Linguist Gareth Roberts joins WIRED to answer the internet's burning questions about the etymologies of English words. How did the first languages first form? Was there once a single common language that all the others evolved from? When were swear words invented? Have words like "dude" and "bro" become gender neutral? Who came up with the word poop? Is "unalived" a real word now? Answers to all of these questions and plenty more await on Etymology Support.
Director: Anna O'Donohue
Director of Photography: Caleb Weiss
Editor: Richard Trammell
Expert: Gareth Roberts
Line Producer: Joseph Buscemi
Associate Producer: Brandon White
Production Manager: Peter Brunette
Production Coordinator: Rhyan Lark
Casting Producer: Nicholas Sawyer
Camera Operator: Christopher Eustache
Sound Mixer: Sean Paulsen
Production Assistant: Sonia Butt
Post Production Supervisor: Christian Olguin
Post Production Coordinator: Ian Bryant
Supervising Editor: Doug Larsen
Additional Editor: Paul Tael; Jason Malizia
Assistant Editor: Andy Morell
Director: Anna O'Donohue
Director of Photography: Caleb Weiss
Editor: Richard Trammell
Expert: Gareth Roberts
Line Producer: Joseph Buscemi
Associate Producer: Brandon White
Production Manager: Peter Brunette
Production Coordinator: Rhyan Lark
Casting Producer: Nicholas Sawyer
Camera Operator: Christopher Eustache
Sound Mixer: Sean Paulsen
Production Assistant: Sonia Butt
Post Production Supervisor: Christian Olguin
Post Production Coordinator: Ian Bryant
Supervising Editor: Doug Larsen
Additional Editor: Paul Tael; Jason Malizia
Assistant Editor: Andy Morell
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TechTranscript
00:00I'm linguist Gareth Roberts.
00:01Let's answer your questions from the internet about the history of English words.
00:05This is Etymology Support.
00:06Shadesy Gigi asks,
00:13Is anyone else as fascinated by etymology, the origin of words and the historical development
00:17of its meaning as me?
00:18Or am I just a sad old man?
00:21How very dare you.
00:22If you are, it's not because of loving etymology.
00:24It's a kind of offshoot of historical linguistics.
00:28The study of language over time, how it changes, and it's really fascinating because it lets
00:33us lift up the lid off the simple words we use.
00:37Take the word gossip.
00:38A godsib was originally someone who had a godfather or godmother relationship with you.
00:43They were related to you by those means.
00:45They would be people you might confide in, you might share social, personal information
00:50in.
00:51And so from there we get the word gossip as a person who shares gossip.
00:55From there we get the verb gossip.
00:58And this would have been in the Old English period that god and sib would have come together
01:01to form the word gossip.
01:03Lunaris says,
01:08This is actually quite common, words becoming less or more gender neutral.
01:13So we can think of the word bro, bro comes from brother, but then maybe they use it in
01:18a way that just includes friends.
01:21Maybe a woman uses it to refer to a female friend and suddenly it doesn't have that gendering
01:25anymore.
01:26But sometimes the same thing happens in reverse.
01:29In Old English, the word man was a general word for people.
01:33The word for man as in male was wer.
01:36Wer really only survives in English in the word werewolf.
01:39Man has taken its place because this was a society where men were the default people.
01:45And if you refer to a default person, they tended to be male.
01:48Man ended up being associated in particular with males.
01:51The Old English word for man is also related to the word world.
01:56The word world in Proto-Germanic comes from word meaning man and word alt meaning age.
02:03Age of man.
02:04This gives us some insight into how Germanic speakers saw themselves and their universe.
02:08There's another word in this area which has an interesting history.
02:11That's the word guy.
02:12So guy actually comes from the name of Guy Fawkes, who was captured in the Gunpowder
02:16Plot and executed horribly.
02:19And every year after that in Britain, people celebrated catching and killing him by burning
02:24effigies of him on a big bonfire.
02:26And these effigies were known as guys.
02:29Kids would go around asking for a penny for the guy.
02:32People sometimes started using this to refer to someone who was disheveled, a sort of grotesque
02:37looking human, a sort of insulting term for a man.
02:39Might call him a guy.
