Linguist Answers Word Origin Questions | Tech Support | WIRED

Summary

In a fascinating video, linguist Gareth Roberts dives into the intriguing world of etymology, answering a range of internet-posed queries about the history and evolution of the English language. Roberts explains the roots of words like "gossip," originally a godparent relationship term, and "guy," which derives from Guy Fawkes' effigies. The video covers how some words undergo gender-neutral transformations and explores the whimsical creation of new words or euphemisms. Audience members learn why silent letters linger and how Proto-Indo-European languages have shaped modern vocabulary. Roberts also touches on language history, the Great Vowel Shift, and how slang evolves across generations. Overall, the video offers an engaging tour of linguistic curiosities and transformations through history.

Highlights

• Discover the history behind the word 'gossip,' which originally referred to godparent connections. 🤯
• Explore how the word 'guy' stemmed from Guy Fawkes and came to represent men generically in America. 🇺🇸
• Find out how silent letters like 'k' in 'knight' are leftovers from old pronunciations. 🤓
• Understand how words such as 'man' and 'bro' have transitioned towards gender neutrality. 🌈
• Learn why words like 'no' have origins in simple gestures or facial expressions, like a baby’s refusal gesture. 🚼
• See how language evolves with cultural taboos, like using 'unalive' as a euphemism. 💬
• Uncover how euphemistic words for everyday activities, such as 'pee,' came into use. 🚻
• Witness the continuous transformation of slang across generations, from 'caput' to 'head' to modern uses. 🕶️
• Experience the linguistic intricacies of the Great Vowel Shift in shaping contemporary English. 🎙️

Key Takeaways

• Etymology is a captivating offshoot of historical linguistics, revealing the evolution of words over time. 🔍
• Words like 'gossip' and 'guy' have fascinating historical origins linked to social contexts and historical figures. 🤔
• The linguistic journey shows how words can become gender-neutral over time, reflecting broader societal changes. 🌍
• Words often evolve from iconic forms or euphemisms, shaped by cultural and social influences. 🌀
• Silent letters in English are remnants from past pronunciations, showcasing the language's complex history. 🗣️
• Slang words constantly evolve, highlighting each generation's desire to differentiate from the last. 😎
• Languages have likely been around for 100,000 years, with Proto-Indo-European serving as a common ancestor for many. 🕰️
• The Great Vowel Shift drastically changed English pronunciation, impacting modern language sounds. 🎭
• Mistakes in language, like the evolution of the word 'orange,' contribute to the diversity we enjoy today. 🍊

Overview

Ever wondered about the story behind common English words? Linguist Gareth Roberts has got you covered with a captivating dive into etymology! From the mysterious origins of words like 'gossip' and 'guy' to the fascinating journey of slang evolving through generations, this video sheds light on the captivating twists and turns of language history.

Words don't just appear out of thin air—they're shaped by decades of social influence and cultural quirks. Whether you're curious about how 'bro' became gender-neutral or why certain silent letters exist, Gareth Roberts delivers insightful and fun explanations. Even prepared with a side of historical curiosity, the viewer will learn about the impact of past linguistic shifts like the Great Vowel Shift.

Beyond uncovering origins, Roberts draws out the remarkable diversity in language evolution, such as how mistakes benefit our vocabulary or how euphemisms cater to cultural taboos. This linguistic joyride proves just how dynamic our communication systems are, showing that what might seem static is, in fact, a flowing river of human connection!

