Latin purc- vs English "furrow" (remember "porcelain" back at the beginning?) is an example of what is called Grimm's Law, which describes a systematic change of certain consonants in the Germanic languages (including English) compared to the mainstream of Indo-European, which includes Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, Russian, Gaelic, Persian (Farsi), and many others. The law is named for Jacob Grimm, half of the fairy-tale Brothers Grimm. In addition to being a collector of folklore, he was one of the first serious students of what is now called Comparative Linguistics.
Sticking to Grimm reality, I'm using mainly Latin for the examples below because the Latin/French component of English is so large, and many of these words exist side by side with Old English (i.e., Germanic) words of similar meaning. Examples from Persian or Gaelic would presumably be less obvious, but they do exist, trust me. Most of my other examples are from Greek. Please note that I'm not claiming that an English word comes from a particular Latin or Greek example, but only that, at minimum, both words derive from some primitive proto-Indo-European common ancestor, and that the English (Germanic) consonant in question changed from "standard" Indo-European while the Latin or Greek did not. In any case, a slightly simplified version of Grimm's Law states the following:
Obvious examples are pater vs father, pipe vs fife, pisces vs fish, etc. Latin pro-, proto-, prime, etc. compare to Germanic for-, fore-, and first, all with the sense "ahead of". Latin peril is Germanic fear. A Greek pet- root meant to spread; it's in both flower petals and the Germanic fathom — the distance defined by the outspread arms.
Greek pyro- is Germanic fire. The pu- root that gave Latin putrid and pus resulted in Germanic foul, filth, and defile, as well as fuzzy, which originally meant "rotten". Latin pork, mentioned before, is in the Germanic farrow, once a single piglet but now a litter of them, and is part of the Dutch aardvark — literally, earth pig. French/Latin pullet and poultry correspond to Germanic fowl and foal, all with a root meaning of "young". An Indo-European pele- root meaning "more" is in Latin words like plenty, plus, plural, the Greek plethora and poly-, etc. An expletive "fills out" a line, as mentioned elsewhere. The Germanic equivalent gives fill, full, and folk (the many), so Germanic refill is exactly the same word as Latin replenish.
Greek plek-, to fold or braid, is Germanic fold and flex. Latin derivatives of this root are -plex in words like duplex (folded double, exactly as in Germanic two-fold) and complex (folded together), pleat and plait, reflect (fold back), deflect (bend aside), etc. Latin multiplex is a synonym of Germanic manifold (many-fold), and simplex (same-fold, i.e. unfolded) is more usually spelled "simple". A reflex was originally an image seen in a mirror; the current sense of an involuntary twitch is by way of "copying" an action. Perplex was originally an adjective, "thoroughly entangled".
Also from Latin are words in -ply- such as ply itself, reply (to fold again or turn back — c.f. reflect), pliant (foldable), etc. From the image of cloth folded and re-folded, ply came also to mean "layer", as in plywood. The pair explicit and implicit are from the image of a document which is "folded outward" so the contents are visible to all or "folded inward" so the contents are hidden. Exploit is the French form of "explicit". Finally, a mechanic's pair of pliers most definitely fold in the middle, and a ballet dancer's plié involves folding the knees outward.
The Indo-European word for "away" was apo-. This led to Greek words like apology and apostle, Latin words in ab- like aborigine (from the beginning), and a whole collection in post- (afterward) such as posterior, post-mortem, puny (French puis-ne and Latin post-natus, last-born), etc. Another large Latin set comes from the meaning "put away" or "place" — Latin ponere, posit- — position, deposit, post, positive, preposition, transpose, propose and proponent (both "place before"), component/compound/compose (place together), expound, and more. Meanwhile, the mutation to Germanic produced off, of, offal (off-fall, i.e., waste), aft, ebb, and after.
There are a bunch of Latin words in pla- (plate, plain, plane, plaza, placid, plateau, plaque, placenta, placard and its twin placket, platform, etc., all with the sense of "flat" or "broad") that in Germanic are fla- words — flat, flake, field, floor, flounder (a flat fish), fluke (of a whale), the Dutch veldt, and the flag in flagstone. Spanish llano, plain, is definitely from Latin plano, even if it has lost a /P/ along the way. (Spanish lleno, full, and lluvia, rain, show the same loss; they are from Latin plen- and pluv-.) [01May08] The opposite of "placid" is implacable.
It would be perfectly reasonable to call a Greek policeman a platypus (flatfoot), although perhaps not to his face. All the current meanings of plant go back to the original sense of (flat) bottom of the foot, now seen in its literal sense only in plantar warts, the plantar fascia that connects the heel to the ball of the foot, and the zoological term plantigrade, describing animals like bears and humans that walk flat-footed with the heels touching the ground. (The opposite is digitigrade, walking on the toes like horses, dogs, cats, etc. The only digitigrade primate species is the human female ballet dancer.) To "plant" something originally meant to tramp down the ground after placing a seed or seedling, and that sense is still felt in phrases like "feet firmly planted".
