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Author: John Hutchinson

Making cuts in the wrong places

Making cuts in the wrong places

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When you want to look up a word, how do you go about it? The dictionary is organised by the first letter of the word, so that is what you consider first. And when you want to compare languages, what is the first thing to catch your eye? Again, the first sound. Thus, when looking at a set of words like English fish, father, full, Latin piscis, pater, plenus and Scottish Gaelic iasg, athair, làn, the fact that f- in English corresponds to p- in Latin and zero in Scottish Gaelic spring immediately to our attention, reading as we do from left to right.

Thus, we might presume that the beginning of a word is somehow especially stable, and that sounds which appear at the beginning of a word are a good first indicator of etymology. However, in fact the beginning of a word is not so immutable as you might suppose. Famously, Celtic languages have initial consonant mutations, which alters the initial consonant of a word in regular ways depending on grammatical context. So in Welsh, while ‘Wales’ is Cymru, ‘Welcome to Wales’ is Croeso i Gymru, ‘in Wales’ is yng Nghymru and ‘England and Wales’ is Lloegr a Chymru. This is interesting enough, but not the only way that the start of a word may be altered in languages. Indeed, we don’t even have to leave English to find examples of a different phenomenon that can take place in the history of an individual word.

Let us take a word like adder (the snake specifically, not someone that does addition!). We can look for cognates in closely-related languages, but we are immediately presented with a problem: German Natter, Frisian njirre and Icelandic naðra all seem like they should be related (all being words for ‘snake’), but what’s with this n- at the beginning of the word? Things only get more confusing when we notice words like Latin natrix ‘watersnake’, Welsh neidr or Scottish Gaelic nathair, all again showing an n-. Finally, when we look at Old English we find that the word there is næddre! What’s going on? We know that in general English n- doesn’t do anything particularly strange and it certainly doesn’t just disappear from the beginnings of words, as evidenced by numerous forms like name, night, nest, new, and nine which have had an n- since Proto-Indo-European!

The answer lies in a phenomenon that linguists call ‘rebracketing’. This is a fairly straightforward notion; linguists already make use of brackets to show the internal structure of phrases, thus any change in the structure of the phrase is notated by a change in the arrangement of the brackets. (It will be noted that some authors, including the Oxford English Dictionary, use the term metanalysis instead, but the meaning is the same.)

In the case of adder, the confusion comes from the indefinite article, which in English is a before words beginning with a consonant and an before words beginning with a vowel. Thus, if a word begins with an n-, this can find itself being rebracketed onto the indefinite article: thus [a [nadder]] becomes [a-n [adder]]. And this isn’t the only word where this has happened in English either: thus [a [napron]] (from French napperon) became [a-n [apron]]. On the flipside, the opposite is also found, where the -n from the indefinite article finds itself attached to the front of a word that originally began with a vowel, e.g. [an [ewt]] → [a [n-ewt]] or [an [ekename]] → [a [n-ickname]].

A newt crawling over moss.
An ewt!

Some of these forms have since become the predominant forms of their respective words, but such is not always the case. For example, uncle derives from a French word oncle, ultimately from Latin avunculus. However, those who are familiar with their Shakespeare will remember the Fool in King Lear, who refers to the title character as ‘nuncle’. Here the reanalysis, rather than from the indefinite article, seems to have been on the basis of possessive pronouns mine and thine, which are particularly frequently used with kind terms: thus [mine [uncle]] becomes [my [nuncle]]. Yet, unlike with the other examples, this has not stuck around, perhaps because the other possessive pronouns (his, her, our, your, their) which would not have motivated this reanalysis; thus the original uncle stuck around and was able to reassert itself.

Nor is English alone in exhibiting these kinds of change. In the adder~nadder case, the same reanalysis has also taken place in Dutch and Low German, also spelt adder in both cases. Similarly, Arabic nāranj was borrowed into Spanish as Naranja, but this underwent rebracketing when it was borrowed into Italian as arancia, and it was from there that the word spread to the rest of Europe, including English orange.

French provides us with an especially interesting example of layered reanalyses in a single word. In Old French, unicorne was reanalysed as beginning with the indefinite article (which is in a sense not incorrect: the literal meaning of the word is ‘one-horn’ and ‘one’ is the source of the French indefinite article, as well as indefinite articles in general cross-linguistically). This left a form icorne, which would contract with the definite article, giving l’icorne ‘the unicorn’. However, at some point, this contracted form with the article came to be reanalysed as the base of the noun itself, with the result that licorne is now simply the French for ‘unicorn’, leading to constructions such as la licorne ‘the unicorn’ where a historical definite article appears ‘doubled up’!

