Etymology things

[xiphias]

This morning, as I was driving Lis to work, we were wondering why so few English words have "lk" sounds in them, yet the phoneme is easy for English speakers to say. The only common words that end in "-ilk" are "milk" and "silk", with "ilk" being not-really-common and "filk" being technically jargon, and then you're into things like "wilk", which is an obsolete form of "whelk" that we only found because Lis started using her phone to look up words that end in -ilk. Yet we have no trouble saying "-ilk". So we started looking up -ulk, such as "bulk", and "hulk", and one thing led to another.

Did you know that the Yiddish word "yenta", meaning a gossip and busybody is from the name of a character in a 1923 comic strip that ran in the Forward?

Anyway, does anyone know of a dictionary of proto-Indo-European words that have been deduced?

Comments

[wcg.livejournal.com]

I think there's a reference to a listing of such words in The Horse, The Wheel, and Language. I'd have to look when I get home.

[wcg.livejournal.com]

And wouldn't you know, it's on line:

http://dnghu.org/en/proto-indo-european-language/

[ron_newman]

"bilk" is not exactly a common word, but most people know what it means.

Can you link to your reference re "yenta" ?

[cheshyre]

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=yenta

[bluerosesgirl.livejournal.com]

What about words like "yolk" and "balk" -- where regional spoken-language variations keep, or lose, the ell sound? My western New York relatives make fun of Connecticut Yankee me for incorporating the ell.

This is fun.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

Actually -- it's not "keep" or "lose" exactly. We ADD the sound, because it's written that way! Some Yankee dialects, including my own, rectify pronunciation/orthography divergences by changing the pronunciation. Words like "folk" come from roots which have the "l" sound, but which lost it before coming into modern English. We put them BACK.

This is even more the case with vowel sounds. We distinguish between "Mary", "marry", and "merry", for instance, which probably were originally pronounced identically. We Yankees create subtle vowel differences based on the distinct spellings.

We speak written English, rather than writing spoken English.

[ron_newman]

We distinguish between "Mary", "marry", and "merry"

We do?

[bluerosesgirl.livejournal.com]

*I* do, for sure.

and this:
"We speak written English, rather than writing spoken English."

makes all the sense in the world -- or maybe makes all my world make sense. Ayuh. (And is also why I'll never write like Flannery O'Connor.)

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

Bluerosesgirl and me.

[cos]

Certainly the last one is different from the first two, for me.

I wonder if Erin vs. Aaron is like this too. Were those pronounced identically at some point and we made them different due to spelling? Current status is similar to marry vs. merry - people from other places generally seem to pronounce Erin and Aaron identically whereas I'm used to them being different. But just because they got to the same place as the marry/merry pair doesn't necessarily mean they followed the same path...

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Words like "folk" come from roots which have the "l" sound, but which lost it before coming into modern English. We put them BACK.

Is this true also of "palm" and "calm" and so forth? I have been heard to express my delight at the way Americans pronounce the "l" where we don't, but I did assume you'd hung onto it, where we had lost it. If you reinstated it, that's a whole different interesting thing...

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

It's hard to say what's a reinstatement, what's a broadening of a slenderized sound, and what's held on to. A lot of silent letters aren't, for instance -- people say that Bostonians drop our r's in certain words, but we don't: rather, they're slenderized and slipped into semivowel diphthongs. Similarly, there are a lot of silent letters at the end of French words that I can hear...

So, in my mind, those l's were never lost in British English -- they were just stuck onto the vowels.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Hee, I like that: I have indeed never felt that the l's were missing, exactly...

But - reminded by a conversation elseweb - I have another one for you: the w in whooping cough. In England, we pronounce it "hooping cough"; in America, I find, it's pronounced as spelled. Is this an instance of your speaking written English, or something else...?

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

Do you think that the intake sounds more like "whoop" or "hoop"? It's an onomatopoeic disease name...

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Indeed. I don't believe I've ever actually heard a sufferer in mid-whoop, so I honestly don't know. Though I am rather attracted by the notion that we hear different sounds on either side of the pond, if that is actually what's going on. I'm equally but differently attracted by the alternative notion, that the spelling and the sound of the disease and the sound of the word became divorced from each other at some point, and the US went with the spelling regardless, or else the Brits decided that must be a silent W for reasons that only a Brit could find good...

[tober.livejournal.com]

Yeah, you're right. FWIW, the particular flavor of the "words" file on one system on which I have an account has a mere 38 words in "-lk", and of those:
- 4 are proper nouns (Norfolk, Polk, Salk, Suffolk)
- 5 are compounds with "folk"
- 7 are compounds with "walk"
- 1 (shoptalk) is a compound with "talk"
- 1 (buttermilk) is a compound with "milk"
- 1 (cornstalk) is a compound with "stalk"

So that only leaves a mere 19 non-proper non-compounds in this particular definitely non-exhaustive but big English word list (which didn't include "filk")

[shmuelisms.livejournal.com]

Since you mentioned Yiddish, there is Shpilk, the singular form of Shpilkes. ;-) It was never entirely clear to me what it meant.

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

A lot of "ancient Yiddish words" came from Brooklyn in the 1920s...despite what Fiddler may claim. ;)

[chanaleh.livejournal.com]

The widespread gossip-and-busybody connotation of the name Yenta may stem from its use in said comic strip, but the actual name is in common Yiddish usage much earlier, as a back-formation from Yentl, which itself was a borrowing of the Latinate "genteel" or gentle.
http://www.20000-names.com/female_yiddish_names.htm
http://www.yiddishbookcenter.org/pakn-treger/06-12/fortunes-yente

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

Yep; the term comes from the characteristics of the comic strip character Yenta, whose name was a normal name.