The Story of English in 100 Words (8 page)

Brock
feels so English – so it comes as a bit of a surprise to discover that it isn’t Anglo-Saxon at all. It’s Celtic. We find it in Irish, Scottish Gaelic and Manx as
broc
, in Welsh and Cornish as
broch
, in Breton as
broc’h
. The animal goes under a quite different name in the Germanic languages, such as
grævling
in Danish and
Dachs
in German (dachsunds were bred to be badger hounds). It didn’t come over with the Anglo-Saxons. That’s what makes it linguistically interesting. It’s one of the very few words to have come into Old English from the Celtic language spoken by the ancient Britons.

Hardly any Old English words have a clear Celtic connection. There are a large number of place-names in England of definite Celtic origin, such as
Avon
,
Exe
and
Severn
, and all the names beginning with
pen
(‘hill’), such as
Penzance
and
Penrith
. But if we restrict the search to everyday words, in addition to
brock
, we find
crag
,
wan
,
dun
(‘grey-brown’),
bannock
(‘piece of a loaf or cake’) and a dozen or so others. A few more might have had a Celtic origin, such as
puck
(‘malicious spirit’) and
crock
(‘pot’), but similar-looking words appear in the Scandinavian languages, so we can’t be sure.

Why did the Anglo-Saxons ignore the Celtic words they would have heard all around them? There are many conflicting explanations. Perhaps the two ways of life were so similar that the Anglo-Saxons already had all the words they needed. Or perhaps there was so little in common between the Celtic way of life as it had developed in Roman Britain and the Anglo-Saxon way of life as it had developed on the continent that there was no motivation to borrow Celtic words. There might even have been a conscious avoidance of them. If the Celts were forced out of England by the invaders, as some people believe, then one of the consequences would be a distaste for all things Celtic, especially the language. On the other hand, some Anglo-Saxon noblemen gave their children British names, such as Cerdic and Cedd. Cædwalla, for instance, was king of Wessex in 685, according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and his is a distinctly Welsh name.

Whatever the reasons, Celtic words are conspicuous by their absence in Old English.
Brock
,
crag
and the others remain as an intriguing reminder of what might have been.

English

the language named (10th century)

Much of what we know about the early history of Britain comes from
The Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation
, written in Latin around 730 by the Northumbrian monk Bede. He tells us how, in the 5th century, ‘three of the most powerful nations of Germany – Saxons, Angles and Jutes’, arrived in the British Isles. It isn’t possible to say exactly where they came from, or even whether they were as nationally distinct from each other as Bede suggests. But one thing is clear: two of those nations gave us the name
Anglo-Saxon
.

It’s first found in 8th-century Latin writers, who used the phrase
Angli Saxones
to mean the ‘English Saxons’ (of Britain) as opposed to the ‘Old Saxons’ (of the continent). The
Angli
part was the important bit, in their mind. It was the crucial, contrastive element – the
English
Saxons, as opposed to other kinds. Only later did the phrase come to mean the combined Germanic people of Britain.

In the 9th century, the name broadened its meaning. In the Treaty of Wedmore, made between King Alfred and the Danish leader Guthrum around the year 880, we see
English
opposed to
Danish
, and it plainly refers to all of the non-Danish population, not just the Angles. Also, at around the same time,
English
is used for the language. When Bede’s book was translated into Old English, we find several passages which take a Latin name, and then say ‘… this place is called in English …’, giving the English equivalent.

English
came first;
England
came later. It took over a century before we find the phrase
Engla lande
referring to the whole country. There was then a long period of varied usage, and we find such forms as
Engle land
,
Englene londe
,
Engle lond
,
Engelond
and
Ingland
. The spelling
England
emerged in the 14th century, and soon after became established as the norm.

4. This scribe at work is probably Bede. The picture is in a 12th-century book from the north-east of England,
The Life and Miracles of St Cuthburt.

Some strange things happened to
English
as the centuries passed. As the language spread to other countries, such as the USA, Australia and South Africa, people started talking about American English, Australian English and so on. This meant that, whenever anyone wanted to talk about the language as it was used in England (as opposed to Britain), they had to use the curious repeated form:
English English
. And since the early 20th century the word has had a plural,
Englishes
, referring to the kind of English used in a particular region of the world. People talk of the
new Englishes
developing in such countries as Singapore and Nigeria – dialects of English, but on a grand scale.