Surprisingly, the Greek philosopher Plato's name is also a "flat" word. His actual name was Aristokles; he was nicknamed Plato because he was a very broad, powerful man who had been a champion wrestler in his younger days. To think of Plato in the WWF as "The Slab" or "The Wall" definitely gives a new perspective to the man!
Poland is one of Plato's cousins, since polye means "field" in Slavic, and the country is predominantly flat farmland. Navigators call an area of open water in arctic pack ice a polynya, from Russian. The dance called a polka, however, apparently is not related to the country, even though the Polish words for themselves are a Polak (male) and a Polka (female). The dance is of Bohemian origin, not Polish, and the name seems to be from Czech pulka, which means "half", presumably from the short quick steps characteristic of the polka. (This does not mean, however, that a polka is the same as a minuet, also named for its small steps.) There was a large craze for the polka in the late 19th Century, leading to polka hats, polka dresses, etc., of which the only remainder is polka dotted fabric. Another dance really does mean "Polish", however — the polonaise.
[31Oct08] There are some words that look like they have undergone a Grimm's Law /P/-to-/F/ switch except that the result certainly isn't German. Sometimes the real reason is because Arabic doesn't have a /P/ sound and substitutes /F/ in words borrowed from Indo-European. The most obvious is Farsi, now the Iranian name for their own language. This started out as Parsee, i.e. "Persian". Parsee is still used for descendents of the Persians who moved to India to maintain their heritage after Islam took over Iran.
Latin cardiac, cordial, etc. vs Germanic heart, as shown in the Indo-European list mentioned previously. Latin canine and Greek cynic are Germanic hound. Latin "purc-", mentioned above as a relative of furrow and furlong (furrow-length), actually gave Germanic "furh-", but an "rh" is pretty indistinguishable from just plain /R/ in English — think of roads vs. Rhodes. [21Nov08] (A furlong, or one eighth of a mile, was so-named because that was the dimension of a 10-acre square field.)
The Latin word for skin was cutis, as in cuticle, "little skin", or subcutaneous, "under the skin." It is the same word as Germanic hide as in horsehide. Greek -kracy meant "strength, ruling ability" (democracy means "people strength", aristocracy is "best strength", and bureaucracy is from French bureau, desk or office), and this matches Germanic hard. The Greek carcino- and Latin cancer are "hard" words, too — the original meaning was the hard-shelled crab, and the disease was named from the appearance of a typical tumor. This got generalized to any affliction which ate away at surrounding tissue, leading to both chancre (a venereal ulcer) and canker.
Latin corp- (body) is in corpse, corps, corporation, and corpuscle. If we apply the two Grimm changes discussed so far, "corp" changes into Germanic "horf", and so it is the second syllable of midriff, middle of a body.
As mentioned elsewhere, Latin quo and quid (pronounced "kwo" and "kwid") are Germanic who and what, and Greek cycle is Germanic wheel. By the way, there are Germanic "qu-" words in English — modern queen and quick are Old English cwen and cwic, for instance. After 1066 the Norman French re-spelled all the oe "cw-" words to match French and Latin style for that sound.
The Roman goddess of agriculture, Ceres, gave her name not only to cereal but to Germanic harvest. These are from a general root meaning "to grow", also seen in increase/decrease, create, the crescent (growing) moon, and the musical crescendo. The original meaning of recruit was to reinforce a body of troops, literally to grow again. Sincere is an unlikely relative of cereal, but it is Latin for "single growth", used to mean pure or clean.
The Latin cant- root meant to sing, as in words like cantor, canticle, cant (originally the whining tone of a beggar), chant, charm (i.e., an incantation), etc. This is also in English hen, which in every other Germanic language means the crowing male of the species — e.g., German hahn means rooster. (Another example of gender confusion among the chickens is coquette. This is an oxymoron, a "female cock". In French, the masculine form (coquet) meant a male flirt, presumably from a comparison with the strutting rooster.)
Authors have to be careful using the word cock these days because the vulgar synonym for "penis" is so strongly entrenched. The male chicken sense is earliest; then came an intermediate meaning of cock or stopcock — a spigot or tap — so named because the handle of early varieties looked like a cock's comb. The slang word for penis therefore means "spigot"; it came along a hundred years or so later. To cock a gun is also from the fowl, due to the perceived resemblance of the firing mechanism of a matchlock or flintlock to a bird's beak. Hence to do something before preparations are complete is to go off half-cocked.
Latin curs-, to run, is seen in cursive, cursor, course, corridor, excursion, courier, current, corsair, recur, occur (literally, "run against"), etc. [17May08] Coarse originally meant "ordinary" and seems to be the same word as "course" via the latter's one-time meaning of common or expected, as in the phrase "of course". In Germanic, the root produced hurry, and almost certainly horse, the running animal.
