Oh. . . ONE more vaguely interesting thing to write about before sleeping. . .

[xiphias]

This morning, as I was driving Lis to work, we were talking about the word "fish." I mentioned that I was surprised that there wasn't anything in English like "fisk" from the same root, except maybe a surname. (In Old English "sc" is pronounced as "sh" is in Modern English, so there are lots of words in English which came down as both "sh" and "sk" variations -- "shirt" and "skirt", "dish" and "disk", a "skipper" is one who runs a "ship", stuff like that. Since "fisc" is "fish" in OE, I was surprised that there isn't a "fisk" word of which I was aware).

Lis mentioned that, because of the f<-->p shift, "fisc" and "pisc" were the same word, which is neat. I don't know WHY f and p change into each other -- or b and v change into each other -- but they do. You can see it really obviously in Hebrew, but it's common among other Indo-European langages, too.

This evening, Lis looked up some of those words in the OED, and we found that "fiscal" comes from a word for a rush basket. I don't know that it has anything to do with fish.

Comments

[dsgood.livejournal.com]

I believe "skipper" is from Dutch; a quick check at http://onelook.com shows one of the two dictionaries I looked at saying from Dutch and the other Dutch or Low German.

And "skirt" seems to be from Old Norse.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

Well, Dutch, Norse, and so forth are all descendants, or close cognates of, Old English. Once you get far enough back historically, all those languages start to smoosh together -- Old English, Old Norse, Frisian, Dutch. . .