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The History of English Podcast
Episode 41: New Words From Old English
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The Anglo-Saxons created new words within Old English through the use of compound words, as well as standard prefixes and suffixes. This process expanded the vocabulary of Old English and enabled the language to emerge as an important literary … Cont...
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Foreign welcome to the History of English Podcast, a podcast about the history of the English language. This is episode 41, new words from Old English. In this episode, we're going to explore how the Anglo Saxons expanded their vocabulary by creating new words from old words. This included putting two or more existing words together to create new compound words. And it also included the use of prefixes and suffixes, many of which survive into modern English. Once we've explored this process, we're going to see how this new expanded vocabulary combined with the expansion of learning to make Old English a true literary language capable of producing sophisticated literature, including the most well known work in Old English, Beowulf. But a quick note before we begin, this episode is about words, lots of words. In fact, this episode is probably more word heavy than any other episode. And that's because I want to illustrate how the Anglo Saxons were constantly creating new words within Old English. And all of those new words ultimately allowed English to emerge as a fully mature literary language. It's important to keep in mind that the original Germanic language was a very basic, earthy language. By now, you will probably have noticed that Old English words tend to be short and simple. They're often single syllable words, and they tend to express basic ideas and concepts. They're the types of words that children learn very early on. Imagine trying to write a novel or an epic poem with the vocabulary of an average small child. You might be able to do it, but it would be a challenge. And that was the problem with the earliest version of Old English. But over time, Old English added more and more new words. Some were borrowed, some were translations of foreign words, and many were new native words. As the vocabulary grew, English was better able to express subtlety, nuance and emotion. It's difficult to say when English reached this critical mass. There probably wasn't a specific point in time. It just became easier over time to compose more expressive poems and stories. But by the middle seven hundreds, we can say with some certainty that English had achieved that threshold of a great literary language, because that was the period when Beowulf was likely composed. And Beowulf is still considered by many scholars to be the greatest surviving literary work in Old English. So let's look at the growth of the Old English vocabulary. And as we've seen over the past couple of episodes, English was growing during the 600-00 and-7-00 thanks to the influence of Latin. Sometimes those Latin words were translated into English by using older English words in new ways. And increasingly, those Latin words were beginning to be borrowed directly into English. But in addition to the influence of Latin, English was also enriching its vocabulary from within by creating new native words. In earlier episodes, I've noted that the Anglo Saxons loved to use compound words. This had always been a feature of Anglo Saxon poetry because that type of poetry relied upon alliteration. And alliteration required poets to use words which began with certain sounds at specific places in each line of the poem. So Old English poets routinely invented new compound words to make the alliteration work the way it was supposed to. And as we saw, they relied upon certain stock phrases which allowed them to fill in the blank space with a word which began with the right sound. Well, this process of creating compound words was not limited to poets. This was actually the traditional way of creating new words within the language. And this process of making new compound words is a legacy of Old English which survives into modern English. We still do it all the time. When we encounter new technology, we we often invent new compound words to describe it. Think about the vocabulary of the modern computer and Internet age. English had to come up with new words to describe all of that new technology. So English speakers created words like chat room, newsgroup, doubleclick, flash drive, flat screen, widescreen laptop, smartphone, photobomb, website, webpage, homepage, username, and even the word podcast is a compound word from pieces of two other words, iPod and broadcast. So English still makes new compound words all the time. So let's take a closer look at some of the oldest compound words in English. Some of those words used by the earliest Anglo Saxons have actually survived into modern English in basically their original form. And we still use them all the time. Words like sunbeam, earring, landmark, rainbow and butterfly all exist today virtually unchanged from the time of the Anglo Saxons. Even the term ice cold, which is two separate words today, was once a compound word in Old English. Its pronunciation and meaning have changed very little over the centuries. Sometimes the compound nature of the word has been lost over time. In previous episodes I've given the example of garlic. It was originally a compound word, gar meaning spear and leok meaning leek. So it was a spear shaped leek. But over time that original meaning has been lost and we no longer really recognize it as a compound word. Another example of this is place names. A few of these place names have popped up in earlier episodes. England was originally a compound word Angeland Land of the Angles. Oxford was the Oxford, the place where oxen