25de maiode 2010 Word Stories | por Steve Taylore-Knowles

There is one simple fact about English language teachers that is rarely acknowledged. It is at the heart of what they do, and yet it is almost never mentioned in articles on teaching, on teacher training courses, or at conferences. That fact is this: English teachers love the English language.

They must do, particularly non-native speakers. They’ve reached a high level of achievement in the language and have spent hours learning it. In this whole business of teaching English, it’s the NNS English teacher who is the real outstanding success story. And from watching many teachers at work, from training teachers, from talking to teachers, I’ve learned that they all, almost without exception, love the English language, its systems and its rhythms, its quirks and its complexities, its lyricism and its stories.

Yet, when we consider our students, are we communicating that love? Do we focus so much on what you can do with the English language that we completely neglect any discussion of what the English language actually is, where it comes from and where it’s going? Many students are interested in English as a language and enjoy hearing about the histories of words. Of course, our main focus should quite rightly be on using English in the real world. However, if you can introduce into your classroom some interesting elements of the histories of words in English, it can go a long way in raising your students’ plurilingualism, their awareness and understanding of links across and between languages.

Over the course of some years, I’ve written a series of short articles on English words for the interest of teachers. You probably wouldn’t take these and use them directly in your classroom, except perhaps with very advanced students. Perhaps, though, they raise points that you as a teacher find interesting and which you can imagine introducing to your students in a much-simplified form. Here are a few selected ‘word stories’ that I hope you enjoy.

Gossipmonger

Behind every word there is history. And in the case of English, that’s often a history that combines elements from different languages. Take a word like gossipmonger (someone who habitually spreads rumours). It’s composed of two parts, the noun gossip and the suffix
–monger. The same suffix can be seen in words like fishmonger and ironmonger. The root of it is ultimately the Latin word mango (trader or dealer). Since it’s been in use in English and other Germanic languages for a very long time, though, it tends to refer to trades that are disappearing from the modern world. The streets of London used to be full of costermongers (street sellers of fruit and vegetables), so-called for the costardes they sold, a kind of apple, but now Londoners are more likely to get their fruit and vegetables from the nearest Sainsbury’s. The form can also be seen in the term warmonger, a word that perhaps has become more common in recent times.

The history of gossip can be traced back to Old English. In Beowulf, the epic poem written in the 8th century AD and a key part of the roots of English literature, the writer uses the adjective sib (closely related). The noun sib (relatives, kinsfolk) is now very rare but still survives in anthropology, where it is a technical term for kinship groups. From it, we get sibling (brother or sister). In Old English, it formed part of the word godsibb (godmother, godfather). The b’s became p’s, it lost the d (as did gospel) and the word became gossip. It also came to mean ‘friend’, and was specifically applied to a woman’s friends who were invited to be present at a birth. A birth was clearly a social occasion, when women got together with their friends and talked. Gradually, women have stopped inviting friends over for a chat when they give birth, but we’ve kept the word and now use it to refer to the chat.

Tenere

Etymology works in two directions. You can take a word in modern English and work backwards to its roots, as I did last month with gossipmonger. Another way to approach it is to take a word in an ancient language and work forwards to see what sorts of word it has produced in modern English. This process often illuminates connections between words that are otherwise not obvious. It can also be surprising how much language can be created out of relatively few simple elements, just as the whole of English can be constructed out of the 44 phonemes of RP (received pronunciation) or the 26 letters of the alphabet.

Take the Latin verb tenere (to hold), for example. There are a number of different modern forms where the word has retained the spelling ten- and where the link to the original meaning is more or less obvious: tenet (dogma or principle, a belief held), tenacious (holding fast, tough), tenant (one who holds or possesses land, and by extension one who rents a place), tenure (the right to hold a position), amongst others.

Interestingly, the word also has a parallel history in combination, although spelling changes have tended to obscure the connection. In Latin, tenere could combine with a number of different prepositions used as prefixes, including ab- (off, away from), con- (together), de- (aside), inter- (among), ob- (towards), re- (back) and sub- (under). Modern English is rather like the graveyard of this process, where the forms still exist, but have mostly lost any feel that the words are composite forms: abstain, contain, detain, entertain, obtain, retain and sustain. All these underwent various spelling differences until settling on -tain¬ around the time of Shakespeare.

