English Past and Present

by Richard Chenevix Trench

‘Whole’, ‘Hale’, ‘Heal’

In the cases hitherto adduced, it has been the omission of a letter which has clouded and concealed the etymology. The intrusion of a letter sometimes does the same. Thus in the early editions of Paradise Lost, and in all writers of that time, you will find ‘scent’, an odour, spelt ‘sent’. It was better so; there is no other noun substantive ‘sent’, with which it is in danger of being confounded; while its relation with ‘sentio’, with ‘resent’[248], ‘dissent’, and the like, is put out of sight by its novel spelling; the intrusive ‘c’, serves only to mislead. The same thing was attempted with ‘site’, ‘situate’, ‘situation’, spelt for a time by many, ‘scite’, ‘scituate’, ‘scituation’; but it did not continue with these. Again, ‘whole’, in Wiclif’s Bible, and indeed much later, occasionally as far down as Spenser, is spelt ‘hole’, without the ‘w’ at the beginning. The present orthography may have the advantage of at once distinguishing the word to the eye from any other; but at the same time the initial ‘w’, now prefixed, hides its relation to the verb ‘to heal’, with which it is closely allied. The ‘whole’ man is he whose hurt is ‘healed’ or covered[249] (we say of the convalescent that he ‘recovers’)[250]; ‘whole’ being closely allied to ‘hale’ (integer), from which also by its modern spelling it is divided. ‘Wholesome’ has naturally followed the fortunes of ‘whole’; it was spelt ‘holsome’ once.

Of ‘island’ too our present spelling is inferior to the old, inasmuch as it suggests a hybrid formation, as though the word were made up of the Latin ‘insula’, and the Saxon ‘land’. It is quite true that ‘isle’ is in relation with, and descent from, ‘insula’, ‘isola’, ‘île’; and hence probably the misspelling of ‘island’. This last however has nothing to do with ‘insula’, being identical with the German ‘eiland’, the Anglo-Saxon ‘ealand’[251] and signifying the sea-land, or land girt, round with the sea. And it is worthy of note that this ‘s’ in the first syllable of ‘island’ is quite of modern introduction. In all the earlier versions of the Scriptures, and in the Authorized Version as at first set forth, it is ‘iland’; while in proof that this is not accidental, it may be observed that, while ‘iland’ has not the ‘s’, ‘isle’ has it (see Rev. i. 9). ‘Iland’ indeed is the spelling which we meet with far down into the seventeenth century.

Folk-etymologies

What has just been said of ‘island’ leads me as by a natural transition to observe that one of the most frequent causes of alteration in the spelling of a word is a wrongly assumed derivation. It is then sought to bring the word into harmony with, and to make it by its spelling suggest, this derivation, which has been erroneously thrust upon it. Here is a subject which, followed out as it deserves, would form an interesting and instructive chapter in the history of language[252]. Let me offer one or two small contributions to it; noting first by the way how remarkable an evidence we have in this fact, of the manner in which not the learned only, but all persons learned and unlearned alike, crave to have these words not body only, but body and soul. What an attestation, I say, of this lies in the fact that where a word in its proper derivation is unintelligible to them, they will shape and mould it into some other form, not enduring that it should be a mere inert sound without sense in their ears; and if they do not know its right origin, will rather put into it a wrong one, than that it should have for them no meaning, and suggest no derivation at all[253].

There is probably no language in which such a process has not been going forward; in which it is not the explanation, in a vast number of instances, of changes in spelling and even in form, which words have undergone. I will offer a few examples of it from foreign tongues, before adducing any from our own. ‘Pyramid’ is a word, the spelling of which was affected in the Greek by an erroneous assumption of its derivation; the consequences of this error surviving in our own word to the present day. It is spelt by us with a ‘y’ in the first syllable, as it was spelt with the υ corresponding in the Greek. But why was this? It was because the Greeks assumed that the pyramids were so named from their having the appearance of flame going up into a point[254], and so they spelt ‘pyramid’, that they might find πῦρ or ‘pyre’ in it; while in fact ‘pyramid’ has nothing to do with flame or fire at all; being, as those best qualified to speak on the matter declare to us, an Egyptian word of quite a different signification[255], and the Coptic letters being much better represented by the diphthong ‘ei’ than by the letter ‘y’, as no doubt, but for this mistaken notion of what the word was intended to mean, they would have been.

Once more—the form ‘Hierosolyma’, wherein the Greeks reproduced the Hebrew ‘Jerusalem’, was intended in all probability to express that the city so called was the sacred city of the Solymi[256]. At all events the intention not merely of reproducing the Hebrew word, but also of making it significant in Greek, of finding ἱερόν in it, is plainly discernible. For indeed the Greeks were exceedingly intolerant of foreign words, till they had laid aside their foreign appearance—of all words which they could not thus quicken with a Greek soul; and, with a very characteristic vanity, an ignoring of all other tongues but their own, assumed with no apparent misgivings that all words, from whatever quarter derived, were to be explained by Greek etymologies[257].

‘Tartar’ is another word, of which it is at least possible that a wrongly assumed derivation has modified the spelling, and indeed not the spelling only, but the very shape in which we now possess it. To many among us it may be known that the people designated by this appellation are not properly ‘Tartars’, but ‘Tatars’; and you sometimes perhaps have noted the omission of the ‘r’ on the part of those who are curious in their spelling. How, then, it may be asked, did the form ‘Tartar’ arise? When the terrible hordes of middle Asia burst in upon civilized Europe in the thirteenth century, many beheld in the ravages of their innumerable cavalry a fulfilment of that prophetic word in the Revelation (chap. ix.) concerning the opening of the bottomless pit; and from this belief ensued the change of their name from ‘Tatars’ to ‘Tartars’, which was thus put into closer relation with ‘Tartarus’ or hell, out of which their multitudes were supposed to have proceeded[258].

Another good example in the same kind is the German word ‘sündflut’, the Deluge, which is now so spelt as to signify a ‘sinflood’, the plague or flood of waters brought on the world by the sins of mankind; and probably some of us have before this admired the pregnant significance of the word. Yet the old High German word had originally no such intention; it was spelt ‘sinfluot’, that is, the great flood; and as late as Luther, indeed in Luther’s own translation of the Bible, is so spelt as to make plain that the notion of a ‘sin-flood’ had not yet found its way into, even as it had not affected the spelling of, the word[259].

‘Currants’