crossed the river. Canterbury was a combination of Kant meaning Kent, Werra meaning people, and bure meaning wall or fortified. Town. So it was the fortified town of Kentish people. Another Old English compound word which we still have in modern English is headache. It was originally heav. Another Old English word for headache was heavre, which was literally head weary. In addition to headache. Old English had the word heartache, which was hertz, but the original meaning was much more literal. It was literally a pain in your heart or your chest. To express the idea of sadness or grief, the Anglo Saxons used a similar word, herness, which was literally heart soreness. So there was a difference between having a heartache and having heart soreness. But you can see how the meaning of sadness shifted from one term to the other over time, since they were both so similar. One other quick note about the word ache before we move. In Old English, the word ache could be either a noun or a verb, just like today. So you could have an ache in your head, a noun, or your head could ache, a verb. But the pronunciation was slightly different in each case. The verb form was ock, pronounced today as ache. So your head might ock or ache if you had a hangover after drinking too much mead. But the noun form was acha. So if we shift the sound of that vowel to our modern vowel sound, it, it would be etche for the noun. So you would have an etche in your head, but your head would ache. And that may seem a little strange, but it really isn't. Think about words like speak and speech, stink and stench. So the verb forms are ache, speak, stink, all with a k sound at the end. And the noun forms are h, speech, stench, all with that ch sound at the end. So these were common constructions in Old English. But whereas modern English has retained words like speak and speech and stink and stench, it didn't really retain both a k and h, but interestingly, it retained the pronunciation of one and the spelling of the other. Notice the spelling of the word ache, ache. So English retained the verb form ach for pronunciation, but it retained the spelling of the noun form. So this is one more example of why modern English spellings are so complicated. Sometimes speakers used one version and scribes used the other, and after that, the two versions no longer matched phonetically. Another Old English compound word, which survives in British English but is rarely found in American English, is fortnight. In America, we hear the term used in conjunction with British events like the Wimbledon tennis championships, but otherwise it doesn't really exist. In American English, the term Fortnight is literally 14 nights or two weeks. The Old English word was fehrtun nicht 14 night. But over the years, the word was shortened and abbreviated to simply fortnight. So you might be wondering why it was called 14 nights and not 14 days. Well, this was actually derived from the original Germanic tribes who tended to count by nights. This was actually mentioned by Tacitus in Germania. And the Anglo Saxons inherited that tradition. And they not only had a word for 14 nights, meaning two weeks, they also had a word for seven nights, meaning one week. The word was selva nicht, literally seven nights. It was shortened to senite in Middle English, but it eventually disappeared, whereas fortnite was retained. Another example of this process is the word daisy, as in the flower. It also started out as an Old English compound word, but over time it got shortened and the compound nature of the word was lost. It was originally dais aya, which was day's eye. It was called a day's eye because the petals opened at dawn and closed at dusk. And over time, dae's eye became daisy. And speaking of dawn and dusk, the word dawn was originally a compound word in Old English. It was dayraid, which was literally day red, perhaps a reference to the morning sun. Another Old English word for dawn was er, day, which was literally early day. Both of those words were later replaced by the Norse word dawn after the Vikings arrived. The word dawn was a variation of the word day. So day and dawn are actually cognate. Now, a few episodes back, I discussed Anglo Saxon marriage terms, and I noted that the word bridal was originally a compound word, bride ale, which was the bride celebration or the wedding reception. As you may recall, an ale was a feast or celebration derived from the word ale as beer or malted beverage, presumably because a lot of beer was consumed at those feasts. Well, ale was sometimes consumed at a specific place, sort of like an early bar or publishing. And the word for that place survives to this day. It was called an alehoos, an alehouse. And even today, the term alehouse is still a popular term for bars. And if you're familiar with Beowulf, you know another name for this type of the mayduhel, the mead hall. And when you drink a lot of ale at the ale house or mead hall, you might get drunk. And drunk is also an Anglo Saxon word. And the Anglo Saxons created a couple of other compound words to describe that condition. If you were drunk on wine, you were wiendrucken wine drunk. And if you were drunk on beer, you were beerjunken beer drunk. Now, beginning with the late Anglo Saxons, an English official was assigned to travel around and test the ale to make sure it was up to par. He would travel to ale houses and order a pine and sample it. And depending upon the quality of the brew, he could actually dictate the price that could be charged for the ale. But how did he evaluate the quality of the drink? Well, believe it or not, he would pour it on his bench and sit in it for 30 minutes. When he stood up, if the ale stuck to his pants, the ale house could be fined for serving poor quality ale which was too sweet or had illegal additives. This official was called an ale Connor. Connor was an Old English word