Language of Confusion: Fire

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

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

University of Texas at Arlington

Tony Jebson’s page on the Origins of Old English

Old English-English Dictionary

Fordham University

The Language of Confusion: Why isn’t it “Firey”?

Seriously, why isn’t it? Why switch the e and the r for that one word? And if "firey" is no good, then why don't we just replace the e with a y, like in wiry? Is there a reason?

Fire didn’t always used to be spelled fire. It comes from the Old English fyr (I think it would rhyme with Tyr) and when Old became Middle, they changed a lot of vowels around and the y became ie. For a few centuries, anyway.

Before about 1200 CE, the word was spelled fier (okay, it’s starting to make more sense now) Then, Old English gave way to Middle English. For about four hundred years, there was a war between the spellings, because really, in the sixteenth century people just spelled things the way they felt like it. Eventually, people started collaborating on universal spelling for English and "Fire" emerged as the preferred choice, which lasted into our Modern English language. But fier remained alive in the adjective form of the word. Which for some reason, they did not change.

Dang. I hate it when there’s a logical explanation. Well, mostly logical. Language evolution is weird.

Thanks to the Online Etymology Dictionary and the great Creighton University article on Middle English.