While watching a Swedish movie today, I was reminded of a question that has always bugged me. The word for “and” in Swedish is “och”. In Danish it’s “og”. These are obviously cognates with each other, but they don’t seem to be cognates with the English “and”, the German “und”, the Dutch, “en” etc. etc. My best guess for a cognate of “och” would be the English “eke” (archaic word for also) or the German “auch” (same meaning). Where did “och” come from? What happened to cognates for and/en/und in the Northern Germanic languages? http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=and says that O.N. (which I am assuming means “Old Norse”) had a cognate for it called “enn”. Does this word still exist and how is it used now?
Here’s the Wiktionary entry on “och”:
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/och
And here’s the Wiktionary entry on the Proto-Germanic root of that:
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Proto-Germanic/auk
Here’s the Wiktionary entry on “and”:
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/and
And here’s the Wiktionary entry on the Proto-Germanic root of that:
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Proto-Germanic/andi
So it appears that “och” came from a Proto-Indo-European root meaning some thing like “increased by” or “added to”, while “and” came from a Proto-Indo-European root meaning something like “paired with” or “next to”. So perhaps in Proto-Germanic there were two ways of saying “and”, one of which (the root for “och”) meant something like “in addition to” and the other of which (the root of “and”) meant something like “with”. In some Germanic languages, the first of these words dropped out and only the second remained to mean “and”. In other Germanic languages, the second of these words dropped out and only the first remained to mean “and”.
Somebody is now going to ask, “What? There’s an etymology for a simple word like ‘and’? Doesn’t a word meaning ‘and’ exist in every language and doesn’t it always mean the same thing and not change?” Well, no. Even simple words like conjunctions and prepositions slowly change in meaning. They are derived from other words and they can drop from a language.
In addition to WW’s excellent post: Modern German has the word auch, meaning ‘also’, and, oddly enough, also itself, but with a quite different meaning.
The English dialect used by Chaucer also had eek, meaning ‘also’ as well.
When we get down to the particle word level the variations in historically related languages get pretty interesting in a sort of “what is is” way. For instance, in Old Norse, the declination of the numeric adjective “second” is very irregular. Some inflections are based on a root similar to other in English or oder in German. “Other”–that sounds rather random until you recall the phrase “every other day”=“every second day”. And the root of other inflections is related to the German word anderer meaning, again, “other”.
I wonder when the northern/southern split occured in the usage of “and”? Thanks for the Wiktionary info, I had no idea it was so comprehensive. However, no clue as to why this split happened. “And” is such a common word, I find it strange that the meaning has shifted from one set of cognates to another.
Let me say this once again: There’s nothing strange at all about common words changing in meaning. Words are always slowly changing in meaning in every language. To be a bit more general, languages are always slowly changing in vocabulary, morphology, grammar, phonology, etc. Words which mean the equivalent of “and,” “or,” “but,” “of,” “the,” “to,” “with,” “in,” “not,” etc. are always changing too. The book that I’ve been recommending for the past few years about how and why languages change is The Unfolding of Language by Guy Deutscher.
You say something about the meaning shifting from one set of cognates to another. That’s not exactly what happened. As I said, in Proto-Germanic, a word that’s a cognate for “and” began meaning something like “with.” Around the same time, a word that’s a cognate for “och” began meaning something like “in addition to.” There’s no way to tell at this point if there was at that point another word that already meant “and” or if it had already dropped out of Proto-Germanic or whatever. Eventually one group of Proto-Germanic speakers began using the cognate for “and” to mean just “and.” Another group of Proto-Germanic speakers began using the cognate for “och” to mean just “and.” The first group dropped the cognate for “och” eventually. The second group dropped the cognate for “and” eventually.
Whenever I see something in a Scandinavian language, I compare it to the two languages I speak, German and English. That’s what gave rise to my question and my mention of “auch” and “eke”. It’s interesting that there seem to be more similarities to German than English.
I’m trying to picture the scenario where these cognates get switched around…What’s a similar change in English nowadays?
On the other hand, a number of very common, non-Romance English words are different from German and Dutch exactly because they reflect the influence of Danish.
Or Norwegian.
“Ook” is also the Afrikaans for “also”, so it looks like that’s a common one
ETA: that’s pronounce something like a short “Oo-erk”, or “work” without a hard w. Not like a Librarian.
I don’t know what you mean when you say that two cognates got switched around, Rusalka. Nothing got switched around. There were two words meaning approximately “and” in Proto-Germanic, one of which was cognate with the English world “and” and one of which was cognate with the Swedish word “och.” The one cognate with “och” dropped out of some Germanic languages and the one cognate with “and” dropped out of other Germanic languages. That’s just what always happens in languages. They slowly change.
Proto-Germanic is a speculative reconstruction, and not a language with any written records. How far back was it spoken?
So we can’t be sure that there were two words for “and” in the common origin language. I was hoping that maybe there were clues as to the diverging uses of these cognates in older texts. How far back did the split possibly occur?
It’s interesting that there is such a sharp divide between the dialects spoken in Schleswig Holstein and Southern Denmark, another thing I’ve always wondered about. There is no gradual continuum.
The continuum is between Germany and the Netherlands. The Scandinavian languages are Norther Germanic, as opposed to Western Germanic (German, Dutch, English). That is, they split off earlier than the split between German, Dutch and English.
Further to that, the earlier residents of Jutland were, well, the Jutes, who were a West Germanic speaking people. It seems that the North Germanic (Scandinavian) invaders came from Zealand, to the east. So, the lack of continuum is explainable by the fact that the people there came from elsewhere, bringing their language with them. This is what you’d expect to find when there isn’t a “continuum”.
The Hindi word for ‘and’, which is और aur, works just like that. It can mean ‘and’, it can mean ‘something else’, or it can mean ‘in addition to’. Depending on context. In fact, aur is used with those other meanings so much that sometimes a simple “and” is not expressed; they simply juxtapose nouns where we’d put “and,” e.g. Laylā Majnūn. That isn’t a lady whose last name is Majnun; it’s translated “Layla and Majnun.” Two individuals. After 26 years since I learned Hindi, I still can’t shake how strange that seems to me.
The Turkic languages, originally, didn’t really have a word for ‘and’. They had the particle da to mean ‘also’, which is as close as it got. They eventually picked up a word for “and” as a loanword from Persian وَ va (which became ve in Turkish).
Yes, Proto-Germanic is a reconstruction, but that doesn’t mean we can’t be reasonably sure of the meanings of many words in it. The reason that we can reconstruct the phonology of Proto-Germanic is that there are typical paths of phonological change. In the same way, there are typical paths of semantic change which allow us to reconstruct the meaning of words. Words that mean “and” often come from a word that first meant something like “increased by” or “added to”. This word later comes to mean something like “in addition to” and then it ends up meaning “and”. Words that mean “and” also often come from a word that first meant something like “paired with” or “next to”. This word later comes to mean something like “with” and then it ends up meaning “and”. It’s often possible to know a lot about a reconstructed language.