which meant examiner or inspector, and it's also the root of the modern surname Connor. Now, I noted that ale or mead was also consumed in the mead hall. Hall was an Anglo Saxon word, but another word for hall was ste. It was the same word used for an animal pen, as in a pigsty or pigsty, using the modern pronunciation. But as I said, ste could also be used to describe a hall or a meeting place. And the person who was in charge of the ste was the stee guardian or the steward. And steewart ultimately became steward. S T E W A R D in modern English. So steward was originally a compound word. And by the way, steward is also the root of the modern surname Stewart, which will become a very important surname in later English royal history. Believe it or not, some incredibly common English words like none, never and nothing were all originally compound words. None was not one originally pronounced nayon. Over time, the two syllable nayon became the single syllable non. And later none never was originally not ever pronounced ne avra. And again, it was such a common expression that it eventually evolved into a single word. Never and nothing was originally a combination of none and thing. It was pronounced non thing in Old English and it later evolved into modern nothing. Another area where a lot of those original compound words survive into modern English is maritime activity. As we've seen before, the Anglo Saxon culture was originally a maritime culture. And a lot of Old English words related to ships and shipping are still found in the language today. And since the Anglo Saxons occasionally had to come up with new maritime words, they often created compound words. In earlier episodes, we saw how Old English poets created numerous compound words for the sea and for ships. So a boat was sometimes called seawood or a wave courser or a curved stem, and the sea was sometimes called the whale road or the water's back. These were mainly poetic compounds which are sometimes called kennings. And in some cases, these compounds were so commonly used as stock phrases that that they began to filter into general usage beyond poems. And many of those compounds are still used today. Words like sea wall and ship rope were commonly used words in Old English. A stormy sea was stormsa, literally storm sea. The open sea was widsa, literally wide sea. We also know that the Anglo Saxons used the word mer for sea, as in mermaid. Well, if you are tired of being at sea, you are mere weary, literally seaweary. If you were seaweary, you might prefer to be a landlubber, another Old English compound word which survives into modern English. Landlubber is another one of those words which has acquired a different meaning over time. The word originally meant a vagabond or homeless person. The etymology of landlubber is directly related to the word lope, meaning run in Old English. We actually saw that word a few episodes back in the context of marriage terms. You might remember that lope is cognate with leap, and it ultimately gives us the word elope, meaning to run away, to get married. Well, a person who runs around on land was a landloper, a land runner. It was originally used to describe a person without a fixed home who travels around from place to place. So it was basically a vagabond or a hobo. But as the word lope gradually disappeared from English, the original meaning of that word was lost, and the word loper gradually evolved into lubber. And over time, the word began to sound like land lubber. So the word began to acquire a new meaning, and it started to mean a person who loves land as opposed to the sea. In Old English, a shipwreck was a sheep. You broke a shipbreak. A person who worked on a ship was a seaman, and that word still exists as seaman. Another word for seaman was a shipwright, which was literally a ship worker. The word rite meant worker. It was also used by the Anglo Saxons to create a word for a jeweler. A jeweler was a yimrite, a gym worker, and it was used to describe a wagon builder. The original version of wagon was wayne. So a wagon worker was a wainwright, and that term no longer exists except as a family surname. However, thanks to Middle English, we do still have the word playwright, which is literally a play worker. Today, the word flood means an overflow of water, but the original version of the word in Old English had a slightly different meaning. It was a more general term for a body of water, either the sea or a lake or a river. So the Old English word for deep water was hech flood, literally high flood, but it meant high water. The Anglo Saxons also had the compound word hechted, which was high tide, but it didn't mean high tide in the sense that the phrase is used today. It was actually a term for a festival or prominent day. In Old English, the word teed or tide didn't really refer to the change in the ocean level. It was actually a term which meant time. In fact, tide and time are cognate, and we still have that original usage in some words. For example, yuletide actually means yuletide. So the compound word high tide actually meant high time, sort of like in Modern English when we say it was high time you got here. So it actually meant a prominent time of the day or the year. So it was usually used in reference to a celebration or festival. And we actually still have the phrase a high time was had by all, which is basically the same usage, but again, in Old English, it was high tide. So we might have said a high tide was had by all. So high tide didn't have anything to do with the sea level. But all that changed in Middle English during that later period. People would speak of the tide or time when the sea level was at its highest and the tide or time when it was at its lowest. And it was through this usage that the phrase high tide and low tide came into being. Again, originally meaning high time or low time. By the