Dizzying Doublets

Have you ever wondered why the word ‘language’ sounds so similar to the word ‘tongue’? Probably not, because those words sound totally different. So you may be surprised to know that both come from the same origin, a word used around 6000 years ago in a language called Proto-Indo-European (PIE). That word was something like ‘dn̥ǵʰwéh₂s’ (don’t even ask me how to pronounce that), and probably meant ‘tongue’. After the PIE language spread into Europe, it split into many different languages, and sounds shifted in different ways depending on the language. In the Proto-Germanic language of northern Europe, dn̥ǵʰwéh₂s became ‘*tungǭ’, and eventually English “tongue”. In Latin, the word turned into ‘dingua’, and later ‘lingua’, which evolved into old French as ‘language’, before finally being borrowed into English. These two words are therefore distant cousins. ‘Linguistics’ is also a cousin.

When these word-cousins are in the same language, we call them “doublets”. Some of them look/sound similar and have related meanings, like ‘ward’ and ‘guard’, or ‘pyre’ and ‘fire’. Some have related meanings but sound totally different, like ‘cow’ and ‘beef’, or ‘word’ and ‘verb’. Others could not seem more different, like ‘head’ and ‘chef’. But all of these pairs of are linked, sharing the same ancestral word. They are just separated from each other by millennia of history, but have ended up in the same language: English.

Doublets exist in many languages, but because English is such a mixed language, it has a great number of doublets, often with 3 or more words being related. English has its Germanic core of vocabulary from Old English, a vast number of borrowed French words, as well as borrowings from many more sources, so often these words sound very different, depending on the root they took to reach Modern English.

In extreme cases, dozens of words in English can share the same root word in PIE, with words coming into the English language from multiple different sources.

Lets look at 2 simple words, “royal”, and “king”, which both have unusually large numbers of doublets.

These two words are not doublets: despite having related meanings, are etymologically totally unrelated. However, they each form a branch of incredibly complex and convoluted trees, each containing dozens of doublets. I thought it would be fun to show those 2 trees here, as examples of how complicated these doublets can get:

Etymological Tree of Hreg

These 30 English words are related to the word “royal”, as they are all descended from the Proto-Indo-European word *h₃reǵ, meaning ‘right’. That little * means the word is reconstructed based on all the words descended from it.

And remember, this is only showing the branches of the tree that end in an English word. There are around 450 different Indo European languages in the world, and many of them will have words related to these ones. Not to mention all the non-Indo-European languages that have borrowed words from the IE ones, like all the unrelated South Asian languages which borrowed raj/raja from Hindi as their word for ‘king’.

This tree contains about a dozen words related to royalty and ruling, mostly borrowed from Old French. This which makes sense when you remember than England was ruled by Old French (and Anglo-Norman) speakers for centuries. This tree is missing the word ‘king’, because that word comes from a different origin: the PIE word *ǵenh₁, meaning ‘give birth’.

Etymological Tree of Genh

These 32 words are related to the word ‘king’. You can see that in the Germanic languages like English, the /g/ shifted to a /k/, while in Latin and Greek it stayed as a /g/, except for in some words where it was dropped altogether. Doublets are a great way to see the different ways different sounds have changed in different related languages.

I learnt a lot making this comic, but perhaps the biggest surprise came half way through sketching out the Hreg tree, when I realised that my own first name, Ryan, belongs on there! It’s amazing to see the interesting and hidden ways words and languages link together, and I’ll definitely be making more posts like this one.

Do if you enjoyed this comic, check out the others in this series:
Fantastic False Cognates
Rampant Rebracketing
Or see find all my creations, including more than a dozen linguistics related posts, on my homepage.

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