02:40And in America, interestingly, around the same kind of period, you get examples of people
02:45using the word just to refer to man generically.
02:47LiftedNGifted0 asks, who the f*** came up with the silent letter?
02:51English spelling is weird.
02:53We did update the word knight or gnor.
02:56Once upon a time, people genuinely did pronounce the K at the start of knight.
03:00They'd say knicht or they would pronounce the G at the start of gnor.
03:04They'd say gnor.
03:05Over time in English, these things changed.
03:07People stopped pronouncing those, but we didn't update the spelling.
03:10We actually did used to say Walder and Scholder, the ancestors of wood and should.
03:15We stopped pronouncing those L's, but we kept the L's in.
03:18But could never actually have the L in the first place.
03:21We just added that L because we wanted to make it match up with wood and should.
03:25And we find this kind of thing also happening quite a lot with words that have been borrowed
03:29into the language.
03:30There was no B in the word doubt, either in English or in French.
03:33But the word came ultimately from the Latin word dubitare, which has a B.
03:37So at some point in the Middle Ages, both French and English strived and decided that
03:43perhaps we should put the B back in.
03:45Genesivi, someone just used the word unalived on BBC News.
03:49The news!
03:50Someone turned to me and was like, I didn't know that was a word.
03:53This is one of those places where you have an effect of taboos.
03:57You have a taboo which is actually, if you like, implemented via social media.
04:01And so we end up trying to skirt around the words we're not meant to use and come up with
04:06words like unalived.
04:07And this happens quite a lot.
04:09We think, for instance, that the reason the English word bear isn't cognate with the word
04:14for bear in Latin or Welsh or Greek is that people didn't want to refer to bears because
04:20it felt to them perhaps as if they might invoke the horror of this big scary creature in using
04:25the word.
04:26So you'd expect modern English word for bear to be cognate with the French word rousse,
04:32which comes from this Proto-Indo-European word, pronounced something like rodus.
04:36Instead, bear seems to trace back to ber in Proto-Indo-European, meaning brown.
04:43This is not the only theory.
04:44There are some other theories about where the modern English word bear comes from.
04:47But we know for sure it does not come from the same place as most of the other Indo-European
04:52languages got their words bear from.
04:54X.
04:55N.
04:56D.
04:57Lu.
04:58Reading about Grimm's Law for the nth time and I still ain't understanding s***.
05:00So Grimm's Law refers to a set of sound changes which happened to occur in the Germanic languages
05:05like English millennia ago in the emergence of Proto-Germanic from Proto-Indo-European.
05:10P became F in the Germanic languages.
05:13Ka became ha.
05:15For example, here are some words in English.
05:18Fish.
05:19Father.
05:20Hound.
05:21Head.
05:22And their cognates in Latin.
05:23Piscis.
05:24Patad.
05:25Canis.
05:26Caput.
05:27The Ps in Latin correspond to Fs in English and the Cs in Latin correspond to Hs in English.
05:34You can get an idea about how certain changes happen by imagining pronouncing the same sound
05:40over and over again.
05:41Puh.
05:42Puh.
05:43Puh.
05:44Puh.
05:45Puh.
05:46Puh.
05:47Puh.
05:48Puh.
05:49And you might notice if you do this a lot that the P maybe slips slightly and you end
05:50up rather than with a Puh sound with a Fuh sound.
05:51This is essentially what happened in the history of the Germanic languages.
05:55Lights for Fit F says it sits there and I can't stop thinking about how swear words
05:59are invented.
06:00Like who said the word f*** one day and decided it was forbidden?
06:02There's a whole bunch of things that people don't really like talking about.
06:07Sex is one of these things.
06:08Defecation is another.
06:10We sometimes feel odd talking about death and very often we'll introduce a euphemism.
06:16For example at some point people didn't want to use whatever word they had the time
06:21to refer to urination so they started imitating the sound that people make when they urinate
06:26Psss.
06:27And that's the origin of the word piss in Latin, pisciare.
06:31More recently the word piss itself stopped feeling so euphemistic so we ended up using
06:37the word P simply by taking the first letter of piss and using that to refer to urination.
06:42Similar to F for f***, F off.
