level of intimacy. In a rapidly changing society, it was never clear when such informality was appropriate so people default to using the second person plural “you” and it eventually stuck. The reason I am telling you this is to give examples of how languages change over time. These are small changes. But the changes can get much, much bigger.
English is grouped by linguists into the Germanic group of languages. Dutch is another Germanic language. In Dutch the word for “where” is “waar”. “house” in Dutch is “huis”. In German it is “Haus” and in Swedish it is “hus”. All these languages have a similar word for the same concept. But they have changed a lot over time, but they still contain the same essence.
Speech patterns change. Sometimes a little, like British and American English. And sometimes a lot, like English, German, Dutch and Swedish. But where did it all start? Well, if they diverged over time, then we should reverse the clock and see what they all looked like hundreds of years ago when they must have been closer together.
This is from the Canterbury Tales from 1392
Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote,
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licóur
Of which vertú engendred is the flour;
Whan Zephirus eek with his swete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
Linguists call this Middle English
Notice “whan” and “hath”. In Modern English these would be “when” and “has”. Over time people start pronouncing the “a” in “whan” more like an “e” and “hath” got replaced by a dialectal variation of “hath” which is “has”.
But look at the words for “when” in other Germanic languages. In Dutch it’s “wanneer” (which originally meant “when before” or “when previously” and eventually just came to mean “when” and in German it’s “Wann”. Very similar to “whan” in Middle English. I didn’t include the older versions of the Dutch or German words because they stayed the same.
Ok, now we have a collection of words that all mean the same and look the same. Since all these languages are spoken in a similar area and are quite similar to each other, they are probably related. Let’s hypothesize about a language that was spoken 2000 years ago. Let’s call it Language A just for simplicity’s sake. The Germanic tribes were living in Scandanavia at that time and had just started migrating into Central Europe.
So let’s say the Germanic tribes spoke Language A. Their word for “when” was probably something like “wann”. But the English word has an H in it? I wonder why. It’s probably not random. Have you ever heard (particularly older people) say when, which, or what with an extra almost whistle at the beginning. There is also a cartoon character who likes to say “Cool whip” with an exaggerated h at the beginning of “whip”.
Well, there’s a reason for that. It was the original pronounciation of all these words that started with “wh”. Different dialects dropped them at different times. In contemporary English its almost entirely gone but can still be heard among older speakers. So if its a feature in English and not in other Germanic languages does that mean it got added to Language A “wann” or was it in Language A all along and English kept it and the others lost it?
Well, this is where we go back to our sources. Can we find other Germanic languages descended from Language A that use an h with a w like English does? Well, in fact you can. Gothic used a word that sounds like “hwan”, and Old Norse (the language spoken by the Scandanavians) “hvenær” (which means “how near”). The original form of the English word used the combination “hw” too. Later English scribes changed it to “wh” because they liked the look of it more apparently.
Ok, so Gothic, Old Norse and Old English all used “hw” (w becoming v is a common change). So we can say the word for “when” in Language A was probably something like “hwan”. That was fun!
What we just did was something linguists do all the time. It’s called “comparative reconstruction”. You gather as much information you can about all the words in the group and adding to it knowledge about how languages change (like knowing the the “v” in “hvenir” was probably a “w” at some earlier point) you can make very reasoned guesses as to an unwritten past.
It is fascinating what we can do with a bit of resources and some effort. I called it Language A just so I could make my own example but it’s not what linguist call it. It is known in linguistics as Proto-Germanic. A ton of work has been done on Proto-Germanic and linguists have reconstructed a lot of words. What’s super cool is you can then go from the Proto-Germanic form and move forward and see how well your guess meets the evidence. If Proto-Germanic has a sound in one place and that sound doesn’t show up in a descendant language then it may be a clue that a descendant language did something different with that sound.
Languages are wild and wonderful and sometimes strange things happen. But they are not as random as we might previously have thought. Thanks for reading