The "real" ie root meaning "horse" is ekwi-, seen in Latin equus and Greek hippo- — hippodrome is "horse-running", hippopotamus is "river-horse", Philip (Greek Philhippos) is "horse-lover", etc. Combined with the comment about the "hard" words above, the Greek "patron saint" of physicians, Hippocrates, would be Dr. Horsepower in English!
The ie kel- root means cover or hide. From this are Latin words like cell, cellar, conceal, and occult (hidden) as well as Germanic words like hole, hull, hall, helmet, and Hell (the covered place).
OK, I lied. The Latin plant-name cannabis is the source of canvas, and it's Germanic hemp, a fact known to everyone under sixty whether they ever inhaled or not.
Both are illustrated in the change from Latin dentist to Germanic tooth and the first in duo vs two and december vs ten. (And cardiac vs heart, too.) Other examples of /T/-to-/TH/ are the aforementioned pater vs father and, keeping it in the family, mater vs mother and frater vs brother (/F/-to-/B/ change is mentioned below.) An example showing three changes is Greek tripod, which corresponds exactly to Germanic three-foot. More /D/-vs-/T/ examples are Latin duc- (to lead, as in duke, duct, conduct, educate, seduce, induce, traduce, the Venetian Doge, etc.) vs Germanic team (of horses, originally), tug and tow, and Latin dict- (to speak, as in diction and dictate) vs Germanic teach. The Germanic god Thor, whose day is Thursday, has the same root as thunder. That word is also the first element of Latin tornado (literally, thundering).
The original meaning of deduce in English was to lead forth, as in "Moses deduced the Children of Israel." It also meant to inherit — "He deduced his fortune from his aunt." The sense of to solve a problem by reason is later. Note that the "draw out" sense still exists in deduct, and a deduction can be either a financial withdrawal or a logical derivation. (Derive has much the same change in meaning; it originally meant to divert a stream into a particular channel, from the root also seen in river.)
Another /T/-to-/TH/ change is seen in the ten- root which means to stretch. This gave Latin words like tense, tent, extend (stretch out), distend (stretch apart), etc. From "stretched" there is a natural progression to Germanic thin, also seen in Latin extenuate (thin out), tenuous, attenuate, etc. The tenterhooks one is stretched on are a metaphor from weaving, where they are attached to the selvage to stretch cloth into shape. From Greek are the geometric hypotenuse "stretched under" a right angle (c.f. Latin subtend), the "stretched out" antenna (originally a nautical word for a sail boom, then the insect part, before arriving at the radio sense), and both the musical tone (from a stretched string) and muscle tone (tautness). [24Jul08] (Tone came to mean "general good health", which is maintained by a tonic. Greek catatonia is when the mind's tone has "fallen down".) Intense means "stretched tight", while intend is to "stretch toward" something. Interestingly, "to pretend" is literally "to stretch forward." The original meaning was to make a claim, and the figure is that of someone holding out their proof at arm's length. The only remnant of this sense is the pretender to a throne, i.e., claimant. The current usage is for the original "false pretender." See the discussion of the tenured tenor earlier in this document for more relatives where the root meaning was extended [I'm sorry…] to "hold". Also note that "pretend" has a very close relative in ostentatious, from Latin obs-tendere, to stretch out in front, i.e., to show something off. [25Apr08] On the other hand, "pretend" is not related to pretext — see the texture/technical family for that one. Attend is "stretch toward", originally in the Latin phrase attendere animum, to stretch the mind toward, i.e., to pay attention or be attentive. Attain looks like it might be related, but not so — it is a tangere "touch" word.
One of the most obvious relationships is Latin frater and friar vs. English brother. Also, in disburse, reimburse, and the Greek bursa and bursitis, the root means "sack" — c.f. Germanic purse. Latin bac- (rod, as in bacteria or bacillus) is Germanic peg. Other related words include the long narrow baguette of French bread and a debacle, literally "unbarring" and figuratively "opening the gates" in French, used for a sudden violent rush of water, as when a dam ruptures or when the ice in a river breaks up in Spring. It was then generalized to "confused rush, stampede". Yet another unlikely relative is imbecile. The literal meaning is "without support, tottering, feeble" from the image of an old man deprived of his staff.
Latin beaker is Germanic pitcher. The Germanic verbs to put and to push correspond to the Latin verb to butt, all with an original meaning of to thrust or shove forward. In English, even though "put" is now much less aggressive than "push", several sports terms still retain the original sense of "shove": the track shotput, the golf putt, and the football punt. The baseball bunt is another "shove" word, of course. Also from the "thrust forward" sense is the architectural buttress, the military abutment, and the botanical bud (c.f. shoot), and a small bud is a button. Sackbut, the archaic name of the trombone, is appropriately "pull-push" in French. [12May08] To rebut is to push back or repel and to abut is to lean against. (Butt as a noun — rifle butt, cigarette butt, buttock, etc, — is a different word. It's Germanic for the thick end of something.)