Some of the most complex cases of rebracketing can be found in Scottish Gaelic. Here we have a number of potential sources of rebracketing, both because the definite article changes depending on the following noun and because of the interaction of the definite article and the mutation system.

Firstly, with vowel-initial masculine noun the definite article prefixes a t- e.g. eun ‘bird’ but an t-eun ‘the bird’. Unsurprisingly, based on the examples we have seen above, this prefixed t- has in many cases become attached to the noun. Interestingly this is particularly common in loanwords from Old Norse, such as talla ‘hall’ from hǫll, tòb ‘small bay’ from hóp (òb is also common) and tolm ‘small islet’ from holmr, as well as other loans such as taigeis ‘haggis’ and tobha ‘hoe’ from English.

In a similar vein, one of the components of consonant mutation is Scottish Gaelic is that an f sound disappears (though is still written as fh). As a result, a larger number of words that began with vowels in Old Irish have acquired an f- in Scottish Gaelic, e.g. áinne ‘ring’, uar ‘cold’ and íaru ‘squirrel’ have become fáinne, fuar and feòrag respectively, as if an áinne uar ‘the cold ring’ was really an fháinne fhuar. Many of the words have undergone the same kinds of changes in Irish and Manx, though not all languages agree on which (e.g. Irish also has fáinne and fuar but iora respectively).

And, as in English, words that begin with n- can find this consonant being rebracketed as part of the article an. However, once this n- has been rebracketed, this now vowel-initial word can undergo the same kinds of mutation-based reshaping as an originally vowel initial word. Perhaps the most extreme example of this is ‘nettle’, which was nenaid in Old Irish, but in Scottish Gaelic can be (depending on who you ask) any of neanntag, eanntag (with the n- rebracketed away), feanntag (with the f- appended by lenition reversal) and deanntag (where the d- is apparently a hypercorrective reversal of a process of nasalisation in the Northwestern dialects)!

A bed of nettles
neanntag, eanntag, feanntag or deanntag?

So, when searching around for a word in a dictionary or an old text, be cautious; simply looking for the first consonant to give you a clue might be misleading when taken out of context. Furthermore, instances like these make clear that language is primarily a spoken phenomenon and the kinds of changes that we see reflect that: while in a written text the different between a newt and an ewt is obvious, in spoken language the question of where one word ends and the nexts begins is not so straightforward as a casual glance at a dictionary might suggest. Perhaps this should then make us ponder further how much written language is a direct reflection of spoken language versus being at least partially arbitrary choices made by the writers.

Royal Rules on Rich Rectors

Royal Rules on Rich Rectors

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Last month, the Guildford Shakespeare Company put on a production of Richard II, a fascinating tale of political strife and the perils of having a leader lacking in competence when the country is in crisis. Sound familiar? In any case, this got me thinking about the name Richard and its many etymological links.

First with the name Richard. It’s borrowed from French, but it didn’t start there. In fact it is one of a number of French words that was borrowed from Germanic, deriving from Frankish *Rīkahard, meaning ‘hard/brave king’. This also gives modern German Richard and through the travels of the Goths and Vandals also made its way into Spanish as Ricardo and Italian as Riccardo. The first part of this name, the *rīk- ‘ruler’ part, in other derivations also gives words like German Reich and Dutch rijk, both meaning ‘empire’ or ‘kingdom’, which in English is also found as the ‘domain, kingdom’ suffix -ry, as in Jewry ‘the Kingdom of the Jews’. As different derivation again gives us English rich, something you’d rather expect a king to be. As a component of names it is ubiquitous in Germanic, such as in Old English Godric ‘God(ly) king’, Wulfric ‘Wolf-king’ and Theodric ‘King of the people’. This last one turns up in German as Dietrich and, again courtesy of the Franks, through French Thierry comes into English as Terry (see also my previous post on the Germans for more on this Theod-).