way, the sense of the word tide as time led to the word tidy as well. It originally meant timely or punctual, basically having everything in order at the right time. But now it just means having everything in order. So it means neat or organized. So if you are a seaman or a sailor, you had to be careful or you might fall overboard. Another Old English compound word which has changed very little over the past thousand years or so. Just like in modern English, the word board had two meanings. It could refer to a wood plank, or it could refer to the side of a ship, as in the word overboard. And since ships were made from wood, it's very tempting to assume that board, meaning a piece of wood, led to the word board, meaning the side of a ship. And while that's possible, not everyone agrees with that etymology. The word board was important in another Old English compound word as well. The word starboard, meaning the right side of a ship. The original compound word was actually steyrbord, which was literally steer board. The board used for steering early ships were steered with a large oar or rudder, which was actually called the steer. So steer was also a noun in Old English. The rudder or steer was typically located on the right side of the ship. So that became the steer board, which meant the rudder side. So, contrary to what a lot of people assume, the word starboard doesn't actually have anything to do with the stars. Over time, the pronunciation of the word just evolved and changed from steerboard to starboard. Since the steering mechanism of the ship was usually located on the right side, it meant the ships had to dock on the left side, so they were loaded and unloaded at port on the left side. This side came to be known as the larderboard in Middle English, which was literally the loading side. The term later became larboard, but it was apparently confused with starboard. And if you were trying to maneuver a ship in a severe storm, you didn't want the sailors to be confused between starboard and larboard. So larboard was soon dropped in favor of another term. Since the larboard, or loading side, was the side where the port was, it came to be known as the port side. And that resolved the confusion with the similar names. So today we have the port side and the starboard side. But starboard is an Old English compound word which still exists in modern English. Now, the port side of the ship was literally the port side decide where people and goods were loaded and unloaded. Well, in order to move people and goods onto and off of the ship, a portable ramp was placed between the ship and the pier. This ramp or passage was called the gangway in Old English, and it became known as the gangway. And it's still sometimes used as an interjection like gangway to mean, get out of the way, I'm coming through. Another Old English compound word related to maritime activity was sundgird, which was literally sound gird. The word sound in Old English was a verb used to describe the process of determining the depth of the sea. And it was probably from the use of the word sound as a channel of water. And the word gird came from the same root as yard and garden. Specifically, it meant to encircle or surround something. So a sund gird was a sound pole or line to determine the sea depth of the water around a ship. And even though that compound word no longer exists in English, each of its two root words are still found in English. We still use the phrase to sound out to mean the process of discerning or determining something. And sometimes we use a sounding board to mean a group which discerns or evaluates ideas. Both of those uses of the word sound come from the sense of trying to determine the depth of water around a ship. And the word gird also exists. Remember, it originally meant to encircle or surround. From that original use, it came to describe something that encircles a person's waist. And it gave us the words girth and girdle, originally meaning a belt or sash worn around the waist. This led to the sense of the word girdle, gird to mean something that provides support. And from there, it gave us the word girder, meaning a support beam. So we've seen a lot of compound words which still exist in some form in modern English. But of course, there were a lot of compound words which haven't survived. And those are kind of fun to look at too, because it shows how the Anglo Saxons used existing words to create new words. So, for example, a crime was a high sin and a lamp was a light vessel. I mentioned in the last episode that the word purple came into English from Latin. But the Anglo Saxons had a native English word for the color. Purple dye was derived from shellfish, mainly in the Mediterranean, and the early Phoenicians were specialists at producing the dye. In fact, Phoenicia meant land of the purple. Well, the Anglo Saxons must have had some knowledge of how purple dye was obtained, because they originally called the color purple fish dye. The word purple actually appeared for the first time in the Lindisfarne Gospels, and it quickly replaced fish dye as the name of the color. In Old English, a distant relative was a fercib, a far sibling. Someone who was cheerful was glad mode, which was glad mood. Someone who was arrogant was over modi, literally over moody. Something that was precious was derwerth, which was literally dear worth. And something that was desirable was lustepere, lust bearing. So you can see how English was becoming more expressive as a language. All of those compound words were providing a subtlety of expression which hadn't existed before. Something that was very high was high, steep. And we've seen before that the word for creation was frumshaft, literally from shaping or origin shaping. Another word for creation was frum, werk, literally from work or beginning work. The basic law of the people. What we call common law today