On a limb

One can teach an advanced course on etymology, while climbing up the leg, ant-wise. On foot we reach the territory of Indo-European, but it is not every day that an English word finds itself in such respectable company. Greek pod– and Latin ped– are of course related to foot (the variation p ~ f and d ~ t goes back to the First Consonant Shift, a familiar motif in this blog; compare pater ~ father and duo ~ two). The Latin root turns up in English pedal, pedestrian, and so forth. We walk pad-pad-pad, and so did people millennia ago. The most ancient word for “foot” was obviously sound-imitative. Probably the same holds for path, despite some hurdles, not worthy of discussion in the present context.

By contrast, leg is a loan from Scandinavian. What a surprise! For about a thousand years, English speakers have been out on a (borrowed) limb and are none the worse for it! So it goes… To exacerbate matters, we discover that the etymology of Old Norse leggr is unclear and that its original meaning must have been simply “limb,” because it turns up in such transparent compounds as armleggr and handleggr. Arm-limb and hand-limb look like so-called tautological compounds of the pathway type (both constituents mean almost or exactly the same). Leggr could also mean “bone hollow”!

The once popular comparison of Old Norse leggr with Latin lacerta “lizard” should be dismissed, because the origin of the Latin animal name is unknown and can therefore shed no light on another obscure word. Even if Latin lacertus “arm” has the same root as lacerta, the etymology of those two words does not become clearer. Leggr is related to Old Norse lær “hip” (the Swedish cognate is lår, and English once had lire, with the same sense), but this is where the story ends, though some Greek nouns have been cited as possibly related. Leg, we should admit, is a word of obscure origin. Nor does the history of German Bein “leg” shed even the weakest light on leggr, because it too is a word of unclear etymology.

We should move on, but we immediately stumble at ankle, another loan from Scandinavian! This is an especially unexpected case, because Old English had the word anclēow. Chaucer still used it in a slightly modernized form, but then the Scandinavian very similar competitor took over. Anclēow, a compound, was related to such words as Latin angulus “angle,” which, considering the shape of the ankle, makes perfect sense.

We seem to have reached the shin but have nothing to boast of. Old English had two closely related words for “shin”: scīa and scina, both “less than fully transparent,” which means “of unknown” or “of unclear origin.” The now accepted derivation of the word from the root for “cut” (as in German schneiden) is, in my opinion, doubtful, and I am glad that the OED online does not mention it. Shin resembles German Schenkel “thigh,” another rather obscure word. The Germanic cognates of shin mean “splint, a thin piece.” Skeat, hesitatingly, admitted that shin might be related to skin (skin, with its characteristic initial sk– is still another borrowing from Scandinavian: the native English word for “skin” is hide). The connection is dubious but not improbable. Once again, consider Russian golen for “shin,” that is, a bare place (goly “naked”). The association between the shin and a place covered only by skin is not improbable. However, all this is clever guesswork and speculation.

Onward, only onward! With knee we are again on solid Indo-European soil: Latin genu, Greek gónu, and others. However, the soil is swampy. Several words, once they are reduced to protoforms, sound alike (almost indistinguishable). Such are knee, chin, and kin. Kin is particularly intriguing. For clarity we may compare such English words as genuflection “bending the knee” and generation. Both are of Romance origin. Genu– in genuflection obviously refers to knees. The etymology of generation needs no comment. Is there a connection between generation and knee? Though in some languages this connection is obvious, speakers do not notice it. For instance, the Russian for “knee” is koleno (stress on the second syllable), while the word generation (as in the first generation of…) is po-kolen-ie.

It has been suggested and more or less accepted in both linguistics and anthropology that the connection is not fortuitous. An old ritual has been cited, according to which when a baby is born, the father puts it on his knee and thus recognizes the newcomer as belonging to the kin. This ritual, which has been observed in several cultures, naturally, presupposes the patriarchy. The somewhat puzzling tie between generation and knee has also been recorded in a few languages not belonging to the Indo–European family.

We have finally reached the thigh and the hip. With thigh “the upper part of the leg” one is again on firm ground. The word has unmistakable Indo-European cognates and contrary to the well-known idiom, here, we do have a leg to stand on. The word’s root seems to mean “fat, thick.” Now on to the hip! But first, it might be of some use to give a few definitions, in order to avoid misunderstanding: thigh “part of the human leg between the knee and the hip”; hip “part on either side where the bone of a person’s leg is joined to the trunk.” For highbrows: perineum “the region between the scrotum and the anus in males, and between the posterior vulva junction and the anus in females.” In bilingual dictionaries, thigh and hip are sometimes confused. With so much light shed on the subject, I am pleased to add that the only English minimal pair illustrating the difference between th, voiceless, and th, voiced, is thigh versus thy.

Like thigh, hip is well-connected. Greek kúbos “hollow above the hips on cattle; cubical die” is probably the most transparent cognate of hip outside Germanic (h-p versus k-b is again due to the Consonant Shift). Of course, we do not know why some ancient sound group like kew– (the reconstructed root) suggested to people the idea of bending and thus of a hole or in general something round. We don’t even know whether such “roots” existed, but it appears that the words listed as cognate in our dictionaries are indeed related, unless the entire procedure is an aberration of vision, the result of looking at an incredibly remote object through the wrong end of the binoculars. Mission accomplished! Ant-wise, we have crawled all the way up the leg and ignored only the toes and sitting in one’s lap.Leg is a part of numerous idioms, most of which are transparent. Only pull one’s leg, fist recorded in texts in 1821, is enigmatic. Even about a hundred years later, many British speakers had never heard it, though both Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde used it in their plays. In the Victorian epoch, leg was avoided in polite conversation (the more reason, of course, for the phrase to be widely known!). It appears that the idiom enjoyed more popularity overseas (in India and in the US) than in Great Britian. It has also been suggested that its home is Scotland, but no evidence at my disposal supports this idea. Of course, such a vulgar idiom must have a well-hidden origin. Consider British English you are having me on!

_{Featured image: Image by David To from Pixabay}