Language Of Confusion: -Ceed, Part II

Part two of the words that come from the Proto Indo European ked-, to go or yield. Some of these words make sense. Some… not so much.
 
First, cease. It showed up in the fourteenth century, coming from the Old French cesser and classical Latin cessare, to put an end to (or, you know, cease). That’s actually from another verb, cedere, to give up or yield, and which we spoke of last week as being from ked-. Well, I guess if you cease doing something, you yield to not doing it? Does that sentence even make sense?
 
Next we’ll be looking at a bunch of words that have both -cede and -cess versions. Recede showed up in the early fifteenth century, while recess showed up in the mid sixteenth century, though back then it meant the act of receding, then meaning hidden/remote come the early seventeenth century. Not really sure how receding came to mean hidden, but that formed into meaning “receding into private chambers”, which became a niche (or receding space) in the late seventeenth century, and then in the early nineteenth century, a “place in recess”, as in, people not there. That was a weird journey. Recession is definitely a lot closer to recede than recess is now. Anyway, recede came from the Old French recede, recession from the modern French recession, and all three words come from the classical Latin recedere (withdraw), recessus (withdrawal), and recessionem (also withdrawal), the latter two just being different tenses of recedere. Re- means back, so the word is to give back? To yield back? Well, it kind of makes sense. Not the recess part, though.
 
Will concede make more sense? Probably not. It showed up in the mid seventeenth century, though concession showed up earlier, in the mid fifteenth century. Concession is from the Old French concession and classical Latin concessionem, just concession, and concede is from the French concéder and the root verb, the classical Latin concedere, to concede. The con- prefix is thought to just be intensive here (as in, just for emphasis), so to concede is to really yield. Huh, I guess I was wrong. It actually does make sense. Well, there’s a first time for everything.
 
Finally today we’ll look at accede, and the far more common access. Accede showed up in the early fifteenth century, while access beat it out by nearly a century and showed up in the early fourteenth century. Access is from the Old French acces and classical Latin accessus, which means something like approach, while accede comes from the Latin accedere, to approach. The prefix is from ad-, which means to, so to accede is to approach to. Well, approaching is required for accessing something, I guess. Also, fun fact, access didn’t show up as a verb until 1962, and was associated with computing. If you ever write something set before then, don’t use to access!!!
 
I just found that really funny.
 
Sources
Online Etymology Dictionary
Google Translate
Omniglot
University of Texas at Austin Linguistic Research Center
University of Texas at San Antonio’s page on Proto Indo European language