was the folk rite or folk law. And. And we've seen before that property was called fayow in Old English. Well, household goods were ineffheow. Inside property, a stranger was a nyferrer, a nyfarer, which used the same construction as seafarer or wayfarer. The word galun meant to sing in Old English. Remember that? The G sound shifted to a Y sound in a lot of Old English words, especially before the front vowels I and e. So galun had a related word, jaelin, which ultimately produced the word yell in modern English. But Galen retained its original G sound, since the initial g in that word came before a front vowel, a. So galun became Gael. And a bird which sang at night was a night gale or nightingale. Today, a gale or song could be enchanting and could send someone into a trance like state. So an Old English word for magic was galdercraft, or singing craft. Another similar word for magic which still exists is the word wykcraft, literally witchcraft. I noted in an earlier episode that the Anglo Saxons sometimes called a spider, a gongawaver, a going weaver. Well, they also used the word sphethra, which is the original version of our modern word, spider. The word sphethra meant the spinner, and it's actually cognate with the word spin. But the most common word for a spider in Old English was another compound word, otterkoppa, literally poison head. In Old English, otter meant poison or venom, and cope meant top, summit or round head. So apparently the Anglo Saxons thought all spiders were poisonous, and some people today still share that opinion. At some point, though, atucopa was shortened to simply copa. And the web which was spun by a spider or copa was a cope, web or cobweb. Today, the word cucumber came in after the Normans from French, but the Anglo Saxons already had that vegetable and they called it earth apple, literally earth apples. As you might imagine, the Anglo Saxons had lots of words for warriors and fighters. Berend meant bearer. So a warrior was sometimes called a gar berend, a spear bearer, or a helm behrend, a helmet bearer. I've also noted before that the term swordplay was an Old English compound word. It meant battle or fight. They also sometimes used phrases which translate as weapon exchange and death spear exchange. They also had a term for an argument which was translated as word exchange. And this phrase was used in Beowulf, and it still exists in the modern English phrase an exchange of words. And the Anglo Saxons had several words for sword. The word sword was an Anglo Saxon word, sward. But they had another term which is really interesting if you're a Star wars fan. They sometimes called a sword a baedulema, literally a battle light, which really isn't that far from a lightsaber. So by now you can see how the Anglo Saxons were very adept at creating new words by combining existing words. A slightly different aspect of this process was the use of prefixes and suffixes. So Instead of combining two or more independent or stand alone words, they sometimes added a standard prefix or suffix to an existing word to create a new word, and we still do that today. In fact, we still use many of the same prefixes and suffixes that were used by the Anglo Saxons. The prefix a or a was used in both Old English and Latin. The Latin version meant not or away from, but the Old English version meant on, and it produced words like alive, asleep, and afoot. After was a common Old English prefix. The period afternoon became afternoon. In an earlier episode we also saw that the month after yule. So basically our modern January was after you'll. And the Latin word epilogue was translated as afterward. The prefix be produced words like before, behead, and become the prefix for produced words like forget, forgo, forbid, and forgive. The prefix fourth produced words like forthcomen, which we know today as forthcoming. The prefix in produced words like income, which was originally a literal compound. It meant to come in or arrive, but it later came to mean incoming money, and that's the sense of the word today. The prefix miss produced words like misdeed, meaning a bad deed or sin. It also produced the verb misdo, meaning to do something incorrectly or to do something evil. Mislike was to do something offensive or displeasing, to miss, think something was to be mistaken, to mistime something was to fail, to time something properly, and that's a construction we still use today. The prefix over produced words like overall, overcome, overdo, and override. The prefix to produced words like together, today and tonight. It also produced the word tomorrow, meaning to the morrow or to the morning. The prefix through produced the word throughout. And the incredibly common prefix un, meaning not, was also an Old English prefix. It produced Old English words like unbind, unborn, unclean, uncouth, undue, uneven, unfair, and many, many others. The prefix under produced words like undergo, underlie, underneath, and understand. It was also used to translate the Latin word subscribe, meaning to write at the bottom of something. Subscribe was translated as underwrite. In a similar manner, the prefix up produced words like upright and up on, which was literally up on. The prefix out produced words like outward and outlaw, someone outside of the law, and outlandish, which was originally a reference to an outlander, in other words, a foreigner. Foreigners sometimes had odd customs and they behaved strangely, and outlandish came to refer to strange or bizarre behavior. The prefix with produced words like within, without, and withstand in Old English. In addition to the many common prefixes which still survive, the Anglo Saxons also used a lot of Common suffixes to create new words. Many of those suffixes have continued into modern English and in fact are even more common today than they were during the Old English period. To create adjectives, they