Kind and kin

The first words that Hamlet speaks (either in an aside to himself or directly to his uncle, are:

A little more than kin and less than kind.

This is a play on words because Claudius has just referred to him as his cousin and his son and the quick-witted Prince disputes the inference of familial affection. (Cousin had a less precise denotation then).

Hamlet is saying that his kinship with the new King is closer than he would like in the sense of family: Claudius is now a father, being married to his mother, as well as his uncle in the normal way. Yet Claudius is not kind to him in the sense of being well-disposed.

It is a pun because the two words are connected in derivation and, from what we can surmise about a late Elizabethan audience, they would have relished the clever but bitter phrase. It is neatly alliterative also with an added contrast between more and less. Yet Hamlet does not use but, perhaps because he needs to link the opposition closely: he has to tolerate the paradox as a whole. 

The root term for both words in Old English meant species, a sense we still have when we say two of a kind. The connection is that to be kind one must act as a relative or kin should behave, in gentle and friendly fashion. 

We still say kith and kin where kith refers to acquaintances and kin to family. Another interesting point is how reactions to puns differ now from then. We groan at them whereas they admired them: this assertion is to be (or not to be) discussed over a CUPPA.   

1066 and so what?

 The one date that everyone knows is, of course, 1006, when the Normans successfully invaded Britain. The social repercussions are more widely recognised than the effects on our language but it is worth noting how English changed around that time and - in my opinion - thank William for his benign influence.

Although the language was evolving prior to the Conquest, those developments quickened during and after, because English lost its status in vital areas such as law, government and literature, agents of stability. The learned used Latin, the aristocrats spoke French and English became less of a written and more of an oral language - to oversimplify. This enabled development since the brake had been released. An oral language, not used in officialdom, was freer to change.

The main changes were loss of inflections and grammatical gender. Inflections are the endings of a word which show its function in the context. Old English was fully inflected, much as Latin is, with a different form for a word if it was the subject or object of a sentence or clause. It was a synthetic language. What this meant was that the words could go in any order and the meaning would stay the same. 

Those endings are easily lost, partly because speakers are lazy and mumble final unstressed syllables in a vague uh sound called schwa. If you don't know what that is, ask your teenage offspring if s/he would like cornflakes and the answer yuh is schwa. The result is that word placement does matter: the dog bit the man is the only sensible order of words in that sentence. In Latin you could invert them and say the same thing because the endings would tell you who did it! A few inflections remain - and cause trouble: think of the errors even writers make with who and whom. Yet English is now an analytic language and the better for it. If you doubt my opinion, ponder on having to change the definite article, the, according to its function in a sentence.

Loss of grammatical gender is even more palatable. We no longer write of inanimate objects as male or female and so do not have to make adjectives and the definite article agree with them as we must in French.  One exceptional example would be to call a ship she. Churchill, as a schoolboy, reasonably objected to learning the vocative case of mensa, pointing out that he did not speak to a table. Yet he might equally have jibbed at the wooden object being thought of as feminine.

So, merci, Guillaume, le Batard, you saved us from much modern angst. 

The word "dollar"

If you are paying your restaurant bill in New York in cash, you do not pull out of your pocket a fistful of schlicks.  That is a pity because it has an onomatopoetic clinking sound to it which would suggest the rattling of many coins. You might talk about a greenback or a buck or even a smackeroo but the correct term is, of course, dollar. 

Around the turn of the sixteenth century, the Count of Schlick (I do love saying that word) started mining in Jachymov. The resulting silver coins were known as Schlickenthalers or Joachimthalers. Thaler meant something from the valley. The word thaler became daler (think of the English dale). From there it is a short transition to doler and dollar which had happened by around 1700. On July 6th, 1785 the Continental Congress adopted the dollar as the main unit of currency and the Coinage Act of April 2nd, 1792 set up the U.S. Mint and established the dollar as the official currency, defining it by its silver and gold content. It has since been taken up by over 30 countries around the world. 

I have lived for a year in the U.S.A. but am British. Yet I would say: "I'd bet my bottom dollar" rather than pound, although I might say "last penny". Such are the vagaries of actual language usage, and we must never think that we have mastered them. I'll bet you my bottom schlick on that. Over a CUPPA.

The word 'sentence.'

 When we use the word sentence we usually mean a complete grammatical unit which makes sense in itself and is followed by a full stop. It contains a main finite verb, one with a subject and tense, and may have additional clauses tacked on. 

