Words, emotions, and the story of great

Last week (July 10, 2024), I promised to deal with the word great and will do so, but two comments on that post reinforced my old wish to deal with the topic indicated in the title of today’s essay. Those who have read the entire series may remember my light-hearted remarks on English leetle and its Gothic cognate (a word with an equally puzzling long vowel) and another facetious remark on the history of a in Latin magnus (one expects short i in its root). I wrote that since magnus means “big,” the meaning might inspire people to open their mouths wide. None of such ideas can be “proved,” and counterexamples are easy to find. For instance, big, obviously, has a “wrong” (closed) vowel: bag and even bug would fit its sense better. Yet sound-symbolic tendencies are real, even if erratic. See the header for images of a man learning, as I suspect, to pronounce Latin magnus.

It is always pleasant to wander and even err in good company. Years of studying sound-symbolism have made me aware of many words whose form cannot be accounted for in any other rational way (just symbolism!). I am also an old admirer of Wilhelm Horn (1876-1952). His contributions to English studies are outstanding, and it is a shame that the Internet has almost nothing to say about him. Horn spent years working on a book that was published after his death under the title Laut und Leben (“Sound and Life”). It appeared in 1954 thanks to the efforts of his former colleague Professor Martin Lehnert, who had a position of authority in the GDR and could hire enough assistants to help him in going through Horn’s manuscript and providing an inestimable word index. Laut und Leben is a woefully neglected book.

Horn believed that when it comes to historical phonetics, numerous exceptions from the otherwise safe laws owe their origin to words pronounced on a high note, that is, with emphasis. In his dedication to a high note, he often went too far. Yet the material he amassed is worthy of our closest attention. One of his star witnesses was the word broad. If we compare broad with goad, load, road, and other words with oa (the likes of goat, oaf, and soak also belong here), we will see that all of them have the vowel of no, while broad does not rhyme with road, goad, load! It rhymes with hoard, sword, and sward! I’ll later return very briefly to the etymology of broad, but at the moment, the Old English form will suffice: it was brād (ā, a long vowel, had the value of a in Modern English spa). This ā became ō (the vowel of today’s awe) and still later the diphthong, which we now have.

Why did broad avoid the trend? No one knows! But if we suggest that a word like broad might often be pronounced in a particularly emotional way (“on a high note”), we may not be too far from the truth. Affectation, simpering, deliberate imitation of baby talk, drooling over some happy event, and similar processes certainly change the way words sound. Broad has no secure cognates outside Germanic. Wide is the common word for the concept, though, strictly speaking, wide and broad are not synonyms. Who coined Old English brād and under what circumstances? Should I again repeat: “No one knows”?

Curiously, the etymology of break, another br-word, is also unclear. And the same holds for its br– synonym, whose only remnant in today’s English is the adjective brittle. Were both sound-imitative words, with their formidable br-? Despite its etymological obscurity, English break has cognates all over most of the Germanic-speaking world and beyond. The obviously related Latin frangere (we can detect its root in English fragile and fraction) again has a instead of e in the root! And the development of the English verb is also erratic. Today’s form should have rhymed with speak from Old English specan, rather than with make, from Old English macian. Horn suggested that break is an emotional form, without going into detail, and of course, what else could he say? I’ll skip his other examples and only add that wide has no secure etymology either. (“No secure etymology” means that no ancient root with a clear form has been reconstructed.)

The time has now come to look at great. At first sight, its origin seems to be rather clear, but dictionaries hedge and prefer to remain noncommittal. Of course, the spelling, or rather the pronunciation, of great is also problematic. Beat, seat, and feat don’t rhyme with it: only steak, with its erratic ea in the middle, does. But as I said (everybody around me says like I said, but I’ll stick to my variant), it is the origin of great that interests us at the moment. Despite all the uncertainty, some careful word historians half-heartedly suggest that great (no change of spelling since the Old English period: great, or with the length sign added, grēat) has the root of such words as grout (its oldest sense was “coarse meal”). If so, the semantic development was from “coarse” to “big.”

The original OED devoted an unusually long discussion to the word’s origin. The problems are several. The same adjective existed everywhere in Old West Germanic (which means that it is indeed old), but not in Scandinavian. Today’s German has groß. Dutch groot is well-known from the family name Groot ~ De Groot and groat “a small coin” (German Groschen means the same: such coins were once called “thick pennies”). Though grautr “porridge” did exist in Old Icelandic (English groats, grout, and of course, grits are close by), no adjective like great developed in it.

The way from “coarse,” that is, “hard-grained,” to “sizable” is not unthinkable. Yet the word’s triumph (it ousted micel) arouses surprise. Then we stumble at gross (some of its senses were also “dense; thick; coarse”), a borrowing from French, where it is native (!), and again discover that the word’s origin is unknown. Grand is from Latin grandis, another upstart: it superseded magnus. Etymologists agree that grandis was “a vulgar word,” that is, a word used by the Roman plebs. An additional detail will more amuse than embarrass us: its a in the root has never been accounted for. Of course, we notice that great, gross, and grand—all three unrelated adjectives—begin with gr.

In today’s (American) English, great has become the smallest conversational coin, a true groat. “Have a great day!” “How was it? It was great” (that is, awesome). “I am ready. Great, let us go!” What a bizarre journey: from “hard-grained” to “magnificent,” and finally, to a vacuous formula, full of sound and fury and signifying nothing.

No end of trouble with emotional words.

_{Featured image by Tima Miroshnichenko via Pexels.}