06:44Tonya MJ underscore writes, you'll just be making up words, yes quite literally that's
06:49what we did as humans to create language or do you think a man in the sky just dropped
06:52the Oxford English Dictionary on a Neanderthal on his way back to his cave?
06:56Yes.
06:57We make up words all the time.
06:59What's interesting though is we very rarely make up words from nothing.
07:04Let's say you have a pet frog and you make a house for your pet frog.
07:10You're unlikely to invent a completely new word for that, you'll probably just call it
07:13a frog house.
07:14You'll take the words frog and house and combine them and make a new word.
07:17The other thing people sometimes do is they will use iconic forms to refer to something
07:24when they don't think they have enough in common with the person they're talking to
07:28for an existing word to work.
07:29For example, let's imagine you're trying to convey to someone who doesn't speak your
07:33language that you want cow's milk.
07:37Maybe what you'll do is mime milk your cow, you'll go glub glub glub glub moo.
07:44What you've done there is created an iconic form and maybe you'll meet this person multiple
07:49times in the future and you probably won't go through the whole charade every time of
07:53glub glub glub moo.
07:55Maybe the next time you meet them you'll say something like glub moo.
07:59And that is not dissimilar from what's happened many times in the history of language.
08:04Another example, the word but in English originally meant outside.
08:09Outside implies physical separation.
08:11It implies that something is not within the other thing.
08:14It's a short step from there to meaning without.
08:17You have something without the other thing because that thing is now outside it.
08:21That's shifted to be used in an abstract sense to mean accept.
08:26Everything except that tree, everything except this book.
08:30And over time this meaning of without or accept shifted even further to mean but, to make
08:36a contrast between two parts of a sentence.
08:38BLVTRSE underscore.
08:40One thing that fascinates me about the human experience is the development of language.
08:44Like how did each language form?
08:46Was there one common language at one point?
08:48Mind-blowing.
08:49Languages have quite likely been around for at least a hundred thousand years if not hundreds
08:54of thousands of years.
08:55We actually don't know whether all vocal languages have one common ancestor.
09:00They could have arisen all in one place and then spread out.
09:04Or it could be that actually languages arose in different places.
09:07Most European languages and a number of Asian languages do belong to the same family.
09:11They have the same common ancestor, which for convenience we call Proto-Indo-European.
09:16So Proto-Indo-European would have been spoken around 6,000 years ago.
09:21The people who spoke it were quite possibly nomadic pastoralists.
09:26They lived in the Pontic-Caspian steppe, a bit north of the Black Sea, around where part
09:31of modern Ukraine and southern Russia are.
09:32Based on what we can infer from the words they had for things, we can trace back words
09:37for different dairy products, for cows.
09:40We can trace back words for wheels, for wagons, for houses, for doors with roofs and pegs
09:46to hold the doors closed.
09:48So we can reconstruct an image of how Proto-Indo-European speakers lived, with implications that perhaps
09:54they led a somewhat nomadic pastoral existence.
09:58And this is a language which has a number of modern descendants.
10:02We can put these languages on a language tree like this.
10:05And for instance, we can imagine that this is the Germanic branch here.
10:09And then we have languages like Dutch, Frisian, English branching out of this.
10:15These languages then are going to be related to each other and ultimately related to other
10:19languages in the same tree.
10:20In this case, the Indo-European language family, we have languages like French, Italian, the
10:27Romance languages, Celtic languages like Welsh and Irish.
10:31We have Slavic languages like Russian and Polish, languages like Hindi, like Persian,
10:38and so on.
10:39Words in these languages which come from a common root would be cognates.
10:42That is, they share an ancestor.
10:45Let's take a word like English father.
10:47We can actually compare the words father and father in the Germanic branch with other words
10:52in other Indo-European languages like the Latin word pater.
10:56And if we compare these, we find they also sound kind of potentially similar.
10:59And we can trace these words back.
11:01The asterisk here indicates that this is not a word we've ever actually seen.
11:05This is reconstructed.
11:06So 6,000 years ago, people were calling their fathers something which sounds eerily similar
11:14to the modern word father.
11:16This root also turns up in other places.