But it is not only Germanic languages that have this root. Indeed, some form of it crops up across the Indo-European language family, usually meaning something like ‘king’ or ‘ruler’. In Celtic (from which Germanic likely borrowed the rīk- words) we find e.g. rí in Irish and rhi in Welsh, both meaning king. In Gaulish, rulers such as Vercingetorix and Ambiorix had an earlier form –rix it as part of their name, and in a reduced form we find the same in the Welsh surname Tudor, originally meaning ‘ruler of the people’ and thus cognate with Theodric/Dietrich/Terry.

In Latin too we find rēx, again meaning ‘king’ or ‘ruler’. This form survives as such in many modern Romance languages, for example Spanish rey and French roi. We also get two separate adjectives in English: regal from Latin and royal from French. Further afield, we find this word cropping up as far away as India, in the form of Sanskrit rāja, once again a ‘king’ word, as well as rāṣṭrá, a ‘kingdom’.

All of these forms can be traced back to a form in Proto-Indo-European (the reconstructed ancestor of all of these languages), which we represent as *h3rḗǵs. In the terminology of Indo-European studies this is an ‘athematic root noun’, meaning a short root without additional derivational suffixes onto which inflectional endings such as the nominative singular *-s are suffixed directly, rather than having an additional ‘theme vowel’ *-o inbetween. As with many such forms in Proto-Indo-European, when we isolate the root itself, *h3reg-, which probably meant something like ‘stretch out the arm, direct’, we can find even more related derivations.

Adding a thematic vowel *-e/o- we get a verb which shows up in Latin as regō ‘rule, govern, direct’, along with an array of derived nouns which we have inn English. We have the agent noun rector, the instrument noun rule (from a French reflex of Latin rēgula) and the abstract noun regimen. Additionally, we have prefixed verbs such as dīrigō, ērigō and corrigō, which through their respective supine forms dīrēctum, ērēctum and corrēctum give us English ‘direct’, ‘erect’ and ‘correct’ respectively.

Germanic, meanwhile, provides us with a different set of reflexes of this verb. While we have already seen the rich set relating to wealth and kingship, the ‘straighten’ meaning of *h3reg- results in other interesting links. We have the (originally separate) verb and noun rake, a device for making straight lines, and the former participle right, originally meaning ‘straightened, directed’. Then we have reckon, perhaps a natural extension of the metaphor of lining things up in order to count them. Finally, from a causative ‘make straighten up’ we have reach (as if ‘straightening out one’s arm’).

This here is the greatest joy of etymology for me; by untangling these webs of relationships, we can show how so much of our vocabulary results from variations upon a common root. It reminds us of the continual creativity involved in using language and, by extension, the creativity of language users, i.e., humans.

Whisky Galore and A Go Go!

Whisky Galore and A Go Go!

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When it comes to etymology, most words have a somewhat mundane route into a language: they either are retained from a direct ancestor or were borrowed at some point from another language. Within the latter category, these words tend to come in batches, often either through an intensive period of contact between peoples, as with the Old Norse loans into English, or through the importation of specific vocabulary which related to aspects of culture which were being borrowed from the group in question, such as e.g law terms deriving from the French used in English courts after the Norman Conquest.

However, every so often, there come along lexical items with a significantly more complex and idiosyncratic path into a language, and occasionally words may interplay with one another in interesting ways. We find such a complex interplay with galore and agogo.

Galore by itself is already an interesting form, as it is one of a small number of loanwords from Gaelic (likely specifically Scottish gu leòr) which does not have some kind of connection with Gaelic culture or geography. This expression can mean either ‘enough’ or ‘much, plenty’, and occurs in several constructions as a result. For instance, in Scottish Gaelic when asked ‘how are you?’, one might respond ceart gu leòr ‘all right, OK’, literally ‘right enough’.

This phrase, in a number of varying spellings such as gilore or gallore, appears to have begun to arrive in English in the mid 17th Century (or at least this is the date of the earliest citation in the Oxford English Dictionary). When this form was borrowed into English it underwent semantic shift and narrowing, coming to specifically mean ‘in abundance, plenty’, losing the sense of ‘enough’. It seems to have been somewhat colloquial in use, not being particularly frequent in writing, and is disproportionately concentrated in Scottish works, including an attestation in the journals of Walter Scott.

This form comes to its greatest in prominence in English through its use in a Compton Mackenzie novel and later Ealing comedy titled Whisky Galore! Both the novel and film centre on a remote Scottish island, and the novel in particular makes use of Gaelic throughout, so the use of ‘galore’ fits in well with the setting.