One more modern result of the word tenere is worth a mention. The tenor of a document is the gist or most important points (from the idea that this is what the document holds). This word is relatively rare, but the same word is more commonly used for a type of male voice. This apparently comes from the fact that that voice (between bass and alto) was usually given the melody line, the most important harmonic element, and so carried the substance of the piece of music.

Nice

How does a word once full of negative connotations come to mean something positive? Take nice, for example. Nice is a word that English schoolchildren are often taught to avoid in their writing. They are told that it's too bland, too general and that they should come up with much better descriptive adjectives. H.W. Fowler in his Modern English Usage (1926) complained that the word had been 'too great a favourite with the ladies, who have charmed out of it all its individuality & converted it into a mere diffuser of vague & mild agreeableness.' Whether 'the ladies' can justifiably be blamed or not, nice has had a long and complicated history and it's not always easy to disentangle the various meanings that it has carried at one time or another.

Its ultimate root is the Latin nescius (ignorant, unknowing). The -sci- element, from scire (to know), survives in words like conscious and science. Nice was common in the 14th and 15th centuries with the meaning 'foolish or stupid'. During the same period, it also meant 'indecent or immoral', 'effeminate', 'strange' and 'lazy'. Quite a list of negatives for a word now seen as positive. Other meanings that nice took on listed by the OED include 'extravagant', 'over-refined', 'shy', 'fussy', 'cultured', 'precise', 'subtle', 'trivial' and 'appetizing', as well as its current meaning of 'agreeable or pleasant'. Apart from the meaning of 'agreeable', the meaning of 'precise' still survives in the derivative niceties (precise details).

We're guessing, of course, when we try to recreate the precise evolution of a word, since writers are not always generous enough to provide us with a precise context from which we can infer that they meant this particular meaning and not this one. However, it seems that in general terms stupidity was linked to immorality, which in turn was linked to excess or extravagance, which was linked to luxury, which was linked to refinement, which was linked to discernment, which was linked to precision, and also to pleasantness. Perhaps it all helps to explain why describing someone as nice often feels like a rather back-handed compliment.

Be

Often, the longer and more unusual a word, the easier it is to trace its development. It can be broken down into constituent parts, simpler roots that can then be followed back. But what about common words that form the fundamental bedrock of English?

Be is, as you might expect, a highly unusual verb. In fact, it's not really one verb at all. The modern English paradigm of be is the result of complex interactions between the forms of three different verbs which, in Indo-European, the ancestor of the family of languages to which English belongs, had the stems es-, wes- (remain, continue to be) and beu- (become). From the first we get the modern forms is, am and are, from the second was and were and from the third be and been, although exactly how that happened is a very complicated process. (For the sake of simplicity, I've omitted some alternative forms from what follows.)

The original stems worked in various ways in Sanskrit, Greek, Latin and the Germanic languages until we get to the time of Old English (up to around the middle of the 12th century AD). What were two different verbs in Gothic (am and was) have by now become one verb, am-was, the present tense expressed by the forms of am and the past by the forms of was. Be is still a separate verb and since it means 'become', it often works as the future of am-was.

The first half of the 13th century sees two major changes. In Old English, am had two plural present forms: sind(on) and aron. In southern England, sind(on) died out and was replaced by the forms of be, which then also tended to replace the singular forms. Even today in southern dialect speech you might hear forms such as 'he be' or 'they be'. Aron survived in the north and gradually spread south until (in the form are) it became standard at the start of the 16th century.

The other change to take place was that the infinitive, participle, imperative and present subjunctive forms of am-was became obsolete and were replaced by forms of be, giving us the verb in a more or less recognisable form. In Middle English, the standard past participle until into the 15th century was be until the northern form ben(e) became generally accepted.

Go

Here goes. I’m going to have a go at dealing with go, one of the commonest, and most complicated, verbs in English. Everyone knows how the verb go goes: go, went, gone. But where has goed gone?

It goes without saying that goed was, of course, never there in the first place. In Old English, gán (to go, the accent indicating a long vowel) was a defective verb (a verb that lacks one or more of the usual forms, like modal verbs, for example) and had to go without a past tense. If the account in the OED is anything to go by, the gap was filled by éode, ultimately derived from the Indogermanic root ya- (to go). This went on, in Middle English, to become yede or yode.