11:18If you take the name of the Roman god Jupiter, that pitter-pitt is from the same place, means
11:23father.
11:24The first part comes from a word meaning day or sky.
11:27So what we have is deus pater, sky father, people essentially worshipping the sun and
11:33the sky.
11:34And this we see all through Indo-European languages too.
11:37We can trace back the Indo-European languages to Proto-Indo-European, we can trace back
11:42the Afro-Asiatic languages to Proto-Afro-Asiatic, which will take us back about 17,000 years
11:48roughly.
11:49But we can't, unfortunately, go back and trace common ancestors for these language
11:55families, these reconstructed languages, because the noise-to-signal ratio gets too high.
12:00We can no longer feel confident about our reconstructions.
12:03So sarcasm.
12:05Language was first developed 100,000 years ago.
12:07People before that...
12:10So what were people doing before language came about?
12:13Part of the story is that while language is quite specific to humans, communication is
12:18everywhere.
12:19Before there was language, human beings were communicating.
12:22We were making sounds, we were using gestures.
12:24We even see this now in other primate species like chimps.
12:28We evolved to be able to do things like complex syntax, rules and constraints that organize
12:34words into sentences, complex meanings.
12:37So imagine that you're speaking a language 10,000 years ago, and you've just encountered
12:43an animal which has claws, little ears, and it makes a sort of meow sound.
12:48And you want to tell someone about this animal.
12:51You don't have a word for it.
12:52No one has ever named this animal that you've ever heard before.
12:55What are you going to call it?
12:56Well, there's a good chance you might call it something like a meow, or a mew, or something
13:01along those lines.
13:02In fact, if you look at the word for cat in the ancient Egyptian language, you actually
13:07find that the word for cat looks quite a lot like the word mew.
13:11Instances of this in modern vocal languages as well, onomatopoeia of course, we have words
13:15like bang, which sounds a bit like a bang.
13:18Animal noises, woof, woof, woof, meow, they resemble the actual sounds that the animals
13:22make.
13:23Words like dada and mama and papa, these are based on the babbling sounds that babies make.
13:31So babies go through a stage where they start babbling.
13:34We parents tend to be fairly self-centered people.
13:36We like to assume that our babies are talking about us.
13:39So this is almost certainly where the Proto-Indo-European word pater came from, meaning father.
13:44It would have started off as something like papa.
13:46And these words keep getting reinvented.
13:48So we end up in English with a word like father, but then we also listen to our babies babbling
13:54and we reintroduce words like dada and daddy.
13:57All over the world, these mama, papa, dada words keep getting reintroduced as parents
14:03listen to their babies babbling.
14:04Clive Dirdle asks, where did the word orange come from?
14:07The word orange came into English from French, and French got it from Spanish, which got
14:14it from Arabic, which got it from Sanskrit, and so on.
14:17What's interesting here is the Spanish word is naranja, starting with an N.
14:20The N became associated with the indefinite article.
14:23So it's like, instead of saying an orange, you reinterpret that as an orange.
14:30And this actually happened a few times in the history of words.
14:32So apron originally was napron, reinterpreted as an apron.
14:37And the old English word for snake, nadr, was reinterpreted as an adder.
14:42So sometimes mistakes can give birth to new forms of words.
14:45Shaylee says, shout out to the guy who invented the word poop.
14:49That shit is deadass.
14:50Poop for real.
14:51The word poop actually probably meant something more like fart originally.
14:55So it seems to be onomatopoeic, poo, with a meaning similar to puff.
14:59That is, it represents the sound made by a puff of air.
15:02So it probably meant something a bit like fart, and then started to be used euphemistically
15:05to refer to other things that come out of your butt.
15:07Critical Stressy asks, why do Americans say fall when autumn was a perfectly good word
15:11for the season?
15:12Neither fall nor autumn was actually the original English word.
15:16Fall seems to be first recorded at some point in the 16th century in English to refer to
15:21autumn.
15:22But before that, English speakers actually referred to autumn as harvest.
15:26This is cognate with the words in other Germanic languages like German herbst, meaning autumn.
15:31In England, that got quite specific, referring to the gathering of the crops in the autumn.