This work in particular, however, had a more interesting impact than simple popularity. As with many best-selling works, it received translations into other languages, and in this case the French translation was titled Whisky à-Gogo, deriving likely from the Old French gogue ‘fun’. This title then was itself used as the name of a nightclub in Paris, the world’s first discothèque. The concept rapidly grew in popularity, with Whisky à-Gogo venues spreading across the globe, as far as Papeete in Tahiti (and Cardiff!), the most famous probably being the the Whisky a Go Go on Sunset Strip in Hollywood. (In the English-speaking world gogo got split into two, possibly on false analogy with the verb ‘go’.)

A film poster for the film 'Roadrunner a go-go'
But there’s only one Roadrunner…

From here on ‘a go go’ or just ‘go go’ became a by-word for everything hip and cool (or ‘groovy’) in the 1960s. Go-go dancers dance in go-go clubs, of course, but the meaning became more and more nebulous over time. In cinema, 1965 was a banner year, with Roadrunner a go-go up against Monster a go-go. This year also an unsuccessful attempt to extend this—word? phrase?—by analogy, with the notorious Batman parody Rat Pfink a Boo Boo. Nobody seems to have got this (not terribly good) joke, and on subsequent reissues the film was “corrected” to Rat Pfink and Boo Boo. (You’re reading this etymology here first. Even the director who came up with the title didn’t realize it, but we’re linguists, we know better.) But the shelf life of terms denoting popular trends is short, and anyone using it now probably means for it to lend antiquated flavour of the swinging 60s. Contrast with galore, which retains its more generic use and seems unlikely to drop out of common usage in the near future.

Who are the Germans?

Who are the Germans?

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You may be familiar with the fact that the Germans refer to themselves as Deutsch and their country as Deutschland, and we find this term also in most other Germanic languages, such as Dutch Duits or Swedish Tysk, as well as Italian Tedesco. However, there are many other names in other parts of Europe. The French and Spaniards call them Allemand/Alemán, as do the Welsh with Almaenaidd; the various Slavic languages share a different term again, seen in e.g. Polish Niemiec or Russian Nemets. In the Baltic the Lithuanians and Latvians have their own terms not seen anywhere else (Vokietis and Vācijis respectively), while in Finland and Estonia they call them Saksi. We could also add some assorted forms from smaller languages, such as Miksas from Old Prussian, an extinct sister language to Lithuanian and Latvian.

An aerial shot of the meeting of the Rhine and Mosel rivers at Koblenz
The Deutsches Eck, or ‘German corner’, in Koblenz

Now, it is not unusual for inhabitants of a country to refer to themselves and their country with a different form from that used by outsiders (when was the last time you called China Zhongguo or India Bharat?). What is particularly notable about the German case, however, is the diversity even among its immediate neighbours. Contrast e.g. France, where everyone uses some form of derivative of Latin Francia (after the Germanic tribe the Franks), though the Greeks still call it Gallia after the Roman province of Gaul. Similarly, most call Spain some form derived from Hispania and Italy one from Italia. So, this diversity in names for the Germans requires some explanation.

Whence this plethora of terms? A consideration of history leads us to our answer. Recall that the modern country of Germany is a relatively recent creation, only being officially united in the mid 19th century by Otto von Bismarck. While there was a political entity that occupied the area in the form of the Holy Roman Empire it was only a relatively loose collection of small states, and prior to that the area was inhabited by a number of distinct Germanic-speaking peoples.

As a result, some of these names derive from the individual groups or tribes which lived in part of the area: so in the Western Romance and Brittonic Celtic languages the name of the Alemanni tribe was applied to the Germans as a whole. The same process occurred in the northeast with the Baltic Finns and the Saxons: not only were the Saxons the nearest group, but also, due to a combination of the Hanseatic League controlling trade through the Baltic and the anti-pagan crusading of the Teutonic Knights (another Deutsch-relative, see below), many Saxons came to settle in the Eastern Baltic, with some of their descendants still living in Estonia and Latvia today. Some small varieties show different groups again: some of the smaller Germanic varieties use a form derived from Prussian, after the state which ended up uniting the German peoples.