Linguist Answers Word Origin Questions | Tech Support | WIRED Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 I'm linguist Gareth Roberts let's answer your questions from the internet about the history of English words this is atmology [Music] support shc G asks is anyone else that's fascinated by atmology the origin of words and the soral development of its meaning is me or am I just a sad old man how very dare you if you are it's not because of loving atmology it's a kind of offshoot of hisorical linguistics a study of language over time how it
• 00:30 - 01:00 changes and it's really fascinating because it lets us lift up the lid of the simple words we use take the word gossip a godb was originally someone who had a s godfa or godmother relationship with you they were related to you by those means 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 from there we get the verb gossip and this would have been in the Old English period that God and S
• 01:00 - 01:30 would have come together to form the word gossip lunaris says dude and bro a gender neutral terms thoughts this is actually quite common words becoming less or more gender neutral so we can think of the word bro bro comes from brother 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
• 01:30 - 02:00 the word man was a general word for people the word for man as a male was where where 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 protog Germanic comes from
• 02:00 - 02:30 meaning man and word Al meaning age age of man this gives us some insight into how Germanic spechers saw themselves in their Universe there's another word in this area which has an interesting history that's the word guy so guy actually comes with the name of guy Forks 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 effes of him on a big bonfire and these effes were known as guys kids would go around asking for a penny for
• 02:30 - 03:00 the guy people sometimes started using this to refer to someone who was disheveled a sort grotesque looking human a sort of insulting term for a man might call him a guy and in America interestingly around the same kind of period you get examples of people using the word just to refer to man generically lifted and gifted zero asks who the came up with a silent letter English spelling is weird take the word uh Knight or no Once Upon a Time people genuinely did pronounce the k at the start of Knight they'd say k or they
• 03:00 - 03:30 would pronounce a g at the start of no they'd say gor over time in English these things change people stop pronouncing those but we didn't update the spelling we actually did used to say Walder and shoulder the ancestors of would and should we stopped pronouncing those L's but we kept the L's in but could never actually had the L in the first place we just added that L because we wanted to make it match up with w 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
• 03:30 - 04:00 doubt either in English or in French but the word came ultimately from the Latin word duare which has a b so at some point in the Middle Ages both French and English strive society that perhaps we should put the B back in genivi someone just used the word unived on BBC news the news and my dad turned to me was like I didn't know that was a word this is one of those places where you have an effective taboos you have a taboo which is actually if like implemented by
• 04:00 - 04:30 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 un alived and this happens quite a lot we think for instance that uh the reason the English word bear isn't cinate 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 cordinate
• 04:30 - 05:00 with the French word which comes from this Proto European word pronounced Something Like H instead bear seems to trace back to be in prot European meaning Brown this is not the only Theory there are some other theories about where the Modern English word be comes from but we know for sure it does not come from the same place as most of the other IND European languages got their words be from H ND L read about Grim's law for the ends time and I still ain't understanding so Grim's law refers
• 05:00 - 05:30 to a set of sound changes which happen to occur in the Germanic languages like English Millennia ago in the emergence of protog Germanic from Proto induran P became F in the Germanic languages C became ha for example here are some words in English fish father Hound head and their cognates in Latin piscus ped canis caput the P's in Latin correspond to FS in English and the C's
• 05:30 - 06:00 in Latin correspond to H's in English you can get an idea about how certain changes happen by imagining pronouncing the same sound over and over again p p p p p p and you might notice if you do this a lot that P maybe you slip slightly and you end up rather than with a p sound with a f sound this is essentially what happened in the history of the jity languages lights for fitf says it sits there when I can't stop thinking about how swe words are invented like who said the word one day
• 06:00 - 06:30 and decided it was forbidden there's a whole bunch of things that people don't really like talking about sex is one of these things defecation is another we uh 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 pade more recently
• 06:30 - 07:00 the word piss itself stopped feeling so euphemistic so we ended up using the word p simply by taking the first letter of piss and using that to refer to urination similar to F for f off T MJ andore writes you'll just be making up words yes quite literally that's what we did as humans to Great language or do you think a man in the sky just dropped the OT English dit on on the andal on his way back to his cave yes we make up words all the time what's interesting
