{"id":1135,"date":"2021-10-20T07:51:55","date_gmt":"2021-10-20T07:51:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/morph.surrey.ac.uk\/?p=1135"},"modified":"2021-10-20T07:51:55","modified_gmt":"2021-10-20T07:51:55","slug":"the-linguistic-archaeology-of-feet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/morph.surrey.ac.uk\/index.php\/2021\/10\/20\/the-linguistic-archaeology-of-feet\/","title":{"rendered":"The linguistic archaeology of feet"},"content":{"rendered":"

There\u2019s been excitement recently about evidence that humans had set foot in the Americas as much as 22,500 years ago<\/a>, pushing back the previous best estimate by almost ten thousand years. And by \u2018set foot\u2019, I mean literally. The tell-tale new evidence comes to us in the form of imprints left by human feet in a particularly well-preserved mudflat in New Mexico. So far, the humans themselves have not been uncovered by archaeologists, but their characteristic mark upon the mud has endured. <\/p>\n

When linguists peer into the past, we also will occasionally use the imprints, left by something which has otherwise been lost, to infer its presence long ago \u2014 all of which brings us to the topic of feet, and not the kind that you\u2019d use to walk across a mudflat, but the literal English word \u2018feet\u2019, which itself contains a wonderful imprint of a long-lost vowel.<\/p>\n

Our story begins with the fact that in English, the word \u2018feet\u2019 is a little odd. It\u2019s a plural that doesn\u2019t end in \u2018s\u2019. As any child will tell you, you can\u2019t get away with saying \u2018foots\u2019 for the plural of \u2018foot\u2019 for very long before someone bigger than you corrects it to \u2018feet\u2019. However, given that most English nouns do use an \u2018s\u2019 plural, it\u2019s entirely sensible to ask why \u2018feet\u2019 is different. (Of course, \u2018feet\u2019 isn\u2019t absolutely unique: English contains a select club of other, similar plurals like \u2018geese\u2019 and \u2018teeth\u2019, to which we\u2019ll return in a minute.)<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The tale of \u2018feet\u2019 begins around two millennia ago, when it was in fact a regular plural word. In proto-Germanic, the singular form would have been \u2018f\u014dt-s\u2019 (pronounced approximately as fohts<\/em>, where \u2018\u014d\u2019 is a long \u2018o\u2019 sound) and its corresponding plural \u2018f\u014dt-iz\u2019, constructed with a simple plural suffix \u2018-iz\u2019. Over the following centuries, the sounds at the end of the plural form were worn away and eventually lost, as often happens during language change. However, before the suffix disappeared entirely, the \u2018i\u2019 vowel in it left its imprint on the \u2018\u014d\u2019 vowel, changing it to \u2018\u022b\u2019, which is to say \u2018f\u014dtiz\u2019 became \u2018f\u014dti\u2019 then \u2018f\u022bti\u2019 then \u2018f\u022bt\u2019 which by Old English had become \u2018f\u0113t\u2019 and is now \u2018feet\u2019. In the meantime, the singular form \u2018f\u014dts\u2019, which contained no \u2018i\u2019 vowel, changed very little indeed: it lost its suffix \u2018-s\u2019, becoming \u2018f\u014dt\u2019 and then modern English \u2018foot\u2019. A similar story lies behind the plurals \u2018geese\u2019 and \u2018teeth\u2019: an original suffixal vowel \u2018i\u2019 changed \u2018\u014d\u2019 into \u2018\u022b\u2019, before disappearing, then \u2018\u022b\u2019 became \u2018\u0113\u2019. <\/p>\n

You might say that the \u2018i\u2019 vowel left its imprint upon original \u2018\u014d\u2019 in the form of the altered vowel \u2018\u022b\u2019. One tool which linguistic archaeologists put to good use, is our knowledge of the characteristic imprints that one sound can leave upon another. In the case of the long-lost \u2018i\u2019 vowel, the imprint even has a name, umlaut<\/em>. Historical umlaut is also what lies behind plurals like \u2018mice\u2019 and \u2018men\u2019.<\/p>\n

Armed with the background knowledge that lost \u2018i\u2019 vowels changed \u2018\u014d\u2019 into \u2018\u022b\u2019, and in doing so gave rise to modern English alternations between \u2018oo\u2019 and \u2018ee\u2019, we can now go fossicking through the vocabulary for more lost \u2018i\u2019 vowels. Another suffix that was lost over the centuries was a causative suffix, which related nouns to verbs, such as \u2018blood\u2019 to \u2018bleed\u2019, or \u2018food\u2019 to \u2018feed\u2019: as you\u2019ll have guessed, the verbs once contained a now-lost \u2018i\u2019. In some cases, pairs of sibling words such as these have grown apart over time. For instance, if you were to decide someone\u2019s fate (or their \u2018doom\u2019) then you\u2019d be judging them (or \u2018deeming\u2019 them), though as you can see, I had to produce a fairly contrived context to highlight the relatedness of \u2018doom\u2019 and \u2018deem\u2019. <\/p>\n

Umlaut caused by a now-lost \u2018i\u2019 also crops up in several nouns ending in \u2018-th\u2019: compare not only \u2018strong\u2019 with \u2018strength\u2019, \u2018long\u2019 with \u2018length\u2019, or \u2018broad\u2019 with \u2018breadth\u2019, but also \u2018hale\u2019 with \u2018health\u2019 and \u2018foul\u2019 with \u2018filth\u2019.<\/p>\n

\"\"
feet made filthy by umlaut!<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Over decades of meticulous work, linguists have uncovered much about how languages around the world change over time, though much more still remains to be accounted for. One of the many lingering questions is what the conditions are, which favour the continued survival of idiosyncratic word forms like \u2018feet\u2019, long after they have lost their regularity. We know that many irregular words, such as the Old English plural \u2018b\u0113c\u2019 for \u2018books\u2019 (corresponding to singular \u2018b\u014dc\u2019), get removed over time, yet others persist for millennia. It\u2019s an ongoing task for linguists to understand why some footprints remain while others get washed away.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There\u2019s been excitement recently about evidence that humans had set foot in the Americas as much as 22,500 years ago, pushing back the previous best estimate by almost ten thousand years. And by \u2018set foot\u2019, I mean literally. The tell-tale new evidence comes to us in the form of imprints left by human feet in a particularly well-preserved mudflat in New Mexico. So far, the humans themselves have not been uncovered by archaeologists, but their characteristic mark upon the mud…<\/p>\n

Read More Read More<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,80,59,24],"tags":[],"coauthors":[76],"class_list":["post-1135","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-english-languages","category-historical-linguistics","category-phonology","category-sound-change"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/morph.surrey.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1135","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/morph.surrey.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/morph.surrey.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morph.surrey.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/14"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morph.surrey.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1135"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/morph.surrey.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1135\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1151,"href":"https:\/\/morph.surrey.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1135\/revisions\/1151"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/morph.surrey.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1135"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morph.surrey.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1135"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morph.surrey.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1135"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morph.surrey.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=1135"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}