English takes a slightly different approach, deriving the term Germans from the Latin name of the region; Germania. This term included two Roman provinces covering much of modern-day Belgium, Switzerland, parts of eastern France and the Rhineland in modern Germany, as well as applying to the larger swathe of barbarian territories further east. Interestingly, several languages use this term to refer to Germany the country despite using a different term to refer to the Germans: Italian and Russian are the most notable examples.

We find a different source again with the Slavic Nemets terms. There is again some dispute in origin, but the general consensus is that it derives from a Slavic root *němъ meaning ‘mute’, itself of contested origin. The meaning likely was not ‘mute’ necessarily, but rather simply denoted that these groups were not Slavic-speaking. This puts in a similar group to the word ‘barbarian’ in fact, which derives from a Greek word meaning ‘those who go bar-bar/talk incomprehensibly’. Similar origins to do with ‘talking’ are likely behind the Baltic Vok-/Vāc-/Miks- forms as well.

Finally, what of German ‘Deutsch’? Well, as is the case with many endonyms it is a relatively simple and self-referential etymology. It ultimately derives from an Indo-European root *tewteh2 meaning simply ‘people’, which shows up also in e.g. Irish túath with the same meaning. This form may also be the source of Romance forms such as Spanish todo or French tout meaning ‘everyone/everything’. This root even survives in Slavic, in Russian giving the form čužoj, meaning ‘foreign, alien’. This ended up as Germanic *þeudō, which through an adjective formation *þiudiskaz meaning something like ‘of the people’ ultimately leads to the modern German form. This form also gives Latin Teutones, a likely Celtic or Germanic tribe which lived in the North German region and was encountered by the Romans early in their expansion northwards.

So, as with many other terms, such as the aubergine words which have been discussed here before, the differences between languages are reflective of a complex history. In this case the wide array of disparate terms of different etymologies reflects the complex history of the entity involved, specifically the absence of a country that even called itself ‘Germany’ until the modern era, as well as the extent to which different groups of ethnic Germans have moved about in Europe.

Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow

Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow

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How do we talk about time? This may seem a simple question with a simple answer; we are all human, surely we all experience time the same way? That may be true, but that doesn’t mean that all languages organise the time in the same way. This is arguably most apparent when it comes to talking about the days either side of the present day. We all live on earth and so therefore all experience a day-night cycle; all can understand how one day follows after another. However, the words we use to locate events in this cycle can vary wildly in their construction.

Let’s take a look at two languages, Scottish Gaelic and Sylheti, and see how their systems compare with that of English. All three of these languages belong to the same family, Indo-European, so it might be assumed that they show many similarities. And yet each still exhibits significant variation in how they talk about time.

Firstly, Scottish Gaelic. Like English, it distinguishes between ‘yesterday’, ‘today’ and ‘tomorrow’. The terms each show a consistent structure with a frozen prefix a(n)- with three morphologically opaque roots; an-dè, an-diugh and a-màireach respectively. Furthermore none of the Gaelic terms has any connection with the normal word for ‘day’, latha/là. Compare English, where yester-day and to-day both feature the word ‘day’, while to-day and to-morrow both feature a frozen prefix to- (historically a demonstrative). Additionally, there are also single terms for ‘last night’ as well as ‘tonight’ with a-raoir and a-nochd respectively, again with no immediately apparent connection with the normal term for ‘night’ oidhche. On the other hand, there is no single term for ‘tomorrow night’ so the compound expression oidhche a-màireach is used instead. There are also additional terms for ‘the day after tomorrow’ and ‘the day before yesterday’, an-earar and a bhòn-dè respectively, while the latter has a counterpart in a bhòn-raoir for ‘the night before last’. English is also reported to have had similar terms in the form of ereyesterday and overmorrow, though these have fallen out of usage in the modern day.

Gaelic is also in another respect slightly more regular than English in how it refers to parts of the day. While in English we have a split between ‘this morning’ and ‘yesterday morning’, Gaelic instead uses madainn an-diugh and madainn an-dè, where the former literally translates to ‘today morning’.

But all this is not really that surprising. All that really distinguishes Scottish Gaelic from English in this respect is which time categories are given single indivisible terms rather than compositional expressions; the fundamental organisation of the system is still broadly similar to English. To see a far more radically different system of organising time words, we will now turn to Sylheti, an Indo-Aryan language spoken in north-eastern Bangladesh by around 9-10 million and by perhaps a further 1 million in diaspora, including by most of the British Bangladeshi community.