• 07:00 - 07:30 though is we very rarely make up words from nothing let's say you have a pet frog and you make a house for your pet frog you're unlikely to invent a completely new word for that you'll probably just call it a frog house you'll take the words frog and house and combine them and make a new word the other thing people sometimes do is they will use iconic forms uh to refer to something when they don't think they have any enough in common with a person they're talking to for an existing word to work for example let's imagine you're
• 07:30 - 08:00 trying to convey to someone who doesn't speak your language that you want cow's milk maybe what you'll do is my milkier cow youo Glo what you've done there is created in iconic form and maybe you'll meet this person multiple times in the future and you probably won't go through the whole shiran every time of Glo Glo moo maybe the next time you meet them you'll say something like Glo moo and then that is
• 08:00 - 08:30 not dissimilar from what's happened many times in the history of language another example the word but in English originally meant outside outside implies physical separation it implies that something is not within the other thing it's a short step from there to meaning without you have something without the other thing because that thing is now outside it that shifted to be used in an abstract sense to mean accept everything except that tree everything except this book B and over time this meaning of
• 08:30 - 09:00 without or accept shifted even further to mean but to make a contrast between two parts of a sentence BL vtrs underscore one thing that fascinates me about The Human Experience is the development of language like how did each language form was there one common language at one point mindblowing languages have quite likely been around for at least 100,000 years of not hundreds of thousands of years we actually don't know whether all vocal languages have one common ancestor they
• 09:00 - 09:30 could have risen all in one place and then spread out or it could be that actually languages arose in different places most European languages and a number of Asian languages do belong to the same family they have the same common ancestor which for convenience we call Proto induran so Proto IND European would have been spoken around 6,000 years ago the people who spoke it were quite possibly nomadic pastoralists they lived in the pontic Caspian step a bit north of the L see around where part of
• 09:30 - 10:00 modern Ukraine and Southern Russia are based on what we can infer from the words they had for things we can trace back words for different dairy products for cows we can trace back words for wheels for wagons for houses for doors with roofs and pegs to hold the doors closed so we Could reconstruct uh an image of how proton European speakers lived um with implications that perhaps they uh led a somewhat nomadic pastoral existence and this is a language which has a number of modern descendants we
• 10:00 - 10:30 can put these languages on a language tree like this and for instance we can imagine that this is the Germanic Branch here and then we have languages like Dutch Fran English branching out of this these languages then are going to be related to each other and ultimately related to other languages in the same Tree in this case the IND European language family we have languages like French Italian the romance languages celed languages like like Welsh and
• 10:30 - 11:00 Irish we have Slavic languages like Russian and polish languages like uh Hindi like Persian and so on words in these languages which come from a common root would be cognates that is they share an ancestor let's take a word like English father we can actually compare the words F and far in the Germanic Branch with other words in other indan languages like the Latin word patter and if we compare these we find they also sound kind of potentially similar and we can trace these words back the asterisk
• 11:00 - 11:30 here indicates that this is not a word we've ever actually seen this is reconstructed so 6,000 years ago people were calling their fathers something which sounds eerily similar to the modern word father this route also turns up in other places if you take the name of the Roman god Jupiter that P bit is from the same place means father the first part comes with a word meaning day or sky so what we have is deos PETA Sky
• 11:30 - 12:00 father people essentially worshiping um the sun and the sky and this we see all through um IND European languages too we can trace back the um induran languages to Proto induran we can trace back the afroasiatic languages to Proto afroasiatic which will take us back about 17,000 years roughly but we can't unfortunately go back and Trace common ancestors for these language families these reconstructed um languages because the noise to signal ratio gets too high
• 12:00 - 12:30 we can no longer feel confident about our reconstructions sagarcasm language was first developed 100,000 years ago people before that so what were people doing before language came about part of the story is that while language is quite specific to humans communication is everywhere before there was language human beings were communicating we were making sounds we were using gestures we even see this now in other primate species like chimps we evolv to be ble to do things like
• 12:30 - 13:00 complex syntax rules and constraints that organize words into sentences complex meanings so imagine that you're speaking a language 10,000 years ago and you've just encountered an animal which has claws little ears and it makes a sort of meow sound and you want to tell someone about this animal you don't have a word for it no one has ever named this animal that you've ever heard before what are you going to call it well as a good chance you might call it something like a meow or a Mew or something along
