Wednesday, April 9, 2014

A-to-Z Challenge: Heart

More words! Okay, I’m running out of little introductions to do. How many more days do I have?



Another one without a specific date attached to it. Heart comes from the Old English heorte, which could mean heart, breast, soul, mind, or even desire. Heorte comes from the Proto Germanic khertan- (yes, a K!) and before that, the Proto Indo European kerd-, meaning heart. Interesting factoid of the day: the reason heart has an “ea” spelling is because it used to have a long vowel sound, meaning “ee” instead of “ah”. It’s one of the many cases in etymology where you’ll find pronunciation shifted but spelling didn’t.

Frigging spelling.

Sources
Tony Jebson’s page on the Origins of Old English
University of Texas at Austin Linguistic Research Center

16 comments:

  1. Heart still means all those things even today.
    No wonder kids struggle with spelling.

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  2. Very cool that "desire" can be attributed to the root of "heart." Makes perfect sense. :)

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  3. I love this: "heorte, which could mean heart, breast, soul, mind, or even desire". That makes perfect sense.

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  4. Loving that heart can mean so many beautiful things :)
    Suzanne @ Suzannes Tribe
    xx

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  5. Don't write a new intro every day. Keep the same one explaining what you're doing for the challenge. We all skim it anyway.

    Desire and heart used the same word? That makes an odd sort of sense.

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  6. I like that word.
    I'm glad my blogging day happened to fall on 'H.' :)

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  7. Hi JE .. I love finding out where words come from - always and thankfully have always been reasonably good at spelling ..

    I enjoyed this - cheers Hilary

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  8. It's interesting that heart has always had ties to the emotional definition it has now, not the physical thing beating in our chests. This is fascinating, as always. It's also interesting to see how pronunciation has changed but the spelling hasn't.

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  9. Love your post! <33

    Please visit my blog, www.thatgirlybookworm.blogspot.com

    I'm doing the A-Z Challenge and my theme focuses on books and the title of the letter of the day!

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  10. Love your post! <33

    Please visit my blog, www.thatgirlybookworm.blogspot.com

    I'm doing the A-Z Challenge and my theme focuses on books and the title of the letter of the day!

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  11. Ha! Spelin iz relativ.

    Fun post today; I'm enjoying learning snippets of etymology from your blog.

    This is A. Catherine Noon, visiting from my blog at http://acatherinenoon.blogspot.com for the A-Z Challenge, #327 on the list. Happy blogging!

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  12. I didn't expect the k beginning and I'm trying to pronounce heorte.

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Please validate me.