15:37So in the 16th century, both fall and autumn were being used to some extent in Britain
15:42to refer to the season.
15:44Fall, the fall of the leaves, comes from the old English word fall.
15:49Insane artist demure was a good word until everyone started using it.
15:57Good question.
15:58Very mindful.
15:59The word demure has actually been around since Middle English, and probably comes from French
16:04mûre, meaning mature.
16:06It's actually cognate with the word mature.
16:08We don't actually know where the de part comes from.
16:12No French word demure as far as we're aware.
16:15But recently it's got kind of popular on TikTok, and people have been using the phrase
16:20very demure, very mindful, to refer to a whole bunch of things.
16:23And I think this is an example of how people love to have fun with language.
16:26People like to be ironic.
16:27They like to use words like wicked to mean good, using expressions that get a good reaction
16:33from people.
16:34Ali Padrino.
16:35Dude, I'm deaf getting old.
16:36What is this new slang these kids got?
16:38What's the YNS era?
16:40What the f*** is FOMO?
16:42Why are you all typing CS for cuz or TS for that s***?
16:45I'm so lost.
16:46I think this is something which happens every single generation.
16:50This is likely something which has happened since language has existed.
16:53And I think this is two-sided.
16:55Kids on the one hand don't want to sound like their parents or their parents' generation.
17:01Slang words don't tend to come down to us in the written records of ancient languages,
17:08mainly because those tend to be formal writing and slang words tend not to get written down
17:12in formal writing very often.
17:14You do see slang words sometimes written in ancient graffiti, often satchel slang, things
17:20like that.
17:21But we also get hints of other kinds of slang surviving into modern languages as ordinary
17:27words, in the same kind of way as cool, which at one point was basically a slang word.
17:32The Latin word for head, if you look it up in the Latin dictionary, is caput.
17:36This is actually cognate with the English word head.
17:40But if you look at the modern Romance languages, you don't find the word caput meaning head.
17:44You find words like testa in Italian.
17:47At some point, people started using the word testa, which originally meant pot or potsherd,
17:52to refer to skulls, and from then to use this word, which had come to mean skull, to refer
17:57to people's heads.
17:59Kaylee Jadar, who invented the word no?
18:02We don't know.
18:03No goes back, ultimately, to Proto-Indo-European.
18:07The English word no is actually a shortening of none, which comes from ne'an, meaning
18:11not one.
18:12And the ne' part is actually very similar to its Proto-Indo-European ancestor, ne',
18:16and that survives in lots of modern Indo-European languages.
18:19We don't know what the origin is of this word, but one possibility that's been suggested
18:23is it actually goes back to the kind of face that maybe babies make when they refuse something,
18:29the nuh face.
18:31Hot girl Mara says, I'm starving to death.
18:34I'm dying and my girlfriend won't choose a restaurant because she's too busy telling
18:38me about the great vowel shift.
18:39I really sympathize.
18:40You should never do linguistics on an empty stomach.
18:42But the great vowel shift is really interesting.
18:45To understand it, it helps to understand a bit about what vowels are and how they work.
18:49This is a model of the human votal tract, the mouth at this end, tongue here.
18:56We have the larynx here.
18:58We push air up from the lungs through the larynx and then we shape our votal tract by
19:04moving our lips and tongue and teeth.
19:07Now linguists are very used to working with a schematic diagram of this tract when we
19:13talk about vowels.
19:14In the late 14th century, people started to pronounce these vowels differently.
19:19Where bet was pronounced originally with the tongue at the sort of mid front part of the
19:25mouth.
19:26People started moving it further up and closer to the top front of the mouth.
19:30It started sounding more like beet.
19:32And this vowel actually became more of a diphthong, a combination of two vowel sounds, ie, and
19:39we end up with beet and bite.
19:42Similarly, bought became bought and bought became boot and boot became bout.
19:49Mars Catland says, Shakespeare just misspelled it and made words up and hoped motherfuckers
19:54would cope with it.
19:55And they did.
19:56Shakespeare did not invent anywhere near as many words as people think.
20:00Other writers of the same period actually had similar or even larger vocabularies.
20:05Lots and lots of people who were contributing dictionary entries had copies of Shakespeare.
