Entomological Etymology: the many origins of English words
English is a really weird language with a complicated history that I’ve always found fascinating. This chart gives a sense for how mixed up English is, with English vocabulary, split pretty evenly between Germanic, French, and Latin sources, and lots more coming from elsewhere.
A big reason I love etymology is because I love learning the histories and transformations that words went through before they arrived on my tongue. Since I talk so much etymology, I thought a quick overview of the major influences on English might help! Along the way I’ll give examples of bug words derived from each different source.
To help me out, I’m using this fantastic graphic showing the family tree of the Indo-European language created by Minna Sundberg. All of these tongues have their origin in the theoretical ancestral tongue called Proto-Indo-European, probably spoken in the steppes of Western Asia around 8000 years ago. Speakers of this language spread out and settled all across what is now called Europe, Iran, and the South Asian subcontinent, and PIE diverged and gave birth to a multitude of modern languages, from Persian, to Hindi, to Russian, and of course English.
The group of Indo-Europeans who settled in North-Central Europe came to be known as Germanic speakers. Starting around 450CE, members of primarily two tribes living in modern Denmark & Germany, called the Angles and the Saxons, migrated to the island of Great Britain. They subjugated the local Celtic tribes and remnants of Roman settlements and set up kingdoms of their own. Eventually, boundaries between the two tribes became hazy and this group of people came to become known as Anglo-Saxons. Their language is now known as Old English, and their land was called England, from the word “Angle”. Sorry, Saxons!
Most of the simple, everyday English words have this West Germanic heritage. This includes basic bug words like beetle, bee, ant, fly, moth, and spider!
Of course, people didn’t stop invading Britain just because the Anglo-Saxons had moved in. Starting around 700CE and continuing for hundreds of years, Vikings began raiding the island. This pretty constant contact led to lots of Old Norse/North Germanic words entering the English lexicon. Lots of them have a violent implication, like skull and thrall, but we also get the word wing from the Vikings. Some sources also give Old Norse credit for the oldest version of the word ‘bug’, which may have come from Old Norse ‘búkr’, although I believe this is inconclusive.
Fast forward to 1066, and England is getting invaded again, this time by the Normans! Normans were a sub-group of the Franks, yet another Germanic tribe, but the Franks had adopted a form of Latin and spoke the Romance language that led to modern French. The Normans conquered England and Norman French became the language of royalty. However, the influence of French speakers was never enough to actually get common people to stop speaking English, and eventually those Normans aristocrats instead became assimilated into the English population. Along the way, English adopted a huge number of French words, for example warden, beef, and cricket.
Since French is descended from Latin, this means that the vocabulary of English became quite mixed between words with Germanic and Romance roots.
But Latin words actually came into English from from several different routes. With the influence of the Christian church, which used Latin exclusively at this time, English was peppered with Latin words continuously over centuries. Highly educated members of society all learned Latin and often borrowed words from it as well. And when the Renaissance finally came to England, a resurgence of interest in Classical texts amplified this influence. Latin was the language of scholarship and a majority of technical terms came to English through Latin. Just a few buggy examples include arachnid, cicada, and termite.
Of course Latin itself was never a pure language: in fact, the Romans had their own cross-cultural fascination with the Greeks, and they incorporated many Greek words into their own Lexicon. As a result, many Latin words that entered English were actually composed of Greek roots, like mantis, entomology, and chrysalis.
Modern English interacts with basically every other language in the world, so today’s vocabulary essentially draws from everywhere, including other branches of the Indo-European tree as well as the many other language families. Food words in particular have a multitude of sources. For example, maize and potato come from Indigenous American words, while amen is Semitic, bongo comes from West Africa, tofu is ultimately Chinese, and curry comes from the Indian branch of the family. Now and then, new bug words creep in from these other sources - like the tsetse fly, with tsetse meaning fly in a Bantu language spoken in South Africa.
This was more material than I expected, but I hope the big-picture linguistic context helps! We’ll focus on bugs again soon.
Also check out the History of English Podcast for more info!
Sources:
Douglas Harper, Online Etymology Dictionary
Wikipedia
John-Erik Jordan, 139 Old Norse Words that Invaded the English Language. +Babbel Magazine.
KryssTal, The English Language: Borrowed Words from Norman French.
