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5.2 -ly: ‘a prolific formative’

The suffix -ly has been very common at all stages of English – which is why the OED calls it ‘a prolific formative’. It is associated with the Germanic noun likom, which meant ‘appearance, form, body’. There are two examples (11 and 12) in Chapter 5’s Table 5.1 to suggeThe suffix -ly has been very common at all stages of English – which is why the OED calls it ‘a prolific formative’. It is associated with the Germanic noun likom, which meant ‘appearance, form, body’. There are two examples (11 and 12) in Chapter 5’s Table 5.1 to suggest that PDE -ly was OE -līc. This OE word could mean ‘corpse’. For example, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for the year 1135 describes how someone’s son and friend brohten his līc to Englelande (‘brought his body to England’). There are some connected words, now obsolete, associated with death. Before you died in the nineteenth century, perhaps a ‘lych-owl’ screeched, to portend your coming demise; the seventeenth-century English poet Michael Drayton talks about the shrieking lych-owl that doth never cry/ But [except] boding death. Then when you died, your body might be taken through a ‘lych-gate’ – the churchyard gateway. After your funeral, ‘lych-songs’ could be sung at the wake. The Modern German word for a corpse is Leiche.

Associating the -ly/-līc suffix with death stretches the imagination a little, but the association with ‘appearance’ is easier to grasp. The OED tells us that the Germanic goðoliko meant ‘goodly’, ‘having the appearance of good’, and one clear meaning of the suffix is ‘having the appearance or form indicated by the first element of the word’ (OED). It could be used in OE to form adjectives from nouns or other adjectives. Hence cāserlīc, meaning ‘imperial’ (‘Caesar-like’), and deofel-līc (‘diabolical’, or ‘devil-like’). It remains a ‘prolific formative’ in PDE in this usage. We have kingly, masterly scholarly and many, many more. Incidentally, as the above PDE versions of cāserlīc and deofel-līc suggest, -like is another PDE suffix that can carry the same idea as -ly. Also, the word like (in He looks like his mother, for example) carries on the idea of ‘having the appearance of’.

As well as being used to make adjectives, -ly can also turn an adjective into an adverb. Instances 11 and 12 in Table 5.1 give OE examples. In PDE -ly has become a very common way of marking ‘adverbs of manner’ – words that describe how something is done: quickly, lazily, angrily and so on.

But how does death come into all of this? Is there any reason why a word meaning ‘appearance’ or ‘form’ should also mean ‘body’?

5.3 Place names and ‘s’ sounds

In West London there is a district known as Chiswick. A wick is a village or farm, and the ‘chis’ in Chiswick means ‘cheese’. Chiswick was a place of cheese farms, and an annual cheese market was held there. At the other end of England, in Cumbria, there is a town called Keswick, and this name also means ‘cheese farm’. The north-west of England, where Cumbria is, was an area dominated by the Vikings. Consequently, you have an initial /k/ rather than a /tʃ/; (this is discussed in section 5.3.3).

Another interesting place-name example, already touched on in CW3.1, relates to what happened to the Latin castrum. Its original meaning of ‘military encampment’ became extended to refer more generally to ‘settlement’, and it is found in quite a few English place names like Manchester, Rochester, Winchester, Lancaster, Muncaster, Chester and Chesterfield. Sometimes these names have the OE /tʃ/ (Manchester), and sometimes the ON /k/) (Lancaster).

5.4 Niman and take

We have already come across (in 3.2) the OE verb niman, ‘to take’. If you know modern German you will readily associate it with their verb nehmen; and in modern Dutch the word is nemen. Our PDE take comes from the Old Norse taka, which originally in Germanic languages meant ‘to touch’. It was initially used in just those areas where there was Scandinavian influence – the Danelaw district. So, while King Alfred, living in Wessex, uses niman, the monk who wrote a poem called the Ormulum (described in CW11.2), living in the Danelaw area of the East Midlands, uses taka. In ME, both words were used, but over time taka won the day. Niman took on a different meaning: to nim survived into EModE meaning ‘to steal’, and a nim was ‘a thief’. This doubtless gave us the name of Corporal Nym, a character with thieving tendencies in Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor and Henry V. Otherwise, niman has died a death (though the last OED citation for nim was as late as 1937). But often words have ‘ghosts’, and nim is possibly the root of the PDE word nimble (meaning ‘quick to take hold of’). Even more interesting is that the past participle of the verb – numb – has survived in PDE. Its original meaning was ‘taken’ or ‘seized’. How interesting etymologies can be!