20:09Shakespeare was the first place they found many instances of some of these words.
20:13He might in many cases have been the first person who wrote some of these words down,
20:17but that doesn't mean that he invented them.
20:18He came up with many fantastic turns of phrase like one fell swoop.
20:23Other words like mockable, for instance, might be the chase for the first person to use the
20:28word mockable.
20:29These are productive morphemes of language that are quite easy to combine.
20:32Omeilantis asks, why did we stop saying thee and thou?
20:36Like I'm honestly not sure how to use them in a sentence.
20:39It's actually kind of interesting that English stopped using thee and thou because their
20:44cognates like French to Russian to stayed around in those languages.
20:49So thee and thou were originally second person singular.
20:53You when you're referring to just one person.
20:56You was originally the plural form.
20:58But around the early medieval period, people started to use you for singulars as well.
21:08This started in Latin.
21:09You had tu and vos, tu being the singular you, vos being plural you.
21:15But people started using vos also when they were talking to one person, but they wanted
21:20to be respectful to them.
21:21Some people have suggested that this was because there were two emperors.
21:23There was the emperor in Rome, emperor in Constantinople.
21:26There were these two centers of the Roman Empire for a while.
21:30It's also possible that people just considered that the word for more people was somehow
21:34the more respectful form.
21:35Around the 17th century, somewhat abruptly, people, especially the southeast of England,
21:41started to drop thou and thee.
21:43Also around this time, you had certain religious groups like the Quakers using thou and thee
21:48for everyone.
21:49And this was not necessarily very popular.
21:52So people might have wanted to distance themselves from that usage.
21:55Softplay band says, word is a word invented, call words words.
21:58Word?
21:59Weird.
22:00Yeah, it is kind of weird.
22:01The English word word comes from an Indo-European root, in fact, originally meaning speech with
22:08an ending on it, which really meant something like put.
22:10And this was used to indicate completed action.
22:13So word means something like spoken.
22:15It's something that has been spoken.
22:17BenjaminST25020 asked, who invented the word pregnant, because that's such a weird word
22:23to just come up with.
22:24Well, actually, this one turns out to be quite simple.
22:26The pre-bit in pregnant, as in prepare and lots of other words, just means before.
22:30The nant bit comes from a word nasty, meaning give birth.
22:35So being pregnant is the state you're in before you give birth.
22:39Nasty is actually a cognate with words like genesis and generate.
22:43Actually, it turns out there are more interesting words than being pregnant.
22:46Take, for example, the Spanish word embarazado.
22:49This is clearly related to the English word embarrassed.
22:51It comes originally from an Arabic word, maraza, meaning rope.
22:56This was brought into Portuguese and then into Spanish as baraza, and gave birth to
23:01a word meaning entangled.
23:03This is a concrete word originally referring to people being entangled in a rope, but it
23:07came quite rapidly to refer to a more abstract sense of being entangled or inconvenienced,
23:12which is where we get the word embarrassed, ultimately.
23:14This entangled, inconvenienced meaning was used as a euphemism for pregnant, hence the
23:21Spanish word embarazado.
23:23Dewey Wrights says, something that always fascinates me.
23:26We don't know where the word dog comes from.
23:29It just appeared in late medieval English from no apparent root word.
23:32This is actually a mystery in etymology.
23:34We might have expected the word hound in modern English to be the usual word for dog.
23:38Instead, hound became more specialised, and the general word for dog is dog.
23:42And we don't quite know where it comes from.
23:44But dog is actually one of a set of words, along with pig, hog, frog, all ending in G
23:50in modern English, which in Old English seemed to have had this CGA ending, so dotka, frotka,
23:56hotka, pikka.
23:58This is a little bit mysterious.
23:59We don't quite know where this came in.
24:01And these are words which we don't see recorded all that often in writing.
24:05What most likely happened is that these were kind of cute, expressive words that were maybe
24:11used in the nursery, or when people wanted to talk in a cute way about dogs.
24:15And so they didn't tend to end up in formal writing.
24:17When people use the word doggo now, they might be taking the word dog back to its origins.
24:23So that's all the questions.
24:24Thanks for listening.
24:25This has been Etymology Support.