Honestly, I might be doing this one
because I’m cold. So very cold.
I actually did fire already, but it
was one of the first etymology posts I ever did and focused more on the
difference between fire and fiery and why they’re stupidly spelled so different.
I already explained the spelling thing in my other post, but here’s a
refresher: it wasn’t spelled fire until the thirteenth century at the earliest,
and before that it was spelled fier. For some reason the spelling changed for
that, but not for the adjective version of the word, because words are weird.
Fire comes from the Old English fyr, which
was pronounced the same way anyway. Before
that it was the Proto
Germanic fur and Proto Indo European perjos, from the root paewr, which also means fire,
as well as egni-, another word for
fire. Yes, they had two. One was for “inanimate” fire, one was for “animate”
fire. I’m not really sure how you distinguish them, but that’s why we have the
words fire, pyro, and ignite.
Pyro-, as well as related words
pyre, pyrite, and others, is from the Greek pyr,
fire,
which is from paewr-. Ignite showed up in the seventeenth century (ignition showed up a little earlier)
from the classical Latin ignitus, the past participle of ignire, to ignite.
But there are other words to look
at. Flame has a completely separate origin, coming from the Middle
English flaume (noun) and flaumen (verb). The words are from the Anglo
French flaume/flaumbe or flaumer/flamber, hence the word flambé,
and come from the classical Latin flammula,
little flame,
from the Proto Indo European bhel-,
shine, flash or burn, and origin of
words like black and bleach and just so many others. Such as blaze, which comes from the Old English
blaese, a flame or blast, from the
Proto Germanic blas, which was taken
from bhel- also.
Tl;dr: we have a lot of words for
fire.
Sources
Tony Jebson’s
page on the Origins of
Old English
I'd think if a fire was inanimate, it wouldn't be a fire...
ReplyDeleteAnimate fires are clearly ones that speak to you, like that whole burning bush thing.
ReplyDeleteBack in the day when they were inventing words, Grogg turned to Ugg and said, 'the yellow glowy thing hurts! What should we name it?'
ReplyDeleteWell, fire was an important concept to earlier peoples. Kind of like other heating systems are to us at this time of year.
ReplyDelete