Another set of words is from an ie root that means to strike or kill. Latin -fend in words like offend, defend, fend (off), and fence match Germanic bane (originally, murderer) and surprisingly, German bahn, as in autobahn. This latter comes from the sense of "hacked out". Presumably the most important tools in building a primitive road through the wilderness were axes and machetes. (Similarly, route and its relatives rout, routine and rut are from Latin rupta, broken, whose literal sense is seen in the obvious rupture, interrupt, disrupt, bankrupt, and erupt. Corrupt and abrupt are a little less obvious; they mean "destroyed [broken] completely" and "broken away".) Abrupt is still occasionally seen as a verb in the sense of "interrupt", as in "He abrupted his journey."
Other examples of f-to-b include the Latin root flat- (to puff or blow, as in inflate or flatulence) compared to Germanic blow, blast, and bladder. Latin frac- (fracture, fraction, fritter [away], fragment, fragile, frail,fracas, frangible ) is Germanic break and brick. The Latin root for "burn" is fla- (flame, flare, conflagration, flagrant, etc.), and that root in Germanic gave bright, blaze, blush, and somewhat surprisingly, black — literally, burned. The related -bert in Germanic personal names (Albert, Robert, Bertram, Bertha, etc.) means "bright". As mentioned previously, Germanic burn itself is from the Latin forni- root seen in furnace. Yet again, the Latin "flower" words in flor- became things like bloom, blossom, blade, etc. in Germanic. Interestingly, Latin foss- (to dig, as in fossil) is Germanic bed, so the original bed was a flower bed, not the sleeping kind. [04Jan08] (A fossil was originally anything dug from the ground, without the restriction to the remains of living things.)Sticking to agriculture, a fava bean is redundant, because Latin fava is Germanic bean.
This is most obvious in the Latin host- words (host, hostage, hospital, hospitality, hotel, etc.) vs Germanic guest, and Latin horti- (as in horticulture) vs Germanic garden. (The original Indo-European root in both cases started with a gh- sound, and predictably the Guttural Growling Germans pronounced it /G/ while the Liquid Laid-back Latins pronounced it /H/.) Latin hab- (to receive or hold, as in have and habit) vs Germanic give is another example, like host/guest, of the importance of reciprocal relationships in the original ie tribal society. A Germanic bridegroom was originally brydeguma, where the second half is the same word as Latin homo, man. Human, humane, homicide, and the Spanish hombre are related. So is humus, soil, and its relatives like humble and humility. In fact, that's the original meaning. The ie root is a tongue-twisting dhghem-, earth or soil, and human literally means "earthling".
[29Mar08] The human species is known as homo sapiens. This is usually translated as "wise man", but it literally means "man who can taste" — Latin sapere means to taste. From "able to taste" it developed into "able to distinguish or perceive" and then into "able to understand". In English, sapient now means "wise" but once meant "tasty". Savory still has the original sense, and its opposite is insipid, without taste. Another "understand" relative is savant, while savvy is French savez[-vous] or Spanish sabe [usted], take your choice, Sage, showing wisdom, is definitely French. (The herb that goes with parsley, rosemary, and thyme isn't related, though,)
[29Mar08] I guess I should point out that reciprocal is a Latin blend of the prefixes re- and pro-, so it literally means "back and forth". In early use the word was particularly applied to the tides.
Certain people whose knowledge of classical languages is somewhat limited object to "homosexual" being used to describe female behavior, on grounds that the Latin word obviously applied only to men. Unfortunately, the first part is really Greek homo-, "same", which is therefore perfectly appropriate to same-sex preference by either males or females. On the same general subject, for the last 2,500 years certain Greeks have been afflicted by the double sense of "Lesbian" — a resident of the Aegean island of Lesbos, or a female homosexual. This is due to the island's most famous citizen, the poet Sappho, who among her many works wrote some love lyrics to women. Considering that the Greeks didn't think much of women, it is ironic that Sappho was so well-remembered that her alleged preferences led to two English words — lesbian and sapphic. They both have double senses, actually, because a professor of literature will use "a sapphic" to refer to a poem in the verse form she invented, independent of content.
[30Apr08] In today's news there is a report that some citizens of Lesbos are suing the Greek Gay and Lesbian Association for defamation. Certainly took them long enough. [08Aug08] Not surprisingly, the Greek court threw out the suit. (Presumably it's also far too late for the Welsh to sue people for using "welshing on a debt", for the Dutch to complain about "Dutch treat", for the Bulgarians to get uptight about the practice of buggering, and for the Gypsies to try and eliminate the verb "to gyp", q.v.)
Speaking of poets, etc., the first recorded instance of butch to mean a tough boy or man is as the nickname of George Cassidy in 1902. It's probably shortened from "butcher". The sense of a mannish lesbian, the opposite of femme, dates from about 1950.