created a suffix like some, which can be found in Old English words like love some and win some. And of course, we find that suffix in lots of words today. Another common adjective suffix was wis, pronounced wise. Today the Anglo Saxons used it in the word otherwise. They also combined the word right with that suffix, and they produced the word ritwis, right wise. But over time, the form of the word changed. It eventually became rich, righteous. The suffix full was also used by the Anglo Saxons. They used it to create words like handful and wonderful. The suffix laus is the origin of our modern day less. The Anglo Saxons used it in words like careless, endless, headless, and lifeless. And two of our most common adjective suffixes also originated during this early period. Ish was used as a suffix in childish mannish, and the word outlandish, which I gave earlier, it was also commonly used as a place of origin. Words like English, British, and Danish were all created during the Anglo Saxon period. The suffix e, spelled with a y, also originated with the Anglo Saxons, but it was originally spelled ignition. As we know by now, the g sound shifted to a y sound in a lot of words, and this was another situation where that occurred. So even though the spelling was I g, the pronunciation shifted from eg to simply e. That suffix was used in words like bloody, speedy, crafty, mighty, and greedy. Another common Old English suffix was like, originally spelled like l I c pronounced lic, or sometimes spelled lice, pronounced liche. It survives in the suffix like in words like childlike and ladylike. But that suffix evolved into another form which is much more common in modern English. The final consonant, k or ch, disappeared over time. So leek or leek liche, simply became li during Middle English, and that suffix became our very common adjective and adverb suffix, ly. So a word like friendly was originally freanlich, friendlike, and deadly was derlick, dead, like the word fatherly was faderlich, fatherlike. But eventually all of those final consonants disappeared and we were left with just li, friendly, deadly, fatherly. As a general rule, the ending lic lic was used for adjectives, and the suffix licca, l, I, c, e was used for adverbs. So let's look at a few of the early examples of adverbs. So the adverb carefully was karfelica, careful, like the adverb dearly was derriclica dear, like evenly, was e vanlice even like. But again, the final consonant eventually disappeared, and today we just have the common adverb suffix ly, spelled ly. The Anglo Saxons also used a lot of noun suffixes. In an earlier episode, I noted that the word dom meant law or judgment in Old English, and that word was used as a suffix and gave us our modern suffix dom. So the realm of the king's judgment was the kingdom, and it was applied by extension to words like earldom, freedom and wisdom. The suffix hod is the origin of our modern suffix hood. It produced words like childhood, knighthood and priesthood. In Old English, the suffix er was a suffix to indicate agency, and it's the original version of our modern er ending. It survives in words like worker, baker and speaker. The related feminine suffix estre was also used. It created a word like songster in Old English, which meant a female singer. In early Middle English, it created the word spinster. But it eventually lost its original sense as a feminine suffix. And today it's used in words like gangster, teamster, youngster and pollster, which are all gender neutral. The suffix ness was used to create Old English nouns like greatness, fairness, thickness and sickness. The suffix ship created words like friendship, kingship and lordship. It meant quality or condition. So friendship was the condition of being friends and kingship was the condition of being a king. The condition or quality of land was landschype, landship. But around the year 1600, the English borrowed the Dutch version of the same word. Remember that the sh sound had evolved in English out of the original Germanic sk sound. So when English borrowed the Dutch version of landship, it came in with its original sk sound, and it came in as landscape, which is the version which we still use today. Another common Old English suffix was kin, pronounced kune in Old English. This was literally the word kin, meaning a relative. It had produced the word kuning, meaning a leader of the family, and kuning eventually became our modern word king. But that word kin or kun was also used as a suffix. The word angel, kun was a term which preceded the word English. It meant the angul kin or the angul kindred. But at the end of words, kin or kun became kun kind. And we still see it in words like mankind and humankind. So in its literal sense, mankind is the man kindred, the kindred of the people. Another suffix which the Anglo Saxons used was mal. It meant measurement, fixed, time or occasion. And it's one of those suffixes which has largely disappeared over time. In its census measurement, the word Mal is actually cognate with the words measure and meter from Latin. Thanks to common Indo European roots, the plural version of mal was malum. And when it was combined with a specific unit of measurement, it became an adverb, used in the sense of item by item or one at a time. So the Old English word drop, malum was literally drop measurements, but it meant drop by drop. And photmalam was literally foot measurements, but it meant foot by foot. And yermalum meant year by year. So you can probably discern that this particular suffix died out over the centuries, except in one word, the word piecemeal. During early Middle English, people in England still remembered that old construction using malum at the end of a word. And thanks to the Normans, they now had the French word peace. So in order to express the idea of piece by piece, they went back and used that Old English