Here, instead of distinguishing between ‘yesterday’ and ‘tomorrow’, we instead find a single term xail(ku), contrasting with aiz(ku) meaning ‘today’ (the -ku is a suffix which can optionally appear on a lot of ‘time’ words, such as onku ‘now’ or bianku ‘(this) morning’). The two senses of ‘tomorrow’ and ‘yesterday’ can be distinguished by combining them with goto ‘past’ and agami ‘future’, but just as commonly instead the distinction is solely marked by whether the verb is in the past or future tense, e.g. xailku ami amar bondu dexsi ‘I saw my friend yesterday’ vs. xailku ami amar bondu dexmu ‘I will see my friend tomorrow’.

This is not an isolated instance in the language, either, but in fact represents a consistent trend. So in the same manner foru can be either ‘the day before yesterday’ or ‘the day after tomorrow’ depending on context and toʃu the same but at one day further removed.

Table of day and night terms in english, Gaelic and Sylheti respectively
Visualising the systems

Nor is Sylheti unique in using this kind of system; it is also found in many parts of New Guinea, for example. Yimas, a language of northern New Guinea, also uses the same term ŋarŋ for both ‘yesterday’ and ‘tomorrow’, urakrŋ for ‘two days removed’ and so on, all the way up to manmaɲcŋ for ‘five days removed’. Once again whether the reference is to the past or future is carried by the choice of tense on the verb, though Yimas has a far more complex system than that seen in Sylheti, for instance distinguishing a near past -na(n) from a more remote past -ntuk~ntut.

Sylheti also has more fine grained distinctions for parts of the day than either English or Scottish Gaelic. For example, if one wishes to say ‘in the morning’ one must decide whether one is talking about the early morning (ʃoxal) or the mid to late morning (bian). Additionally, while forms such as ‘yesterday/tomorrow afternoon’, ‘the night before last/after next’ and ‘yesteray/tomorrow morning’ use compound expressions (xail madan, foru rait and xail bian/ʃoxal respextively), to express ‘this morning/this afternoon/tonight’ the word for the part of the day (perhaps with the oblique suffix -e or a time suffix -ku) is sufficient by itself, for example amra ʃoxale Sylheʈ aisi ‘We arrived in Sylhet this morning’ or ami raitku dua xotram ‘I am praying tonight’ (with rait ‘night’).

This is just one small part of the temporal vocabulary, and only looking at representatives from a single family, and yet already we see great variation in how time is organised and discussed. It is not so much that these groups have fundamentally different conceptions of time, as these languages share a common ancestor and are only separated by a few thousand years. Instead, it is a testament to the fluidity of time itself, resulting in the words used to refer to it easily shifting in meaning and being reorganised over generations.

Of the saintly and sinister: words for the left-handed

Of the saintly and sinister: words for the left-handed

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A couple of years ago, when I was still living in North Yorkshire but shortly to be moving further south, I attended a function at one of the final services conducted by my mother (an ordained priest in the Church of England) in a rural parish church. Afterwards, over a goodly spread of finger-food (what in clerical circles is commonly referred to as a bun-fight), I was in conversation with one of my mother’s then parishioners, a local farmer, who was much interested in my studies in linguistics. He tasked me with sourcing the etymology of an unusual local term – cuddy-wifter, which I was told refers to a left-handed person. I’ll propose an etymology of this specific term later, but first let’s have a short discussion of terms for “left hand” across languages.

A close-up of the left hand of a bronze statue. The hand is a polished golden colour, in contrast to the rest of the statue which is a dark brown colour.
Rarely has the left hand been portrayed in such good light

Firstly, it is important to note that many languages do not really make use of such ego-centric terms as “left” or “right” much, if at all. In these languages instead speakers opt for a geocentric system, locating and orienting objects and themselves by their relationship to either the points of the compass or in some cases the landscape. This has been most famously documented in a number of Paman languages of Queensland, Australia. For example, a speaker of Guugu Yimidhirr might refer to their nagaalngurr “east side” or guwaalngurr “west side” rather than to their left or right. Aspects of this conception of space are also found widely in languages across the Pacific and beyond.

And where languages do have a term for “left”, they very frequently differ on what the term should be. Even only looking at the Indo-European family we find a multiplicity of terms: besides English left we find forms as clì or ceàrr in Scottish Gaelic; izquierdo in Spanish; majtë in Albanian; levyj in Russian; chap in Persian: and bau in Sylheti. So many different words, and these languages are all related!

