A handful of remarks on hinting and hunting

Allow me to introduce a group of seemingly ill-assorted words. Each member of this group occupies a secure place in the vocabulary of English, but no one knows for sure whether they belong together. My pair of distinguished guests is hint and hunt. They look very much alike and, in a way, their meanings are not incompatible: both presuppose the existence of a searched-for target. One wonders whether they aren’t even variants of the same verb or at least related.

It is the third time that I am returning to the origin of English hunt. See especially the post for February 12, 2020, and the comments. There will be some overlap between that essay and the one I am offering today, but now that several years have passed, I think I have partly solved the riddle (for myself) and decided to return to that intractable word.

Like some older authors, I suspect that hint and hunt are related. They even resemble non-identical twins. Mark Twain wrote a little-remembered but very funny tale “The Siamese Twins.” In the final sentence, it informs the reader that the ages of the brothers were respectively fifty-one and fifty-three. The author apologized for not mentioning this fact earlier. I decided to avoid his mistake and to make things clear right away. Hunt (the verb) has been known since the days of Old English, that is, for more than twelve centuries. By contrast, hint (the noun) first surfaced in texts by Shakespeare.

Though hint is a relatively recent word without a respectable pedigree, it looks like it belongs with hunt and hand (we use the hand for seizing things; hence an association with hunting). As expected, opinions on their relationship differ. Hunt is a typical English verb for “chasing game.” It lacks obvious cognates, but in many other languages, words meaning “hunt” are also obscure. For example, German has jagen, about whose origin nothing definite is known either.

There may be a good reason for this seemingly unexpected opaqueness—unexpected, because hunting is such a common and seemingly transparent occupation. For millennia, hunting sustained early communities, and people’s survival depended on the success of the chase. Danger lurked everywhere: the hunter might get lost, killed by his prey, or return empty-handed. Words designating such situations often fell victim to taboo, just as, for example, many animal names did. Call the bear by its name, and it will come and destroy you. But if you speak about the bear as a honey-lover (that is what they do in Russian) or the brown one (that is the case in Germanic: from a historical point of view, bear means “brown”), the beast will be duped and stay away. (Talk of the Devil, and he will appear! Right?) The same practice prevailed for the names of several wild animals, body parts, and diseases. (My apology: taboo was also made much of in the earlier post.)

Common words were distorted, and today we usually have no way of guessing what the original form was. Yet we sometimes know the idea behind the euphemism: for example, not the Devil but the Evil One (or Flibbertigibbet, for variety’s sake); not the bear, but the honey-eater or the brown one. The main Latin verb meaning “to hunt” was vēnārī, related to Venus. The idea must have been “to do something with a will, full of desire.” (A digression: the most often hunted animal was the deer, so much so that Tier, the German cognate of deer, means simply “animal.” Deer is a Germanic word, but those who have read the anthologized opening chapter in Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe know that it was the Anglo-Saxons who killed deer, while the meat went to the table of the French barons. Hence venison, related to the Latin verb, cited above.)

The same seems to hold for Russian okhota (with cognates elsewhere in Slavic; stress on the second syllable): the root khot– means “to wish, desire.” The English verb hunt should probably be “deciphered” as “to catch, seize.” Perhaps, it was a vague taboo word, like its Latin and Slavic synonyms. If hint really appeared so late, it cannot be related to hunt, which, though devoid of relatives (and thus “local”), was already old even in Old English.

Fortunately, the situation is not hopeless. Hint, first recorded as a noun, meant “opportunity; slight indication or suggestion”; thus, just a dab, as it were. It was a mere reshaping (or an alternate form) of the now obsolete old verb hent “get, receive”! The desired time bridge has thus been restored. We can proceed with our chase, and while looking around, we notice the already mentioned hand, a Common Germanic word again (!) of uncertain origin, to quote some dictionaries (elsewhere in Indo-European, this extremity has quite different names.)

Could hand also be a taboo word for something like manus (manus is Latin for “hand”)? Indeed, it could. As just noted, the names of body parts are often products of taboo. Hand is an instrument of catching, grasping, “handling” things. It is an ideal member of our ill-assorted family. The scholarly literature on hunt and especially hand is huge, and many (but not all) language historians defend the ideas mentioned above. The bridge exists. Though it rests on unsafe supports, it may sustain the construction rather well.

The final actor in our drama is the Gothic verb fra-hinþan “to take captive” (fra– is a prefix; þ has the value of English th in thin). Gothic, a Germanic language (now dead), was recorded in the fourth century. Some of the Old Germanic words, related to –hinþan, mean “to reach” and “booty.” Though –hinþan and hand have often been compared, þ and d don’t match, and a reliable reconstruction depends on exact sound correspondences. Once such correspondences fail, etymologists are in trouble. However, here we seem to be dealing with a “special” taboo word, and it would be unrealistic to expect great precision in the coining of its forms. Obviously, I am pleading for special dispensation.

As usual, I refuse to press my point, but I also refuse to concede defeat. It sems that a special taboo word with the sense “grasp, seize, catch,” sharing the root hent/hint ~ hunt ~ hand did exist in Germanic, and its reflexes are still discernible today. Hinþan was a strong verb (that is, a verb, whose root vowels alternated by ablaut, as, for instance, in English bind ~ bound or run ~ ran). The nouns, related to it, were like English bend and band. If this conclusion deserves credence, hint (from hent), hunt, and hand are modern reflexes of that ancient taboo word. Let me repeat that numerous researchers think so, but the most cautious critics prefer to sit on the fence. This is fine. The fence is as good a support as any other.

_{Featured image via Pixabay.}