My musing started with a post on my other blog about Latin roots in Harry Potter books. One of the ones I picked out was the spell "nox," which comes from the Latin word for "night." I couldn't think of any modern English words that use that Latin root, but then Lilly posted mentioning the word "nocturnal," and the German "nacht" ("night"), and it started me thinking etymologically.
See, English has a complicated history. It's an Indo-European language, meaning it stems, like a lot of the languages of Europe (as well as some surprising ones like Hindi and Afrikaans), from an ancestor language called Indo-European, a language so ancient we have no record of it except that linguists know it has to have existed. Here's a picture:
(If you're wondering what the "proto" means in "Proto-Indo-European," it means that the language has been reconstructed by linguists. As I said before, it's too ancient to have anything written down, so we don't know much about it past that it exists.)
So this is fun. I haven't looked up any etymology on any of the following words, but I'm going to hypothesize on their relationships.
"Night" --Modern English
"Nacht" (night)--German
"Nox"(night)--Latin
"Nocturnal" (occurring at night)--Modern English
If you're wondering what that dotted line on the language tree is for, it's because Middle English was heavily influenced by French when the Normans (from France) conquered the British Isles in 1066. Thus, a lot of words in English were borrowed from French, which descended from Latin. This resulted in the common misconception that English is descended from Latin. Does that make sense?
I'm going to go ahead and say that "nocturnal" is one of those words borrowed from Latin. It wouldn't be all that odd for (and I'm going to put these in brackets, which is Linguistics speak for "this is how they're pronounced, not how they're spelled") [nɑks] ("nox") to turn into [nɑkt] "noct." The "al" ending of "nocturnal" makes it an adjective in English.
Now, "nacht" comes from German, which is so distantly related to Latin that it might as well not be for our purposes. But, notice the similarities in sound between "night" and "nacht"? Bear in mind that Middle English was very very heavily influenced by French, which doesn't like funny sounds like that back-of-the-threat one in the German "nacht." And notice the spelling of English "night": where did that gh come from? I bet it was a gutteral sound in Middle English, but that French influence stamped it out, leaving only the spelling as a fossil to attest to its existence. Think of words like "laugh" and "enough." That same gh, but this time it's turned into an f, because that's easier to do at the end of a word than to not pronounce it at all like in "night." What about "sight"?
So, say it out loud if you want to, but add in that gutteral sound to "night." Sounds quite a bit like "nacht," right? I'd venture a pretty confident guess that "nacht" and "night" are both direct descendants of the same word in Germanic.
"Nocturnal" came into the language later, borrowed directly from Latin "nox," as a lot of higher-vocabulary words are.
Now I'll go look up etymology, and see if I'm right. (oh look, I bet "right" is Germanic too!)
So says the Oxford English Dictionary:
"Nocturnal" is the adjective form of "nocturn," which comes from the Latin "nocturnus." No mention of "nox," but I'm guessing it's in the same word family in Latin.
"Night" is indeed Germanic, although I can't seem to find the exact word in Germanic. The Oxford English Dictionary didn't see fit to include that in the entry.The Old High German is "nacht," as is the Modern German. The reconstructed Indo-European is "nokt." Which is interesting because I can see the Latin "nocturnus" descending from that.
Love, Dory
Wowzers! I agree that "nokt" seems like the common ancestor of the Latin "nocturnus" and the Germanic "nacht." I wonder how common it is for an Indo-European word to survive so intactly in two otherwise unrelated modern branches? This is something I'm going to keep in mind to look for...
ReplyDeleteAnother interesting thought: Many anthropologists believe that Native Americans first arrived on this continent from east Asia during the ice age via a land corridor through what is now the Bering Strait. I recently watched a documentary in my earth science class titled, "The Human Genome Project," which heavily supports this theory through genetic tracing of mitochondrial DNA in indigenous people all over the world. The film also pointed out that there are many strikingly common linguistic features between the languages of North American tribes and the indigenous people of northern Europe, from iceland and even as far as Russia. Does this mean Native American languages can be considered distant descendants of Indo-European as well?
ReplyDeleteIt'd probably have to go further back than Indo-European. There are theories out there that there are ancestor languages that connect, say, the Indo-European Branch to languages like Japanese and Mandarin or the Native American languages.
ReplyDeleteBut, it's not a widely believed theory, mostly because evidence is almost impossible to get. There's no literature, let alone living speakers of those ancient languages. They might have linguistic features in common, but I guess that depends on HOW similar they are. Do they have words like "night" and "nacht" that can be traced all the way back to that ancestor language, decently intact?
I suppose some progress may be made on the DNA front, but though that may prove that people are genetically related, it can't prove that their languages are.
For example, there are Native American languages that are completely unrelated too, as far as linguists can tell, even though they lived close and interacted with each other. In class we talked about the Hopi and the Navajo, who lived near each other, had similar lifestyles and technologies, and may even have intermarried. But their languages are from two different families, one Uto-Astecan and one Athabaskan, which are languages as ancient as Indo-European.
I see! I must admit I don't yet have a very good knowledge base in Native American cultures. This is something I hope to remedy, as I've always had a very romantic fascination with them, particularly the Great Plains people.
ReplyDeleteI agree, I think they're super interesting! The stuff we learned in high school history classes always made it seem like every Native American culture is largely the same, and I can't believe that can be true. I'd love to know more about them. You'll have to fill me in, you Anthro Major, you.
ReplyDeleteI definitely will! I suspect there will be a whole slew of new hypotheses when I get there.
ReplyDelete