5.5 Was English a creole?

Pidgin languages often develop in colonial situations where the colonisers speak a language like English or French, and the colonials a local native language, linguistically very different from the European one. A means of communication between the two groups needs to be developed, and the answer is often a pidgin language. For example, when Britain colonised Nigeria, the British and Nigerians developed an English-based pidgin in order to communicate. Often, pidgins become separate languages in their own right. Frequently, there is intermarriage between speakers of the two ethnic groups involved, and if there are offspring, the pidgin becomes a first language for them. When a pidgin becomes a first language for a significant part of a community, it is often known as a creole.

A main characteristic of pidgins is that they simplify some aspects of the colonisers’ language. Grammatical endings are often dropped, and notions like tense are often expressed not by different verb forms but by adverbs like ‘yesterday’ or ‘last week’. Many other forms of simplification will be made to make the language as easy to understand as possible. Here is a short example of an English-based pidgin. It is taken from an advertisement for a make of razor blades, broadcast on the Solomon Islands Broadcasting Service in 1971. The Solomon Islands are in the SW Pacific Ocean. They were placed under British protection at the end of the nineteenth century, and gained independence in 1978. The major language of communication is called Solomon Island Pidgin. Here are the first three lines of the transcript, with a ‘translation’ underneath:

Paul:

Hei, Peter! Baibai yu leit long parti blong Mary, ye.
Hey, Peter. Soon you’ll be late for Mary’s party.

Peter:

Orait, orait. Mi kam nau.
All right, all right. I’m coming now.

Paul:

Yu sheiv tudei, or no mor?
Did you shave today, or not?

Notice how tenses are handled here. The adverbs nau and tudei clarify the time involved, so it is not necessary for the verbs to carry tense endings – kam and sheiv are the forms used for every tense. Another simplification is that mi is used for both I and me. Notice also how possession is expressed (where we would say Mary’s party). And compare the complicated way the question in the last line needs to be phrased in PDE (Did you shave today?). Contrast this with the simple form used in the pidgin.

How are pidgins relevant to OE and ON? Pidgins usually arise between very dissimilar languages, which OE and ON were not. From this point of view, it is misleading to suggest that the two languages mingled to form a pidgin or creole. But what you do have is a situation in which speakers of two different languages seek a common form of communication. Grammatical differences between the two languages – complex noun and adjective declensions, elaborate verb conjugations – are likely to be dropped in the effort to communicate. As we shall see in Chapter 10, this is just what happened as OE changed into ME. Such grammatical simplification led Bailey and Marold (1977) to argue that creolisation was at work here. ‘It cannot be doubted’, they conclude, ‘that [Middle English] is a mixed language or creole’ (p. 22). But there is scholastic disagreement. Thomason and Kaufman (1988) argue that these grammatical simplifications were happening anyway, and contact with ON is not the major factor involved.

5.6 Here lies Gunni

Townend (2006) uses a number of texts to illustrate the various influences that affected OE. One is a short grave inscription found in Winchester. It is just five words long, and it reads:

HER LIÐ GVNNI: EORLES FEOLAGA

A possible translation is ‘Here lies Gunni, the earl’s companion’.

Townend draws attention to four linguistic points:

The first is than the name ‘Gunni’ is an Old Norse one, reminding us of their presence in England – even in Winchester, the capital of Wessex and an Anglo-Saxon stronghold well outside the Danelaw.

The second is that feōlaga is an ON loanword, meaning ‘companion’, which our PDE word fellow comes from.

Thirdly, although the word eorl existed in OE, its meaning was ‘man’ or warrior’. The word later took on the meaning of the ON jarl, to refer to a rank, replacing the OE ealdorman. This is how it seems to be being used here, so again you have ON influence.

The fourth point shows the possible influence of Latin in the phrase HER LIÐ. It means ‘here lies’, and the phrase is not found elsewhere in inscriptions. It may be a calque of the Latin hic iacet (literally ‘here lies’).

Together, these four points show that foreign influences were indeed at work on OE at various levels.