• 13:00 - 13:30 those lines in fact if you look at the word for cat in the ancient Egyptian language you actually find that the word for cat looks quite a lot like the word Mew instances of this in modern vocal languages as well on a matter P of course we have words like bang which sounds a bit like a bang animal noises woof woof woof meow they resemble the actual sounds that the animals make words like dada and Mama and Papa these uh are based on on the Babbling sounds
• 13:30 - 14:00 that babies make so babies go through a stage where they start babbling we parents tend to be fairly self-centered people we like to assume that our babies are taught you about us so this is almost certainly where the protein European word p came from meaning father it would have started off as something like Papa and these words keep getting reinvented so we end up in English with a word like father but then we also listen to our babies babbling and we reintroduce words like dada and Daddy all over the world these mama Papa d
• 14:00 - 14:30 words keep getting reintroduced as parents listen to their babies babbling Clive derle asks where did the word orange come from the word orange came into English from French and French got it from Spanish which got it from Arabic which got it from Sanskrit and so on what's interesting here is the Spanish word is Naran starting with an N the N became associated with the indefinite article so it's like instead of saying a orange you reinterpret that as an orange and this actually happened a few times
• 14:30 - 15:00 in the history of words so apron originally was napron reinterpreted as an apron and the Old English word for snake n was reinterpreted as an Adder so sometimes mistakes can give birth to new forms of words shayley says shout out to the guy who invented the word poop that is dead ass poop for real the word poop actually probably meant something more like fart originally so it seems to be on theat p po with a meaning similar to Puff the idea is it represents the sound
• 15:00 - 15:30 made by a puff of air so it probably meant something a bit like fart and then started to Beed euphemistically to refer other things that come out of your butt critical stressy asks why do Americans say fall when autumn was a perfectly good word for the season neither fall nor Autumn was actually the original English word fall um seems to be first recorded some point in the 16th century in English to refer to Autumn but before that English speakers actually refer to Autumn as harvest this is cinate with the words in other Germanic langu is like German helst meaning autumn in
• 15:30 - 16:00 England that got quite specific referring to the Gathering of the crops in the Autumn so in the 16th century both fall and Autumn were being used to Summit scent in Britain to refer to um the season Fall the fall of the leaves comes from the old English word fall Autumn a borrowing from uh Latin via French insane artist deor was a good word until everyone started using it good question very mindful the word deure has actually been around since
• 16:00 - 16:30 middle English and probably comes from French uh M meaning mature it's actually Cate with the word mature we don't actually know where the DU part comes from no French word de as far as we're aware but uh recently it's got uh kind of popular on Tik Tok and people have been using the phrase very demure very mindful to refer to a whole bunch of things and I think this this is an example of how people love to have fun with language people like to be ironic they like to use words like Wicked to mean good using Expressions that get a
• 16:30 - 17:00 good reaction from people Ali padrino dude I'm deaf getting old what is this new SL these kids got what's the YNS era what the is fomo why you all typing CS for cuz or Ts for that I'm so lost I think this is something which happens every single generation this is likely something which has happened since language has existed and I think this is two-sided kids on the one hand don't want to sound like their parents or their parents' generation sland words
• 17:00 - 17:30 don't tend to come down to us in the written records of ancient languages mainly because those tend to be formal writing and slang words tend not to get written down in formal writing very often you do see slang words sometimes written in Ancient Graffiti often sexual slang things like that but we also get hints of other kinds of slang surviving into modern languages as ordinary words in the same kind of way as cool which at
• 17:30 - 18:00 one part was basically a slang word the Latin word for head if you Lo it up in a Latin dictionary is caput this is actually cognate with the word English word head but if you look at the Modern romance languages you don't find the word capid meaning head you find words like Testa in Italian at some point people started using the word Testa which originally meant pot or pot shur to refer to skulls and from then to use this word which had come to mean skull to refer to people's heads Kaye jadar
• 18:00 - 18:30 who invented the word no we don't know no goes back ultimately to prot European the English word no is actually a shortening of nun which comes from Nan meaning not one and the N part is actually very similar to its proton European ancestor n and that survives in lots of modern IND European languages we don't know what the origin is of this word but one possibility that's been suggested is it actually goes back to the kind of face that maybe babies make when they ref use something the no face
