As Peter Rozovsky reported in the comments after the last post, "Island" and "isle" are etymologically unrelated. Crazy, right? Crazy, but true. "Isle" stems from the same source as the French île, as in Île de la Cité, the heart of Paris. It is connected to the Latin insula--you know, like in "insulate", or "peninsula". As the Online Etymology Dictionary has it, the "Ancients" guessed that it came from in salo--that which is in the sea.
"Island", though, has an Old English beginning. It went back through yland to the older iegland. "Land" is probably self-explanatory--ieg is more interesting. It's related to many water words, like "agua" and "aqua". Ieg shows up in British place names, where it means, "slightly raised dry ground offering settlement sites in areas surrounded by marsh or subject to flooding". It is a little bit of land upon the waters.
All right, all right, but where is that blasted "s" coming from? In either case? It seems to be that the s in island comes across from contamination from French, but how can that be when île didn't have an s in it either?
Students of French probably already have the answer. See that little cap over the i in île? That's what's known as a circumflex, mes amis. The circumflex represents a missing, silent letter--often an s. The French dropped a lot of 's's over time. What's interesting is that when the French Normans invaded England and came to stay for a couple few centuries, the English gamely added those words to their own language. Words like forest, hospital, feast. These words sounded like the Old French words. But in France itself, these words were undergoing a change in the vernacular. The circumflex was the monkly nod (monks being the ones writing stuff down at that time) to that vanished, silent s. Forest is forêt. Beast is bête. Paste is pâté. Here's the link that helped me understand all this.
And here's a discussion of more surprisingly unrelated words.
Like I always say--you never know where ignorance is going to take you...
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Seana
ReplyDeleteThere's a very good discussion in one of the Walter Scott novels (possibly Ivanhoe) about the English adoption of French words when there was already a perfectly good English word available. Wood for forest in your example. They talked particularly about food, how in the field it was English pig, swine, etc. but on the plate French pork.
Very interesting. Of course, French is tres seductive. Even the Russians seem to have fallen under its spell, at least according to Tolstoy.
ReplyDeleteI do wonder sometimes what the French have against pronouncing the end of their words.
The example one often sees, usually to contrast the humble, earthy Anglo-Saxons with the luxurious Norman French are the Germanic words cow and sheep in the field, to be consumed as Latinate beef and mutton on the plate.
ReplyDeleteSo the English got to tend and the Normans got to eat, if I have that right.
ReplyDeleteBut actually, neither beef nor mutton sound that Latin or fancified compared to some others we could name, usually involving three or four syllables.
Try them in their more Gallic guises of boeuf and mouton.
ReplyDeleteIt's an irony of history that the refined Normans had been swashbuckling Vikings just a few generations before.
Whoa! I love being arrested in my ignorance. I sure hope I remember this.
ReplyDeleteAs in "arreter."
ReplyDeletePeter, 'boeuf' isn't too scary, but bœuf bourguignon is a pretty Frenchy fancified name for beef braised in red wine. Intimidated a whole generation of housewives, I bet, although I bet Julia Childs made them feel a certain sang froid.
ReplyDeleteTouché, Kathleen. Although I'm actually hoping, perhaps naively, to get through life without being arrested in my ignorance. It could so easily happen.
ReplyDeleteI'm sure I've mentioned the time I struck up a chat with a young American couple when we were touring Chartres cathedral. We agreed to meet in Paris that evening for dinner, and the waitress, overhearing our menu deliberations (the husband and I could read the menu in French; the wife could not) helped out with an enthusiastic "Boeuf bourguignon; eet iz zuh best!"
ReplyDeleteOh, and speaking of fancified food names, that was the same trip when I ate gésiers de canard confits and realized how much more rustic the dish sounds in English: jellied ducks' gizzards.
ReplyDeleteVery nice for a Parisian waitress, since I read that the dish comes from peasant origins.
ReplyDeleteI don't think you can sell any of the innards of ducks unless you fit the word canard in their somewhere.
You could probably say something similar about snails.
ReplyDeleteI made is a point on that trip to at least one disgusting animal part every day, but I drew the line at snails.
ReplyDeleteI haven't had them either, but I don't think I'd draw the line at them, since texture doesn't really bother me. From what I understand, escargot is more about butter and garlic than anything else.
ReplyDeleteWell, when you get right down to it, most non desserts are.
I had rabbit on that trip and frog's legs. I might not eat some of those things again, but I'm glad I are them once.
ReplyDeleteMy feeling about escargots is I'll chow down on the butter and garlic; you can have the snails.
I let slugs wander around in my house at night,and the worst I do when I find them is painstakingly put them out the window, so you can see how that is going to go.
ReplyDeleteWell, your local university's sports teams are named after a slug, so that's different.
ReplyDeleteMais Oui, I've been jailed for my ignorance before...
ReplyDeletePeter, well the banana slug is a good deal more charismatic than the ones that seem to do some sort of circuit around my living room in the wee hours, but its the same principal.
ReplyDeleteDo tell, Julie--do tell...
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ReplyDeleteA circumflex or, as more than one French teacher has called it, un petit chapeau, or "little hat."
ReplyDelete