Meanwhile, another verb had gone and become synonymous with go, the verb wend, in use today mainly in the phrase wend one’s way. The history of wend goes back to the Old English wendan, and, the argument goes, ultimately to an assumed Indo-European root of *wand- (the asterisk indicates a form that is assumed to have existed, even though no examples of that precise form have been found). The modern words wind (the verb, with past tense wound), wander and wand all go back to this same root. Now, the verb wend originally went wend, wende, wended, but the forms wente and went for the preterite and the past participle became common from about 1200 onwards. (You can see where this is going, can’t you?)

Over the next 300 years, the old past tense of go (yede or yode) gradually went by the board and was replaced in the south by the past tense of wend, while wend acquired a new past tense, wended. In Scotland and some northern dialects, yede/yode didn’t go the distance either and was replaced by a new formation, gaed, based on the present tense (the closest we came to having the word goed). The southern form went went north, leaving us with go in its modern form. This merging of two verbs into one goes by the name of ‘suppletion’ and regular readers will remember that what goes for go also goes for be, the other verb in English whose modern form is a result of suppletion.

Orange

It’s been said that there are two words in English for which there are no perfect rhymes. One of them is month, but I’d like to have a look at the other one: orange. Orange is the etymological equivalent of the chicken and the egg. Which came first, the fruit or the colour?

As with so many word origins, the place to start is one of the earliest Indo-European languages, Sanskrit. The orange seems to have originated in south-east Asia, in northern India. The Sanskrit word for this bitter orange was naranga or nraga. In Arabic, this became naranj. As this Persian orange spread west, so did the name, which still survives in recognisable form as the name for modern sweet oranges in many languages, including Albanian (nerënxë), Hungarian (narancs) and Spanish (naranja). In Modern Greek, the name νεράντζι, from the same root, still refers to the bitter orange.

The fruit was introduced into Italy in the 11th century, where it was known in Old Italian as narancia, leading to the Old French word narange. Now imagine saying una narancia or une narange. The n’s get absorbed and tend to disappear. Add to that the fact that there was already a town in France called Orenge or Orange and then throw into the mix the French word or (gold), and it’s easy to see how the word became une orange in Old French and then an orange in English.

Portuguese traders brought sweet oranges from China in the 15th century and these quickly displaced the bitter varieties. In most countries, the name remained the same, or they became known as ‘China’ oranges, but a few languages adopted terms that preserved the role of the Portuguese (Bulgarian portukal, Greek πορτοκάλι, Turkish portakal).

We no longer use the term China oranges in English, but a similar fruit has retained the association with that country. Mandarin (Sanskrit mantrin, counsellor) is a term used for Chinese officials, who traditionally wore bright yellow silk robes, perhaps leading to its being used for the similarly brightly-coloured fruit.

And to answer the chicken and the egg question, the first recorded use of orange (actually, orenge) to refer to the fruit that the compilers of the OED could find dates from 1387. The first use of it to refer to the colour dates from 1542.

Hap

If you’re a philosophical sort of gambler, then I suppose it’s possible to lose at the roulette table and still be happy. This wouldn’t have been the case in the past, though. Happy originally meant ‘having good fortune’ and is derived from the Middle English word hap (luck, good fortune), which in turn came from Old Norse happ, again meaning ‘luck, chance’. Hap has also enjoyed a life as a verb, meaning ‘to come about by chance’.

Although it no longer survives on its own as a separate element, hap can be found in words such as mishap (unlucky accident) and haphazard (random, dependent upon chance). The second element in this word, hazard, was originally a dice game and it seems that it derives from Arabic. The OED suggest that it may come from the name of a castle where the game was supposedly invented (Hasart) or from vulgar Arabic az-zahr (die, in the sense of one die, two dice). Although hazard has now almost completely taken on the meaning of ‘dangerous obstacle’, it retains the sense of taking a chance as a verb in the phrase hazard a guess.

And, as might be obvious now, hap is the root of happen (take place, occur). The suffix -en is the same suffix we find in threaten, forming a verb from a noun. Although it is not restricted to the sense of coming about by chance, it still retains a strong connection to the idea of unplanned, fortuitous occurence in the sense happen to be. It also forms part of the word happenstance (chance event, also happenchance), which is quite a modern word (late 19th century) and is an amalgam of happening and circumstance.

Hap survives in another word that has, interestingly, outlived other contenders for the same function. Perchance, mayhap and peradventure have all fallen out of use, leaving the way clear for perhaps.

