Mytholinguistics (Linguistics)

[Pete Jones]

Veering away from the concrete stumbling block back toward the abstract linguistics...

Historical reconstructions are sometimes just perverse, I think. Here's a good example.

English SHAME is said to have these ancestors:

Proto-Germanic: *Skando-, with the variant *Skamdo. (The M became an N because of sound-change laws blah blah)

And that proto word came from:

Proto-IE: *Skom-teh

And that came from the root:

Proto-IE: *Skamo- ("shame")

By looking at SKAMO, you can see how the pronunciation SHAME came about (also SCAM and SHAM?). A familiar version of this pronunciation shift is SHIP and SKIFF.

And by looking at SKANDO- you can imagine how the slightly altered semantics of SCANDAL came about. A scandal is that which causes shame.

This seems easy enough, if a little difficult to fathom given the timeframes involved. Proto-IE is 7000 years ago, and Proto-Germanic is 3500 years ago. How could two slightly different forms arrive in the modern world when their Ur-forms go back that far?

Well, they can't, say the linguists (and chronologists). It's too far back. So they need something else.

[Mick Harper]

I used the word 'skalding' in a post about immersion heaters just now. It didn't look quite right so I looked it up. Apparently the British spell it 'scalding' even though sc- is ambiguous.

My thoughts then turned to how I could have made such an error. I realised it was because I had been reading too many of your posts lately. This won't stop me but always bear in mind the price I am paying.