suffix and they created the word peace, malum, which survives today as piecemeal. Knowledge of this suffix must have survived for a long time after people stopped using it, because Shakespeare used it in the early modern English period. He used the phrase to tear her limb, meal to mean tear her limb from limb. So, as you can see, the Anglo Saxons were creating lots of new words to add to their vocabulary. Those original Germanic single syllable words were growing and becoming much more expressive. Words were being combined, prefixes and suffixes were being added. And all of this was happening at the same time that Latin words were starting to come into English in large numbers. English was slowly emerging as a literary language. And the final step in this process was the development which we've explored over the past few episodes. You can't have a great literary language without literacy. So the growth of formal education and literacy within Britain was the last fundamental step on the way to English becoming a great literary language. With the rise of education, the Anglo Saxons had to come up with new words to express many of those new ideas. A library or a place where books were kept was the book hoard. A school was a larhus, a lore house or learning house. Education brought new concepts. The word geometry eventually found its way into English, but it was originally earthcraft. Medicine was also improved thanks to education and learning. A doctor in Old English was was a lache, one who speaks magic words to bring about a cure. In fact, lache is cognate with the Latin word lecture, thanks to Common Indo European roots. So in Old English, medicine was originally lachdem or latchcraft. Epilepsy was the fiela siognis, falling sickness. Gout was the photlight the foot disease, the body was the flesh, hama, flesh home or the sahul hus, the soul house. And the I was the heovod, yim, the head gem. So just as new technologies created the need for new words, so did the burgeoning education system. And English proved to be very adept at creating new words related to education. So I want to digress here for a moment and look at the origin of a few English words associated with learning. And let's start with the word learn. If you've ever sat through a boring lecture, staring at the clock, counting the minutes as they go by, then you might not be surprised to learn that the word learn and the word last as to endure are both cognate. They both come from Common Indo European roots. The original Indo European word was something like leis, and it meant footprints or track. So if you were tracking an animal, you had to stay on track to learn its whereabouts. Similarly, if you were following someone else's lead, you also had to stay on track and follow in their footsteps. So this process became associated with learning and acquiring knowledge. To learn, you had to follow a track or path. So this process of acquiring knowledge became lern in Old English, and what you actually learned, the noun, was called lar, which is the original version of the word lore. I noted earlier that a school was called a larhus in Old English, which was a lore house. We still have the word lore and a compound word like folklore, which is literally the folks learning or the people's learning. So learning was the equivalent of following the teacher's lead. And that meant you had to be persistent, you had to stay on track. And that produced the Old English word lasten, which meant to last or endure. So ultimately, learn and last come from the same source. By the way, the sense of last as the final position actually comes from a completely separate Old English word. Now, the Latin version of the same Indo European root word lais was lyra. And in Latin it retained more of its original Indo European meaning. It meant furrow or track. But sometimes you might deviate from the track to describe that kind of deviation. The Romans combined the prefix de, meaning away from, with that word lira, meaning path. So d delira meant a deviation from the normal path. And that word came into English as delirious and delirium. So if you take a class about folklore and you're trying to learn and you think you're becoming delirious because you can't last to the end of class, you can at least rest assured that all of those key words are cognate. They all come from the Indo European word for footprints. Of course, footprints is another compound word, but it's not actually an Old English compound word, because print is a French word which came in after the Normans. Footstep is actually composed of native Old English words foot and step. But the first written evidence of footstep is from the early 1200s in the early Middle English period. So while it may have been an Old English compound, there's no surviving written evidence of it during that period. In Old English, footprints was rendered as footswaff, which was literally foot swath. But the Beowulf poet used another compound word for footprints, and that poet harkened back to the original Germanic word, which gave rise to words like learn. And last, he called footprints footlast. Footlast. So in a sense, footprints were foot learning. The Baluth poet uses the word footlast after introducing the dragon in the last portion of the poem. The dragon is guarding gold and other valuables in his lair, But a thief awakens the ire of the dragon when he breaks in and steals some of the valuables. The dragon discovers the trespass by observing the thief's footprints or footlast. And here's the actual passage from Beowulf. This is lines 2287 through 2290. And first, here's a modern translation. Then the dragon awakened, his anger was renewed. Sniffing along the stones. The dragon discovered the enemy's footprints. The thief had stepped secretly and craftily near the dragon's head. And here's the original version in Old fasi wirrum un woch brocht