• 18:30 - 19:00 hot girl Mara says I'm starving to death I'm dying and my girlfriend won't choose a restaurant because she's too busy telling me about the great bowel shift I really sympathize you should never do Linguistics on an empty stomach but the great bowel shift is really interesting to understand it it helps to understand a bit about what vows are and how they work this is a model of the human vocal tract the mouth at this end tongue here we have the larynx here we we push air
• 19:00 - 19:30 up from the lungs through the larynx and then we shape our votal trat by moving our lips and tongue and teeth now linguists are very used to working with schematic diagram of this track when we talk about bowels in the late 14th century people started to pronounce these vowels differently where bit was pronounced originally with the tongue it's a mid front part of the mouth people starting moving it further up and closer to the top front of the mouth it
• 19:30 - 20:00 started sounding more like beet and this fowl actually became more of a diff thong a combination of two vowel sounds I and we end up with beat and bite similarly bought became B and B became Boot and boot became bout Mars Catland says Shakespeare just misspelled made words up and hope would cope with it and they did Shakespeare did not invent anywhere near as many many words as people think other writers
• 20:00 - 20:30 of the same period actually had similar or even larger vocabularies lots and lots of people who were contributing dictionary entries had copies of Shakespeare Shakespeare was the first place they found many instances of some of these words he might in many cases have been the first person who wrote some of these words down but that doesn't mean that he invented them he came up with many Fantastic terms of phrase like one Fell Swoop other words like mockable for instance might be the chase we the first person to use the word mock these are productive uh
• 20:30 - 21:00 morphemes and language that are quite easy to combine oh my lantis asks why did we stop saying the and thou like I'm honestly not sure how to use them in a sentence it's actually kind of interesting that English stopped using the in thou because they Cates like French 2 Russian 2 stayed around in those languages so the and there were originally certain person singular you when you referring to just one person you was originally the plural form but but around the early medieval period
• 21:00 - 21:30 people started to use you for singulars as well they started in Latin you had two and was to being the singular U was being plural U but people started using W also when they were talking to one person but they wanted to be respectful to them some people have suggested that this was because there were two Emperors there was the emperor in Rome emperor in Constantinople there were these two centers of the Roman Empire for a while it's also possible that people just
• 21:30 - 22:00 considered that the word for more people was somehow the more respectful form around the 17th century somewhat abruptly people especially the southeast of England started to drop thou and thee also around this time you had certain religious groups like the Quakers using now and thee for everyone and this was not necessarily very popular so people might have wanted to distance themselves from that usage soft play band says word is a word invented call words words word weird yeah it is kind of weird the
• 22:00 - 22:30 English word word comes from an induran route in fact originally meaning speech with an ending on it which really meant something like put and this was used to indicate completed action so word means something like spoken it's something that has been spoken Benjamin St 25020 asks who invented the word pregnant because that's such a weird word to just come up with well actually this one turns out to be quite simple the preit in predent as in prepare and lots of other words just means before
• 22:30 - 23:00 the nant bit comes from a word nasty meaning give birth so being prant is the state you're in before you give birth Nasi is actually conate with words like genesis and uh generate actually it turns out there are more interesting words of being pregnant take for example the Spanish word embaraso this is clearly related to the English word embarrassed it comes originally from an Arabic word maraza meaning rope this is brought into Portuguese and then into Spanish is Baza and gave birth to a word
• 23:00 - 23:30 meaning entangled this is a concrete word originally referring to people being entangled in a rope but it came quite rapidly to refer to a more abstract sense of being entangled or inconvenienced which is where we get the word embarrassed ultimately this entangled inconvenienced meaning was used as a euphemism for pregnant hence the Spanish word embarass de writes says something that always fascinates me we don't know where the word DOD from it just appeared in late medieval English
• 23:30 - 24:00 from no pound root word this is actually a mystery in atmology we might have expected the word Hound in Modern English to be the usual word for dog instead Hound became more specialized and the general word for dog is Dog and we don't quite know where it comes from but dog is actually one of a set of words along with pig hog frog all n and G in Modern English which in Old English seem to have had this CGA ending so do FR H Pik this is is a little bit mysterious we don't quite know where
• 24:00 - 24:30 this came in and these are words which we don't see recorded all that often in writing what most likely happened is that these were kind of cute expressive words that were maybe used in the nursery or when people wanted to talk in a cute way about dogs and so they didn't tend to end up in formal writing when people use the word doggo now they might be taking the word dog back to its Origins so that's all the questions thanks for listening this has Bean atmology support [Music]