The Old English -wise in words such as likewise and otherwise means "manner" or "style" — originally they followed a preposition: "in like wise," i.e. in like manner. This is the same word as guise, still used in phrases like, "He was in the guise [style] of a soldier", although it is now more common in the compound disguise, that is, a different style. Back a ways, I mentioned the various "wal-" words meaning foreigner, at least as seen by Germanic speakers. Gaul (and the Galatians) and the Kelts are other members of that family, implying that, like Slav/Slave, the words were taken from the foreigners' name for themselves.
Examples include grain vs corn, grackle vs crow, gen- (family or birth, as in genus, generate, genius (what you're born with), generous (literally, well-born), etc. etc.) vs kin and kind. The original meaning of "kind" as an adjective was "acting like family". Think of Shakespeare's pun when Hamlet said his uncle was "more than kin and less than kind". King is another Germanic relative — its original meaning was "family head". Ditto is yet another "kind", the German word for child, as in kindergarten. The biblical book of Genesis is quite concerned with genealogy, the study of births. Benign and malign are bene-gen and mali-gen, well-born and ill-born, while cognate is co-gen, born together. Another word where "gen" has contracted down to "gn" is pregnant, from pre-gen, before birth. (French even got rid of the /G/, producing prenatal.) Degenerate is from Latin de generis, down from the kin, i.e., a disgrace to one's ancestors, and regeneration is, of course, being born again. General in all its senses means "of a class, of a race" — the military use was originally an adjective, a captain general. Note that congenial and congenital are the same word (born with), although their meanings are now quite far apart.
Captain general, attorney general, surgeon general, and most other phrases where the adjective follows the noun (e.g. court martial), are relics of French legal, military, or culinary terms, and all still show their origin by their plurals — attorneys general, courts martial, etc. More examples are body politic, sergeant major, knight errant, church militant, battle royal, and many foodstuffs like beef Wellington, steak tartare, and eggplant Parmesan. C.f. mothers-in-law and "backwards" geographic terms like the River Thames and Mount Baker. Since Washington, Alberta and Uganda all have peaks so-named, the world has at least three Mounts Baker. If, God forbid, the capital of Louisiana ever got cloned, the state would be afflicted with Batons Rouge.
Note that the current pronunciations of "pregnant" and "cognate" are "spelling pronunciations" derived from erroneously attaching the /G/ to the prefix. Logically, they should be pronounced PREgnant with a long /E/ and COgnate with a long /O/ like other words with the /pre-/ or /co-/ prefix. "Zoo" and "cocaine" are mentioned elsewhere as spelling pronunciations, as is bike as a clipped form of "bicycle". [24Feb08] Many words where there could be a misreading used to be hyphenated — "co-operate", "de-activate", and so on — but now we just have to trust to luck that future generations won't decide that "cooperate" should be pronounced with a long /U/ like cooper.
Latin glue is Germanic clay. Latin/Greek grav- (dig, scratch) gave Latin engrave, graven images, and the thing for dead bodies, as well as Greek graph- (to write); these match Germanic carve and crab (because it scratches). The experts are uncertain whether the name of the crab is from "carve" or from "hard," as above. (Grave as an adjective — a grave crime — is a different word. That's part of the "heavy" family that includes gravitation, aggravation, etc.) The verb to grub is another "dig" word, and grubby seems to mean "covered with dirt like a digger". [03Apr08] A similar root produced "split" words like Germanic cleave, cloven, and cleft, as well as Greek glyphein (to carve) seen in heiroglyphics. Greek gyne (woman, as in gynecology) is Germanic cwen/queen. As mentioned elsewhere, the Latin words in gel- (gelatin, etc.) are from a root that means "frozen", and that's Germanic cold and cool.
Greek -gon (bend or angle, as in pentagon or diagonal) is Germanic knee. Latin genuflect is literally "bend (flex) the knee." Proceeding down the leg, Latin angle itself is of course Germanic ankle, and going the other direction, one arrives at the Germanic knuckle. Actually, there's probably a third "angle" body part, the chin. An anchor (once spelled "anker" like it sounds) is another notably bent object. Note that these examples imply that the /K/ in knee, knuckle, etc. used to be pronounced, which of course it was.
There aren't many good examples in English, because Latin had converted the /TH/ to /F/ or /D/ already and didn't have it as a native sound. (Latin used /TH/ only to represent the Greek letter theta.) One example is Greek thyroid, which matches Germanic door (from its location in the throat), but which in Latin became the for- root previously mentioned as the root of foreign and forest. Another is an ie theu-, smoke, which led to Greek thyme (used for incense), the liturgical thurible (incense holder), and Germanic dust and dove (from the bird's smoky color). Deaf, which originally meant blind, is a possible relative. Keltic dun- means "dark brown", leading to the dun color and personal names like Duncan (brown head). In Latin, the root became fume, and to obfuscate something means to throw up a smoke screen. The root extended its meaning to "breath", leading to deer, once any [breathing] animal as mentioned above. (C.f. Latin animal, from anima, breath.)