wasta erftrusthana sterk hirot und fand fondas vortlast he to ford jestop dir na krafta drachen hea fude nech. So let's break that down into each half line and see if we can do a literal translation. The first half line is the sel wurm unwoke, then the worm awoke, or then the dragon awakened. The second half line is rok vasjeini wad wrath was renewed, or his anger was renewed. Stunk the after stana stunk, then after stone. But it really meant sniffing along the stones. Sterk hert, which is really an euphemism for the dragon, an fond, which meant found out. So sterk hert on fand was the stark heart found out or the dragon discovered. The next half line is feandes forlast fiend's footprints or the enemy's footprints he to ford jestop. He too forth stepped. The thief had stepped. Dirnan krafte. Dirnan was an Old English word that meant secretly. So dirnan is secretly and krafta is craftily. So secretly and craftily. And the last half line is draken hafta nechama dragon's head. Near or near the dragon's head. And I wanted to read that passage to you for a couple of reasons. First, I wanted you to see how the Beowulf poet used the phrase footlast for footprints. But I also wanted to illustrate how English had become a literary language by the end of the 8th century. By the time many scholars think Beowulf was composed, the poet was capable of combining and shaping words in a very sophisticated way. Not only does the passage satisfy the required alliteration of the poem, it also illustrates how the poet could avoid redundancy by pulling from different sources and by making new words. The primary focus of the passage is the dragon, which is actually a Latin word. And in that short passage, the poet refers to the dragon three different ways. Each of the ways represents one of the techniques which we've covered over the last three episodes. First, he calls it the worm, a simple, basic Germanic word used to translate the Latin word dragon. Then he uses an Old English compound word to describe the dragon poetically. He calls it the stark heart. And finally, he calls it the drakken, which is a version of the word dragon and thus represents a word borrowed from Latin. So in that one passage, we can see how English had combined these techniques to become a full fledged literary language. But even though much of this growth in the language had been spawned by the Northumbrian Renaissance, that Renaissance was slowly fading away. So I want to conclude this episode by looking at the changing landscape of Anglo Saxon Britain in the mid and late seven hundreds. By the middle seven hundreds, the political power of Northumbria was gradually being replaced by another kingdom, the kingdom of Mercia to the south. Mercia had been a threat to Northumbria for decades. Its king, Penda, had been partially or fully responsible for the defeat and death of Northumbrian kings like Edwin and Oswald. But Oswald's brother Oswy had finally defeated Penda. And Northumbria prospered in the aftermath of Penda's defeat. But in the year 716, Ethelbald assumed power as king of Mercia in the English Midlands. He quickly emerged as the strongest ruler of his day, and his power exceeded well beyond Mercia to the other kingdoms in southern Britain. Even though the Anglo Saxon Chronicle doesn't list him as a Bretwalde, or overlord. Most scholars have no problem giving him that label. Ethelbald ruled during Bede's lifetime, and Bede described him as the ruler of all of England south of Northumbria. In fact, a charter of the year 736 identifies Ethelbald as king not only of the Mercians, but of all of the provinces which are called by the general name South English. He even began to call himself King of all south England. But the powerful Ethelbald was murdered by his bodyguard a couple of decades after that charter, and a period of civil war followed in Mercia. By the end of the year 757, another relative of Penda had claimed the throne, and this king would eventually surpass Ethelbald in terms of power and prestige. That king was Atha. During the later half of the seven hundreds, Atha ruled over a Mercian kingdom that was unrivaled within Britain. Even though Atha never controlled Northumbria, there was no question where the political and social power lay during the later portion of the 8th century. But the rise of Mercia wasn't the only problem for Northumbria. Across the Channel in France, the Frankish kingdom was at the height of its power under the rule of Charlemagne. And Charlemagne oversaw the Carolingian Renaissance there. And that saw the Frankish kingdom bring in some of the leading scholars from Northumbria. And within a few years, the Frankish kingdom had replaced Northumbria as the leading center of education in Western Europe. In addition to those developments, there was another even greater threat on the horizon. Literally on the horizon. The Vikings from Scandinavia began to arrive in Northumbria at the end of the 8th century. And all those great monasteries which I've discussed, Lindisfarne, Iona, Whitby, Jarrow, they were all ransacked and plundered, and most were destroyed. Over the next few episodes, we're going to explore all of those developments and the impact which those developments had on the English language. Next time, we're going to turn our attention to the east, to Scandinavia, to the ancestors of the Vikings. We're going to explore what was happening in Scandinavia while the Anglo Saxons were busy carving up Britain. And we're going to explore the origins of the Viking culture. And this early period is kind of important in the history of English because it provides the setting and backdrop for a poem which I keep mentioning in the podcast, the little poem about a man named Beowulf. So next time, we'll explore the historical roots of the Vikings and the origins of Beowulf until then, thanks for listening to the History of English podcast SA.