Anything associated with England attracted the adjective. In the 15th and 16th centuries, an often fatal sweating sickness (probably a type of influenza) was called the
English sweat
. In the 18th century, foreigners would describe people who were feeling especially low or depressed as having the
English malady
or
melancholy
. At roughly the same time, we see the emergence of the
English breakfast
– a substantial meal consisting of hot cooked food, such as bacon, eggs, sausages and suchlike. It was the contrast with the
rest of Europe which was being noted: they just had
continental breakfasts
. And a similar contrast appeared during the 19th century: an
English Sunday,
with everything closed, was contrasted with a
continental Sunday
. In the USA, an interesting use developed in billiards and pool when a player hits a ball on one side so that it spins, affecting the way it bounces off another ball. It must have been an originally British technique, because the idiom is
put English on the ball
.

People never seemed quite sure how to handle the word
English
. In the 17th century, translating something into the language was said to
Englify
or
Anglify
it. In the early 18th century it was
Anglicised
– a usage that evidently didn’t please everyone, for later in the century we find both
Englishified
and
Englishised
. Today it seems to have settled down as
Anglicise
, but there’s still some variation in usage.

Anglo-
and its derivatives have come to dominate, but there’s still some room in the language for
Saxon
. Celtic speakers sometimes refer to English people as
Saxons
and their language as
Saxon
, and the word is hidden within the Scots Gaelic (usually) jocular term
Sassenach
. Words in English that are of Germanic origin (as opposed to those from Latin and the Romance languages) are often called
Saxon
words. So there’s some life in the old word yet.

Bridegroom

a popular etymology (11th century)

What has a man about to be married got to do with someone who looks after horses? People have come up with some crazy explanations. Perhaps, in a male-dominated society, the man was thought to be ‘grooming’ his bride, or giving her the value of a horse? Or perhaps, more romantically, he was going to carry her off on his horse? The truth is less exciting, but linguistically more illuminating.

The word for a man about to be married, or just married, is first found in an Anglo-Saxon version of the Gospel of St John, but it turns up in an unfamiliar form:
brydguma
. This is a compound of
bride
and
guma
, which was a somewhat poetic Old English word for ‘man’. Half a millennium later, in William Tyndale’s translation of the same Gospel, it appears as
brydegrome
. Why the change?

During the Middle English period, the word
guma
fell out of use. Probably most people never used it at all, for the recorded instances are all very literary. It must have been an odd experience, hearing the word
brideguma
when someone got married. Everyone knew what
bride
meant, but
guma
was a mystery.

And so people, unconsciously, turned it into something more familiar. The change seems to have taken over a century. The latest example of
brideguma
– spelled
bredgome
– recorded in the
Oxford English
Dictionary
is 1340; the earliest example of
bridegroom
– spelled
brydegrome
– is 1526.

Why did people replace
gome
with
groom
? Because the sound and the meaning of the two words were very close. When
groom
first arrived in English, in the 13th century, it meant simply ‘man-child’, ‘boy’. It then broadened its meaning to apply to adults, and soon seems to have been restricted to a particular kind of adult male – someone who had an inferior position in a household. By the 16th century, this sense of ‘servant’ had narrowed further to mean an attendant who looks after horses, and this is the primary sense today – though the older use is still seen in the titles of some members of the British royal household, such as
Groom of the Chamber
.

So, at the end of the Middle English period, when
guma
was disappearing,
groom
, meaning ‘man’, would have been a natural replacement. And thus we have the modern form, which basically means nothing more than ‘bride’s man’.

The history of English has many examples of this kind of development – what is called ‘popular’ or ‘folk’ etymology. When people encounter an unfamiliar word, they often try to make sense of it by relating it to a word they already know. And if enough people make the same guess, the new formation can become part of the language. We see popular etymology operating again when we
button-hole
people: we’ve quite forgotten that originally what we were doing was ‘button-holding’ them. And it’s there when we jocularly call
asparagus
‘sparrow-grass’.

Arse