Language of Confusion: Gifts

Tis the season, right? Let’s look at where some gifts come from.

Gift showed up in the mid thirteenth century, I assume after give, although give doesn’t actually have a date of origin. Gift is thought to be Scandinavian in origin, like the Old Norse gift/gipt, gift, and before that is definitely from the Proto Germanic geftiz, from geb-, to give, from the Proto Indo European root ghabh-, give or receive. And of course that’s where give is from, just with different word tenses. It’s from the Old English giefan, give, from the Proto Germanic geban, which is also from geb-.

Now let’s look at a common gift that’s given (ha!): game. It showed up in the thirteenth century from the Old English gamen/gamenian, joke or play. It’s descended from Proto Germanic, from two parts: ga-, a “collective prefix”, basically a prefix that indicates a collection/collective; and mann, which means person. So a gaman is a collection of people. And that’s how you have a game. In related words, gamy/gamey is related to game, originally meaning spirited, then morphing to having to do with taste in the sense of hunting wild game. However, there’s also a rarely used definition of game where it’s a synonym for lame, i.e. a game leg. That use of game is not related to the others, and is probably just some sort of slang.

Toy showed up in the fourteenth century meaning, ahem, “amorous playing”, or sport. It actually didn’t mean toy like we use it until the sixteenth century. Unfortunately, not much is known about its origin, and it may be a combination of several different words. There are some similar Germanic words, like the Dutch speeltuig, which means toy, and the Swedish tyg, which means fabric, but we really don’t know where toy came from.

Finally today, how about a type of toy? Like a doll. Doll showed up in the mid sixteenth century, but back then it was only a nickname for Dorothy. In the early seventeenth century, it became slang for a girlfriend or lover, but then by the mid sixteenth century, it basically meant a slut. And then somehow when the eighteenth century rolled around, it was used for a child’s toy baby, and by the end of the century, it was once again back to being used as a term for pretty or silly women, so in a slightly more favorable light. Of course, if you try to use it on a woman these days, you’re liable to get punched in the mouth (deservedly so) for being patronizing. Wow, this word really went on a crazy journey.

Sources

Online Etymology Dictionary

Google Translate

Omniglot

Dictionary.com

University of Texas at Austin Linguistic Research Center

University of Texas at San Antonio’s page on Proto Indo European language

Tony Jebson’s page on the Origins of Old English

Old English-English Dictionary

Language of Confusion: It’s a Given

Because last week was Thanksgiving. Or something.

 

Give first showed up in Old Englishas giefan, with the same meaning (as in to give to someone), yet it actually appeared as yiven in Old English’s predecessor Middle English. The change to the hard g was from Norse influence, and probably the fact that yiven and giefan evolved from the Proto Germanicgebanan with a hard G. That word can be traced even further back to the ancient Proto Indo Europeanghabh (take, hold, have or give). This week’s “Can you believe they’re related” reveals that ghabh is also the origin word for habit. Weird? Yes, but habit comes from the classical Latin habitus, meaning demeanor or dress and the past participle of habere, “to have or hold”. The line from ghabh to there is a lot clearer now.

There’s also the alternate meaning of give, as in “give in”. There’s no obvious reason for the disparate meanings, but “give up” showed up in the twelfth century, give out in the fourteenth, and as in “give in” in the seventeenth, so it always seems to have had that meaning to it.

And we can’t forget about forgive. It showed up in Old English as, appropriately enough, forgiefan, which could mean “give or allow” as well as “forgive”, “give up” and “give away in marriage”. I’m kind of glad it’s lost that connotation. Anyway, the giefan part should be obvious by now but I don’t think we’ve ever talked about the prefix for- before (heh). As a prefix, for- can mean away, opposite, or completely. Since the whole for- thing could be a post of its own, let’s just say that forgive means “give completely”. That makes sense for most of the dropped definitions, but the current one was adopted basically as a substitute for pardon. Because for some reason, we needed another word for it.

TL;DR: Give and habit come from the same word from thousands of years ago and forgive was given a new meaning just because.

Sources

Online Etymology Dictionary

Tony Jebson’s page on The Origins of Old English

And both the University of Texas  and the University of Texas at San Antonio