Two nonidentical twins: rump and runt?

Rump and runt are not twins, but they sound somewhat alike, and they may be “distantly related,” to use a phrase sometimes occurring in dictionaries, though this phrase is too vague to be useful. Rump surfaced in texts only in the fifteenth century, and but for the Rump Parliament (1648-1653), famous in British History, the word would probably have been relegated mainly to talks about animals and birds. Since rump made such a late entry into English, it may have been a borrowing. Indeed, its source is often believed to be Scandinavian, but the picture needs clarification, because the obvious cognates of rump are also well-known in other Germanic languages. Thus, German Rumpf and Dutch romp mean “torso, trunk, body,” and they are certainly not loans from Scandinavian. Modern Icelandic rumpur is probably a borrowing from Danish. The latest edition of the main German etymological dictionary says at Rumpf: “Origin unclear.”

Not only the sound-imitative verb rumble (a rootless word) but also the name of the German fairy tale dwarf Rumpelstilzchen (Anglicized as Rumpel-stilt-kin) is close by. This tale appears in the famous Grimms’ collection. The name probably means “rumbling stilts.” Most of our readers know the story, but, just in case, I’ll briefly retell it. A stupid man tells the king that his daughter can weave straw into gold. The king takes the claim seriously, and the poor girl is brought to the palace. There, she is locked in a room full of straw and told that unless she can live up to her father’s promise, she will die. Otherwise, the king will marry her. A mysterious dwarf appears. He vows to fulfill the impossible task if she gives him some presents, though why someone endowed with such a gift needs presents is unclear. She agrees. The greedy king cannot stop, and the ordeal is repeated two more times. But the girl runs out of precious objects on her. On the third night, she has nothing to give the dwarf and is made to promise him that as a reward she will part with her firstborn. Again, we are in the dark about why the dwarf needs the baby. She is saved, becomes Queen, and gives birth to a boy. The dwarf returns for his reward. She pleads for mercy, and he finally agrees to relent if she guesses his name in three days.

The plot is as old as the hills. Knowing one’s name meant having full control of the person, but we need not delve into folkloristic depths, though, perhaps unwittingly, the tale (it will be noticed) brings out the idea that there is no fool like an old fool. One fool is the heroine’s father. The other is the dwarf. Nobody can guess his name, but on the third day, someone spots the dwarf and overhears him singing boastfully that his name is Rumpelstiltzchen and will remain hidden forever. The queen tells the dwarf his name, and he bursts in fury.

This odd name is not only impossible to guess but hard to interpret. Yet in English dialects, rump has been recorded as meaning “a cow with bones sticking out.” Not improbably, rump, in addition to meaning “torso” and “backside,” could also refer to protruding bones and the coccyx. I will venture the guess that Rumpelstilzchen, like so many folklore ghosts, was named for being able to rattle his bones and frighten people. According to an old suggestion, which I, naturally, like, the word rump first meant “tree stump.” Therefore, my guess may be correct. The same holds for the idea that rump is related to such Slavic words as Russian rubit’ (stress on the second syllable) “to cut, hew.” Cutting wood is a noisy activity, and the result is of course a stump. Rumpus “commotion,” a late eighteenth-century “fanciful formation,” is unrelated but what an apt one, as far as sound imitation is concerned!

No one knows what exactly the Old Icelandic derogatory nickname rympill meant. Perhaps it should be glossed as “badass,” which returns us to rump. Above, I said that since rump surfaced in English so late, it may have been a borrowing. But perhaps a vulgar word for “hind quarters” was part of common Scandinavian-North-West Germanic slang, and I need not dwell on a possible connection between one’s posterior and auditory effects. My point is that despite all the uncertainties, the complex rump– ~rumb– ~ ramb– gravitates toward “noisy” words and is possibly onomatopoeic.

Now lo and behold! Runt, which also made its way into English books more or less at the same time as rump, means in dialects “an old tree stump.” It still means roughly the same (“the stem of a plant”) in Scotland. Those English speakers who use the word runt may mainly remember its sense “the smallest of a litter of pigs” (like Wilbur, a doomed and rescued pig in E. B. White’s book Charlotte’s Web). Rumpelstilzchen was also a dwarf. The conjectures about the origin of runt are few and unpromising: mere guesswork. An obsolete English word rother “ox” is cognate with German Rind and Dutch rund and means “cattle.” Runt and rind have sometimes been compared, and Ernest Weekley defined runt as “small cattle,” but the senses do not match too well. Old Icelandic hrinda meant “to push, throw, drive.” This verb is part of our story only if runt is a very old word that once began with hr– (such words are numerous: outside Icelandic, that is, in West Germanic and in the continental Scandinavians languages, the initial h has been lost before consonants). But runt need not be old. Animal names are often sound-imitative, and perhaps runt is one of them. I am not impressed by the runt-rind connection.

Runt has been more or less given up as a word of unknown origin, and I have no arguments to prove or even suggest its connection with rump, but they may be close. No definite solutions present themselves, though perhaps my ideas on rump are a bit more convincing than those on runt. Be that as it may, when one comes to think of it, rump and runt emerge as having a similar phonetic structure (nt consists of two sounds articulated in the same part of the mouth, and so does mp: such consonant groups are called homorganic), and both words share a suggestive abut obscure past.

A postscript to the previous post

A reader asked me why I had rejected the Indo-European root of the word whale. If it is true that the word is Nostratic, then its root is pan-human, so to speak. But if some old word for a sea monster (a whale or a shark, or any other big fish) migrated from land to land, then again we end up with a “rootless” vagabond. This was my reason for staying away from Pokorny’s root. I also recommend our readers to have a look at a comment about Australia and New Zealand, following the post of a week ago. I, of course, copied my information about a beached whale from a newspaper.

_{Featured image by thecmn via Flickr. Public Domain}