From whence then English left? We can find cognates in nearby parts of West Germanic, such as West Frisian lafter/lofter and Dutch lucht/luft, but none further afield meaning “left”. These forms derive ultimately from a term meaning “palsy, paralysis”, which might perhaps derive from a Proto-Indo-European verb *lewp- “peel, break” which would also through another derivation gives the English verb lop. A similar pattern appears to hold in closely related German links which, though it doesn’t appear directly related and is of somewhat unclear etymology, the Icelandic form linur meaning “weak, feeble” indicates likely a similar semantic development.

On the other end of the scale, terms for the left hand or left-handedness can often end up taking on other meanings. Notably, this has happened twice in English borrowing from two different Romance languages, Latin and French. In the case of the Latin term sinister, it now refers to someone or something that is seen as being shadowing and potentially malicious. In the case of the French term gauche (ultimately derived from the same root as English walk), it instead refers to a lack of fashionability and perhaps a degree of awkwardness.

We can therefore draw two main conclusions from the above. Firstly, the concepts “left” and “right” are not essential to how we as humans conceptualise ourselves and the wider world; many languages do without, and those which have words for them seem to be happy to churn out old forms for new ones (compare e.g. the near-universal agreement on a form deriving from something like *mātēr for “mother” in the various Indo-European languages mentioned above). Secondly, there is a clear tendency for the left hand to carry a negative connotation, either directly due to being the non-dominant hand for most people (as indicated by the various etymologies referring to physical weakness in Germanic) or through some more cultural taboos (as seen by the development of the Romance terms sinister and gauche in English).

What then of cuddy-wifter? Well, the exact origin is not given specifically in any source I could find, but with a bit of digging uncovers the following. The “wifter” part is easier to pin down, as at least according to the Oxford English Dictionary (the pre-eminent source on English etymology) “wift” comes up sometime in the 16th century as a verb meaning something like “to turn aside” or “to drift”, which, going by the pattern set by the above data, seems a reasonable source (at least in part) for a term for “left hand”.

The cuddy part is the more problematic element. Cuddy is an affectionate form of Cuthbert, the pre-eminent saint of the North-East of England, and crops up in a number of terms from the region, notably cuddy ducks to refer to the eider ducks said to have been particularly beloved by the saint, as well as the ponies used in the many coal mines of the area, which were referred to simply as cuddies. However, the connection with the saint seems suspect from the off, as there doesn’t appear to be any kind of source which would attest to the saint being left-handed. Certainly, the Venerable Bede, that great chronicler of Anglo-Saxon England, makes no mention of anything of the kind, in contrast to his willingness to comment on much else of the saint’s physical characteristics.

a single eider duck drake floating on the surface of the sea
Can you blame Cuthbert really?

There also exists a sense of “cuddy” meaning “a stupid fellow” which perhaps would tie into the negativity often associated with left-handedness. However, the OED only provides examples from the mid-nineteenth century and appears to derive from the “pony” usage (in a similar manner to the development of ass more broadly in English), which does somewhat problematise this as an etymology. In particular, the structure of cuddy-wifter this would require seems oddly-formed, akin to something like ass-drifter, and the timespan of a century for this form to arise and spread south of the Tees, well outside the coalfield regions where the pit-pony was a fact of life, is probably a bit of a stretch.

Perhaps then we should look elsewhere for a source. Old English appears to provide no obvious sources, so perhaps we should look to Celtic for an origin. And a tantalising hint we find: Welsh chwith “left” or “wrong” and Irish and Scottish Gaelic ciotach “left-handed” or “clumsy” (there’s that negativity again), pointing to a Proto-Celtic *skittos, which to my mind looks like it might have a relationship at some point with English skew, though that is far from proven at this stage. I would propose, then, that this word was borrowed into a northern variety of English (perhaps from Cumbric, the extinct Celtic language of Cumbria) as something like *cwithy~*cuthy, and then later on it was folded into the cuddy form, with no actual direct connection with the saint at all.

So, while admittedly I haven’t been able to come up with a definite answer to that question I was set at that bun-fight a couple of years ago, I can at least tell a story rich in history and culture, revealing much both of the linguistic landscape of Britain and of our historic attitudes towards those who are left-handed.