Commuter

Commuter – one who spends his life
In riding to and from his wife;
A man who shaves and takes a train,
and then rides back to shave again.

E. B. White, ‘The Commuter’ (1982)

Although we use the term commuter to refer these days to anyone who travels to and from work, whatever the means of transport, E. B. White puts the emphasis in the right place when he places his commuter on the train. For it was the train that made the life of the commuter possible. The development of regular, scheduled passenger services through the 1830s meant that for the first time one was able to live some distance from one’s employment and still make it to work and back again in a reasonable amount of time. But what about the term, commuter?

It derives from two Latin elements, com- (with, together) and mutare (to change). The second part is also present in words such as mutate, transmute and permutation. The history of the word commute predates the railways by at least two centuries. In the middle of the 17th century it was used to mean ‘exchange or substitute one thing for another’. Hence, money was commuted from one currency to another. It also meant ‘to change an obligation into something less severe’, particularly in the sense of avoiding a duty by paying money. It still survives today in the related sense of replacing a punishment with a less severe one, particularly replacing capital punishment with life imprisonment − e.g. His sentence was commuted to life imprisonment.

The railway connection came in 1842. Season tickets, entitling the holder to a certain number of journeys at a reduced rate, had been available on some railways for about 8 years and the Liverpool and Manchester Railway decided to issue its own. (The Liverpool and Manchester Railway was the world’s first intercity railway, having opened in 1830.) They called their season tickets ‘commutation tickets’, since the money paid up front is ‘commuted’ into journeys. Although the term ‘season tickets’ remained (and still remains) the usual term in Britain, the term ‘commutation tickets’ became common in America. Commuter was being used in the USA from the 1860s onwards (as was the term commutation passenger), but it wasn’t until the 1940s that the word was used in Britain without being kept at arm’s length in inverted commas.

Nim

In the mathematical realm of game theory, there is a simple game that has been analyzed and which is often used to exemplify basic principles. You may have played some variation of it. In this game, two players place a row of matchsticks between them. They take it in turns to take either 1, 2 or 3 matchsticks and the person who takes the last matchstick loses (or wins, depending on the variation being played). Not a game that is likely to displace chess as an intellectual pursuit, but I mention it because of its name: nim.

During the 17th and 18th centuries, nim was a verb, meaning ‘steal’ and was weak (or regular). It was the offspring of a strong Old English verb meaning ‘take’: niman. Niman became a victim of the Viking invasions of Britain and was displaced by the Old Norse taka (take). It had disappeared by the 16th century, but its cousin survived across the North Sea in Germany, the modern German word for ‘take’ being nehmen.

The preterite and past participle of niman were nam and numen, respectively. Compare this to another Old English verb: swimman (swim), swam (swam), swummen (swum) and you can see what the fate of this verb might have been had it survived to the present day in its strong form. In fact, one part of it has survived. The past participle numen lives on in the modern English word numb, thus spelled from the 17th century on. The original sense is that of being ‘taken’ by cold or grief and so being unable to feel. A closely related word is numskull (stupid person, also spelled numbskull).

One other word ultimately derived from niman is the adjective nimble (originally, ‘quick to take’, and then ‘agile, quick, alert’). And that’s about it. A word that was once as much a part of everyday life as take is now was ousted by an invader and left very little trace in modern English. A ruthless business, language change.

If you google the word ‘nim’, you’ll find a number of sites that explain the maths behind nim and allow you to play various versions against computer opponents. Just don’t expect to win.

STEVE TAYLORE-KNOWLES

Steve Taylore-Knowles has been involved in ELT for over 15 years, as a writer, a trainer, an examiner and a teacher. He holds B.A. and M.A. degrees from the University of Warwick, and is a Licentiate of Trinity College, London (Dip. TESOL). For a number of years he lived and worked in Greece, where he served on the Executive Board of TESOL Greece, and where he taught students and trained teachers at all levels, specialising in exam preparation. He has written a number of internationally successful courses, including the Laser (2nd edition 2008) and Destination (2007-08) series for Macmillan. His most recent course to be launched globally is openMind (2009), a ground-breaking multi-level series for young adults. He regularly speaks on various aspects of ELT at conferences and events around the world. Now based in his native county of Lancashire in the north of England, when he’s not working Steve tries to find time to go fishing.