Yet again, the ie root for "to do or act" yielded Greek theme, thesis, apothecary, and synthesis, as well as Germanic do, deed, deem, and doom. The Latin change to /F/ produced all the fact, -fy, and -fication words mentioned elsewhere.
It seems obvious that theos, the Greek word for god (theology = study of god, atheism = no god, etc.) must be the same word as Latin deus, but it ain't so. The Latin mutation of Greek theo- is really fa- as in fanatic (possessed by a god), profane (outside the temple), fair (held on a holy day), feast and its derivatives festival and festive, etc., while deus is from another ie root meaning "to shine". (See the above discussion of Easter for more "shine" words.) Deus, divine, deity, and the Germanic god Tiw (whose day is Tuesday) are from the "sun god" sense, while dismal (literally, "bad day"), dial (originally the sundial), dawn (literally, "daying"), and maybe diet are from the "day" sense, all through Latin and/or French. Astronomers have decided that, to avoid confusion, "day" should apply only to the Earth, and that a rising and setting of the sun on some other body should be called a sol. This word has been familiarized recently in connection with the Mars landers. [08Oct08] (This only works inside our solar system; I have no idea what will happen with the planets of other stars.)
[14Jan08] The French massaged Latin diurnal into jour, leading to soup du jour ("of the day", but higher priced) and journey, a day's travel. Note that a journeyman is one who is employed by the day. A journal is a "day book" and was originally a synonym of its cousin a diary. (Jury is not related, though — that's a "justice" word.) The other "jury", meaning temporary, looks as if it should be a "day" word (so that jury-rigged would mean "rigged just for the day") but the experts can find no connection. Ditto with jerry-built, poor and flimsy, which seems to be Liverpool slang from about 1870 and may commemorate some unknown lowest bidder.
To almost everyone else's astonishment, the experts are unanimous that Germanic "day" itself is not a member of this group, but that the resemblance is pure coincidence! The Germanic word god itself is somewhat obscure but seems to be from an ie root hut- (see previous item for H-to-G) that means to call or invoke. For example, in Sanskrit the word puruhutu (much-invoked) is often used as an epithet of a god or goddess. There is a minority view that god is actually from an ie root that meant to pour [a libation]. As an aside, many people would agree that the most appropriate scientific name ever given to a chemical is that of the caffeine-like active ingredient in chocolate. It is called theobromine, "food of the gods".
The voiceless /TH/ sound heard in thick and thin serves as a real trap for non-native speakers of English, because it is a surprisingly rare sound in the world's languages. It existed in proto-Germanic, but now is found only in English and Icelandic. The sound also exists in Semitic and as mentioned above, Greek, and that's about it. Speakers of German, Slavic, the Indo-Iranian and Romance families, and most non-ie languages tend to pronounce "thin" as "tin" or "sin" (and voiced /TH/ as in these and those as "deze" and "doze" or "zeze" and "zoze") unless they've had a lot of practice. Note that German had a /TH/ spelling, but the sound was hard-/T/, as mentioned before in the discussion of "thal", pronounced "tall", German for valley. Recently German authorities have begun a campaign to "rationalize" the language with a /T/ spelling instead (Neandertal, etc.) [04Sep08] Goth and Lithuania used to be spelled with a /T/ and are so pronounced, but I don't know if they will be victims of the spelling police. Castilian Spanish also has a /TH/ sound, because that's the way they pronounce /S/ — they all have a bad lithp.
Unvoiced /TH/ is thus a literal shibboleth, from the Bible story (Judges, chapter 12) of the Israelites picking that word (which means "stream") as a password in some battle with enemies who could not pronounce unvoiced /SH/ or /TH/ — anyone who claimed the password was "sibbolet" was immediately killed. Similarly, Italians have been known to use cicera, literally "chick-pea", to sort out Frenchmen, who do not have a hard /CH/. (The Roman author Cicero was a nickname — he had a big wart on his nose.) Allegedly, US soldiers in the Pacific theater in WW II used lollapalooza as a word impossible for the Japanese. Aladdin's "Open sesame" password from the Arabian Nights might be another one; in Arabic the pronunciation is "sheshame". There are two notoriously difficult tongue-twisters: "The sixth sheik's sixth sheep's sick," and "The Leith police dismisseth us." If you think you have trouble saying them correctly, try them on any (former) friend whose mother tongue is not English!
