WORD HISTORIES: WORDS, WORDS, WORDS
By Mary Ann Lieser
为什么踢的球和舞会在英语中都是ball?为什么狗吠和树皮都是bark?可以说，每个英文单词的背后都有其独特的历史。任何一种语言都不能孤立存在，在其发展过程中总会受到其他语言的影响。现在使用的英语潜藏着拉丁语、法语、希腊语、古斯堪的纳维亚语等多种语言的痕迹。历史上大不列颠岛曾被不同的民族占领过，这些民族带去了自己的语言和文化，并同当地文化进行融合，而英语也在这一过程中吸收来自其他语言的词汇，使得同一单词衍生出了似乎并不相关的多重含义。If you’ve ever wondered why one word has different meanings—for instance, from the ball you kick to the ball that’s a dressed-up dance party—then you’ve noticed something interesting about the English language. The language’s rich vocabulary is the result of a unique history. And that history reveals itself in the multiple meanings of many words we use every day.
When we hear the word “bark”, we use context clues to tell us whether it means the outer surface of a tree, the noise a dog makes, or a small ship. Those different meanings represent distinct words that entered the language at different times and just happen to go by the same name today.
Germanic tribes known as Angles, Saxons, and Jutes took over control of the British Isles from the native Celtic Britons in the 5th century. Over the next hundred years, these groups began using a language scholars now call Old English. The language spoken then would barely be recognizable to English-speakers today, but it was the earliest version of English. The meaning of bark that refers to a dog’s exclamation comes from this language, from the verb beorcan. That usage appeared in written English as early as 885 C.E.
From the very beginning, Old English absorbed words from other languages. Starting in the 6th century, Christian missionaries from Rome brought words of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew origin. Vikings began raiding the coastline in the 8th century. They brought Scandinavian words, including the Old Norse word bark, meaning “tree skin”. And in 1066, a group of French-speaking Normans defeated the English King Harold and established French as the language of court and politics. Hundreds of words of French origin were absorbed into the English language. By the 15th century the French word bark (sometimes spelled barque), meaning a small ship, was in common usage in English.
A batt in Old English was a weapon like a club. Hitting someone or something with a batt was naturally called “batting” them. When games like cricket or baseball were developed, the word “bat” came from “batting”, rather than the ancient weapon.
The little furry bat gets its name from the Middle English “bakke”, which probably evolved from the Old Norse word leðrblaka—literally, “leather flapper”. The original meaning of the helpful critter’s name was probably just “flapper”.
A pen that keeps animals enclosed is a very old word in English—so old that we aren’t sure where it comes from. It might come from the Old English pin, referring to a gate that’s fastened with a pin.
You might have trouble finding a pen just before a test or when you’re trying to write something down quickly—but at least you don’t have to make one on the spot. Old pens were made from feathers, which writers had to cut into the right shape themselves. The word “pen” comes from the Latin word penna, meaning “feather” .
The match you use to light a fire has a much grosser—and wetter—name than you might think. The term probably comes from the Greek word myxa, which originally meant “mucus” .In old lamps, the wick that you lit an oil lamp with hung out of it like a string of snot.
The boxers in a match are meant to be equals, but they aren’t usually friends. Originally, though, the word comes from the Old English maecca, meaning “companion” or “husband/wife”.
“Rock” is a relatively new term in English. It originally comes from rhythm-and-blues music slang in the mid-20th century. “Rock” in blues came to mean dancing while swaying side to side, like rocking a baby.
Rock as in “stone” comes by way of the Old North French roque—brought to England by the Normans. Once it was established in Old English, “rock” meant a big rock formation like a cliff, not individual stones. But over time it eroded to mean any kind of stone.
CHECK THE OED
One of the best places to learn how English has developed over the centuries is the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). The OED is a historical dictionary that includes quotations in chronological order that show changing meanings over time. From the OED’s earliest days, the editorial team used a form of crowdsourcing to locate thousands of examples of published word usages. They recruited hundreds of volunteer readers to mail them individual slips of paper with hand-copied quotations.
The OED makes it easy to understand how the word “curry” can mean both a horse’s grooming (a form that entered English in the Middle Ages from the French word curreier) and a spicy dish that originated in South Asia (a 16th-century English adaptation of a Tamil word).
Editors at Oxford University currently are working on a third edition of the OED. This time around, the work employs computers rather than slips of paper, but the need to track word histories remains. New words—and new shades of meaning for old ones—continue to shape English, and linguists continue to record and analyze how our language evolves.
本文刊登在《英语沙龙》（原版阅读）
2023年6月刊
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