The original derivation was the Latin sententia indicating feeling, from which we also have sense, sentiment etc. The term subsequently broadened to denote opinion or judgement which was the starting point for our modern usage in the courtroom. The judge delivers his verdict and orders that a sentence be applied. It is ironic that this context is supposed to be free from the clouding effects of emotion, previously denoted by the word. As so often, the adjective has taken a different turn and sententious (full of meaning) has come to be pejorative, indicating pompous moralising.

 Chaucer had fun with the concept: the rooster, Chanticleer, in "The Nun's Priest's Tale" quotes lofty Latin sententiae as part of the mock-heroic trope and the Wife of Bath, in her Preamble, twists recognised sayings to fit her purpose. The spurious Pardoner refers to Radix malorum est cupiditas (greed is the root of all evil) whilst lining his own pockets with pressured offerings from the poor. Chaucer was well aware of such elements of Ciceronian rhetoric and a knowledge of some of them is essential to a full understanding of his work. 

Hearty, cordial and cardiac

 Medical professionals need terms which are neutral, unemotional and free from the connotations of normal, vernaculat usage. The word heart is an interesting example of the problem of keeping scientific vocabulary as objective as possible.

A doctor today might inform you that you have a heart condition but would probably use cardiac (from the Greek) in a letter or formal note. In old medical texts he would have written of a cordial failure. We notice that the shift is towards Latinate terms and that Greek is often employed - as in the many terms ending in ology. This is to avoid the subjectivity of our native words.

In Middle English, around 1400, the word cordial entered the language, derived from Latin cor and cordialis and meant of the heart or pertaining to the heart. It functioned in exactly the same way as cardiac does today.

The shift was then towards a more metaphorical sense via cordial as a drink which was believed to strengthen the heart - even one laced with opium as was Godfrey's Cordial. That sense (as a noun) has been retained although it refers to different syrups and liquids depending on country. The adjective has become entirely figurative: when you give a visitor a cordial welcome, you are not necessarily offering a drink.

Fortunately for medicine, the word cardiac has retained its objectivity: you do not give your friend a cardiac hug! Perhaps a hearty one.

Yet, we might swap our usual CUPPA for a glass of heart-warming cordial now that the weather is colder.

The term 'culture' according to Raymond Williams

 I am not proposing to discuss Raymond Williams' entire opus Culture and Society but to look at his account of how the word changed its meaning up to the publication of his book in 1958.

On p. xvi of the Preface he recognises that the development reflects society, "a remarkable change in ideas." Culture had primarily meant "the tending of natural growth", a sense we have kept in terms like agriculture and horticulture. From there it shifted towards the process of human training - by analogy. Those required an object to be trained, a plant or a person, but, by the nineteenth century it became a thing in itself, morphing into "the general state of intellectual development, in a society as a whole." From that denotation it narrowed to "the general body of the arts." Later in the century it widened and indicated " a whole way of life, material, intellectual and spiritual." 

Since that book was written, the term culture has once more evolved and lost precision, so that we talk of a cafe culture - where there is no reference to the arts or any other mental connotation. One could say that it has become trivialised. Although there are stages at which it widened and narrowed, the semantic shift here is more an example of the effects of social preoccupations. Perhaps, in modern times, it reflects the insistence that Coronation Street is culture just as much as is Hamlet.

As we have noted before, not all associated words change in the same way. If we describe a person as cultured, we normally refer to the older sense of versed in the high arts. That individual has been mockingly called a culture vulture.

I will brood on that over my CUPPA.

Doublets, cognates and synonyms

 There are differences between these 3 terms but I intend to examine the overall idea that the spirit of the English language moves against pairs of words having exactly the same meaning. In time they usually become differentiated as to denotation, connotation, normal usage or register.

An example is fatherly and paternal. The former is native and descends via the Germanic faeder whereas the latter is directly from the Latin pater.  Father has been subjected in its history to 2 shifts of letter from pater:  p →f (Grimm's law - yes, he of the fairy tales) and t →th/d. In one sense they are interchangeable but fatherly is more domesticated whilst paternal tends to be legalistic and formal. A man would not apply for fatherly leave when his new baby is about to be born. Yet when he holds it for the first time, a paternal hug sounds less loving. 

The Latin word patria, denoting one's native country, leaned towards suggesting that it is your fatherland about which you are patriotic, although some countries prefer to keep the concept of a motherland. I am happy to note that we accept that mothers do the nourishing when we talk of our alma mater, our former school or college. 

Similar pairs can be seen in motherly/maternal, brotherly/fraternal, son/filial, sister/sororal, some of which have fallen out of common use, except for the American sorority, originally women's fraternity (until 1880's).  Differentiation and social change at work there!