The rarity of the /TH/ sound is the reason why it is spelled with a digraph in English. Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic all have a /TH/ letter — /θ/ (theta) is the Greek version — and so did Old and Middle English — /þ/, called thorn. [03Sep08] (Just as "alphabet" is Greek alpha-beta, the runic alphabet is called the futhorc, from the first six letters.) Unfortunately, the technology of printing developed on the continent among Germans, Dutch, and Italians who did not have that sound, and so the type fonts imported to start the English printing industry had to make do with the "continental" letter set. For a while, it was customary to replace a thorn with a /Y/ in printed text because the handwritten versions of the two looked somewhat the same, leading to the well-known ye for "the", as in Ye Olde Curiosity Shop. (That "Ye" is pronounced "the", please note!) Eventually the printers gave up the fight and started using /TH/, the digraph which the Romans had used to express Greek theta, a sound not in the Roman alphabet either. Thorns were still common in handwriting as late as Shakespeare, however, and not only ye but also ys, yt, yn, yei were commonly used for "this", "that", "then", "they", etc. well into the 1700's. This must have been confusing for foreigners who didn't know the trick, since in abbreviations like "yrs" for "yours" (yrs truly) it really was a /Y/, and "ye" could either be the alternate form of "the" or the second person plural personal pronoun! [06Aug08] (Icelandic is a quite archaic language, and it still retains the thorn character in print.)
[16Sep08] English has a few peculiar family names with an
initial lower-case /ff/ —
ffolkes, ffyfe, and so on. The authorities are
agreed this is from a misreading of the Old English handwritten
capital /F/, which looked like a ligature of two lower-case /f/'s
— 
. These days one
occasionally sees such names written with an initial capital —
notably the comic writer Jasper Ffordes — but that is
illiterate.
Another Old English letter not present in the continental type fonts was the yogh — /ȝ/ — used for the semi-vowel /Y/ sound before another vowel. Think of "pure" compared to "poor". That little /Y/ in pure is the remains of a yogh. By Renaissance times it only was used in Scots and Northern English, and early printers replaced it with continental /Z/, again from the appearance. This practice led to its presence in northern names like Mackenzie, which is correctly pronounced "Mackenyie", and Dalziel, pronounced "Dalyell". Menzies should be pronounced "Menyies", but casual English pronunciation usually makes it sound more like "Mingus". The actor Denzel Washington's name is simply the northern spelling of "Daniel" and, in theory, should be so pronounced. (C.f. the many words pronounced with a short-/E/ in America and a short-/A/ in England when followed by an /R/, such as derby, clerk, etc. In some cases America has also adopted the short-/A/ — sergeant, the doublet person/parson, and the fact that darling started life as "dearling".)
Eventually, some words with a yogh were re-spelled to use /I/ or /Y/ instead (e.g., year and eye were originally ȝer and eȝe) or it was simply dropped. The a- in front of verbs (alight, awake, abide, etc.) was once ȝe-; c.f. German verbs with ge-. Americans and Irish often drop the sound itself in words where the English do not. For example, American "dew", "due", and "do" are homophones, but in England the first two are pronounced "dyoo". The proper British pronunciation of duke is "dyook", rhyming with "puke". The American version, rhyming with "kook", is distinctly low-class in Britain. (The English novelist Georgette Heyer consistently used the spellings "dook", "stoopid", etc. when reproducing the speech of working-class characters, which probably puzzles her American readers.)
Note that half the Mackenzie clan surrendered to the Sassenachs and now pronounce their own name the way it looks to the English, while the other half re-spelled it to be Mackinney to keep the proper Scots pronunciation. This is by no means uncommon — taking another example from a different letter and language, it's quite possible that Sir Mick Jagger and Chuck Yeager are distant cousins, with one branch of the family retaining the German pronunciation of Jaeger through re-spelling, and the other surrendering and going with standard English pronunciation of /J/. Many Youngs, Youngdahls, etc. used to be "Jung-". My wife's maiden name is Caylor, which is certainly a phonetic re-spelling of Koehler (Köhler) to keep people from pronouncing it "Coaler".
Perhaps my wife's ancestors should have grown up in Central Texas. A lot of the original settlers here were German, and the Austin-San Antonio area has such place names as the towns of Boerne and Gruene, Koenig Lane and Mueller Airport, all pronounced with an attempt at the original German umlauts — "burney", "green", "kaynig" and "miller", respectively. For that matter, I have relatives spelling the family name "Deardorf" instead of "Dierdorf", presumably because someone got irritated with their first syllable pronounced "dire" instead of "deer". Me, I'd never think of doing something like that, if only because it's such fun correcting telephone solicitors.
Certain people who should be world-famous are obscure because of pronunciation difficulties — c.f. Ignacy Lukasiewicz (Wook-a-shave-its), a famous mathematician who devised the so-called "Polish notation". If she received her PhD today, Dr. Maria Dolega-Sklodowska (Dowenga-SklawDAWFskah) would probably keep her maiden name for professional purposes. If so, she would be far less remembered by generations of science students, but fortunately for them, she meekly adopted the pronounceable name of her husband Pierre Curie, even though she got two Nobel Prizes and he only got one. [27Oct08] Astrophysicists honor Bohdan Paczynski, the expert on the formation of supermassive black holes, by calling the torus of hot interstellar gas spiralling into a black hole a "Polish Doughnut".
Switching from Poles to Greeks, consider the great painter who was known as El Greco because Domenikos Theotokopoulos did not fall gracefully on Spanish ears. (He was born in Crete, actually, but from Spain I guess that was close enough.) The electronic music composer Vangelis would undoubtedly be less famous if his movie scores were credited to Evangelos Odysseas Papathanassiou. The test for cervical cancer is called the Pap Test, short for Dr. Georgios Papanikolaou, the Greek physician who invented it.
[20Feb08] While on the subject of human anatomy, a whole lot more women know about the G Spot than know about the German gynecologist Ernst Gräfenburg who first described it. Similarly, everybody knows about the ubiquitous E. coli bacterium, but nobody remembers the 19th century German bacteriologist and pediatrician Theodor Escherich who discovered it. (Despite the headlines, unless you have a few billion E. coli in your gut, you die. The bug is the body's source of several essential vitamins.)
NASA calls their X-ray orbital telescope the Chandra observatory, named for the Indian-American astrophysicist and Nobel laureate Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar. (In an interesting combination of heredity and environment, Chandrasekhar literally was raised from birth to be a Nobel Prize winner. He was a nephew of the Nobel-winning physicist Sir Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman, and Chandra's mother was fiercely determined that her child would out-do his brilliant uncle.)
I wonder if these men and women were compensated by getting less unwanted telephone calls — I certainly can visualize a poor solicitor seeing such a name come up on his or her computer monitor and quickly clicking to the next entry. Names don't even have to be long — I know someone named Chudej, which has the property (for non-Czechs, at least) that if you see it, you can't pronounce it, and if you hear it, you can't find it in the telephone book. The pronunciation is "Hoo-jay", more or less. That reminds me of the joke that the pterodactyl is obviously an Irish animal, either "Peter O'Dactill" or "Terry Dactill" depending on whether the user has read the word or heard it pronounced.
Similarly, I'm sure the Welsh keep place names like Rhosllanerchrugog, Gwyddelwern, Llanymawdowy, and the grand champions, Gorsafawddachaidraigodanheddogleddolonpenrhynareurdraethceredigion and LLanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch, just to irritate and embarrass the English. That last is even too much for the Welsh, who, I have heard, usually say "Llanfair PG". (As an aside, Welsh is certainly the only language which can have four consecutive /L/'s. The reason for all those -llan- syllables in place names is that it means "church" in Welsh.) I'm told that some Welshmen won't admit they are fluent in English until the tourist reassures them they are from the USA, Australia, or Canada rather than from England. All things considered, this is certainly an easier feat than an anglophone trying to extract English from a perfectly-bilingual resident of Montreal.
Long words in themselves are not particularly difficult if the reader knows the language. English speakers touring Germany soon become accustomed to signs like hauptbahnhofparkplatzeinfahrt and automatically break the monster into its components: haupt (high), bahn ([rail]road), hof (hall), park (same as English), platz (plaza, place), ein (in), and fahrt (fare, travel). Thus we have the "high-railroad-hall-park-place-in-travel", the main railroad station parking lot entrance. (Many other languages get just as bemused by the English habit of long noun phrases like that one — a "college Division One June 2006 baseball World Series home plate umpire chest protector strap" has fifteen consecutive nouns, but gramatically fourteen of them act as modifiers to "strap".)
[24Jan08] There is at least one grammatical construction where English goes so far as to treat an entire phrase as a single word, namely when adding a possessive. Consider the phrase "the Secretary of State's limousine". The position of that /'s/ only makes sense if "secretary-of-state" is regarded as one word. This doesn't happen with the only other remaining English noun inflection, the plural. Two of the breed are "Secretaries of State", not "Secretary of States".
Most other Indo-European consonants, — /L/, /M/, /N/, /R/, and /S/ in particular — were not affected by Grimm's Law. Observe that all these are the "extended" consonants — those that can be drawn out for a long time. (Mmmmmm…, ssssss…, etc.) Grimm's Law seems to have only affected the "plosive" sounds that cannot be prolonged.
The early philologists found quite a few exceptions to Grimm's Law — Germanic words where a consonant did not change as expected. Eventually it was realized that there was a secondary principle, now called Verner's Law, that applied when the consonant in question was in certain positions relative to the stressed syllable of a word. This had been masked because the stress of a proto-Germanic word was not necessarily on the same syllable as that of its modern descendants, and is one of the reasons that most of my examples so far have been at the beginning of words, where Grimm's Law always applies no matter where the accent falls. A few examples showing where Vernor over-ruled Grimm are Latin septem to English seven (instead of "sethem"), Latin centum to English hundred (instead of "hunthred"), and the variations between lose/lorn, raise/rear, dead/death, etc. The -kyr- in valkyrie, from the same root as choose, is another Vernor's Law substitution. This is complicated by the fact that since most Germanic languages were heavily inflected, Verner's Law might cause different forms of the same word to be spelled differently — the added endings changed the syllable count and the stress.
No one knows why proto-Germanic changed in this way from the parent Indo-European, although other languages have undergone similar but less drastic systematic shifts, a few of which are discussed in the next sections.
