Supper with an etymologist

It does not require much philological preparation to guess that supper is a word containing the root sup– and the suffix –er. Yet in the days of King Alfred and even much later, the inhabitants of Anglo-Saxon England had no such word. People spoke of the morning meal, midday meal, and evening meal. The word for “meal” was mete “meat,” whose ancient meaning “food; meal” is still heard in the idiom meat and drink, the compound sweetmeats “candies, etc.,” and the obsolete greenmeat “fodder.” As far as I can judge, sweetmeats is a dead word in American English (that is, no one even understands it), while greenmeat is so little remembered that even my computer does not recognize it. Be that as it may, supper exists (see the header!) and has been an English word since the thirteenth century. It was borrowed from French, but the root of the French noun is Germanic. This means that at one time the speakers of Old French took over the word sup from their neighbors, while later, those neighbors added a Romance suffix to it! Quite a journey, but such hybrids are not too rare.

Now, what is sup? Never mind sup for “what’s up.” Sup means “to sip,” and it seems to occur only in the context of imbibing alcohol. Yet it is an old “respectable” word with well-known cognates, for instance, Dutch zuipen, German saufen, and Icelandic súpa. Once we begin to wonder where sup– came from, we are sucked into a vortex of similar-sounding verbs. I used and even highlighted suck for a purpose: this verb is part of a sizable group of s-words, referring to liquids. All of them seem to be “obscurely related” to one another, as dictionaries characterize this situation.

Sup is not the same as sip, and neither is a synonym of suck, but the affinity is obvious. Let us first look at sap (from which we have sapling). The word is old and has cognates all over the Germanic-speaking world (for example, German Saft “juice”). Etymologists, naturally, reconstruct the most ancient form, common to several languages, and come up with the ancient noun sapam or sappam.

However, the sounds refuse to play the expected game, because we also remember Latin sapa “grape juice, boiled until it is thick” (Italian sapa or saba is the continuation of that word), obviously a member of the same family, but it too has p in the root, and it is well-known that Latin p should correspond to Germanic f (as happens in Latin pater versus English father). Another borrowing? Who borrowed what from whom? The most cautions sources admit that the origin of the word is unclear. Indeed, it seems that we have a group of words, either sound-imitative or somehow (how?) reflecting the words’ sense, that is, sound-symbolic. All of them refer to the way we deal with liquids: sip, sap, sup, and sop.

It pays off to have a look at those verbs individually. So far, we have examined only sup. Sip is a late fifteenth-century addition to English. Similar verbs exist elsewhere in Germanic. Etymologists seem to agree that sip, though “allied” to sup, is a weaker version of it. This verdict sounds convincing, because sip and sup do seem to be cognate in at least some way. Can seep throw light on this group? Not really. Old English sipian, along with its lookalikes with a long vowel in the root, have been recorded, but none of them would have become seep. Even if the progenitor of sip were found, we would still remain with the same group of similar-sounding verbs describing the movement of liquids.

There also is sop “a piece of bread dipped in liquid” (and compare milksop “a timid male, a pushover”!), which is universally recognized as a member of the family we are discussing, even though its ultimate origin is as obscure as of that of the verbs we have examined. Sip, seep, sop, sup…. Finally, what about sap “juice”? It has a secure German cognate Saft (the same meaning (f in Saft goes back to p, and final t was added to saf only in the fourteenth century). A good old word, but it is unable to solve our puzzle. We should resign ourselves to the conclusion made above: all the words belonging to the complex s-p with a vowel in the middle in some way imitate the noise made in the process of drinking.

Though we realize that multiplying the words belonging to this group will hardly result in a revelation, perhaps soup is worth mentioning here. Sop, we remember, was borrowed into English from French in the seventeenth century, and the story of soup sounds familiar: Latin suppa, the ancestor of soup, seems to be a word of Germanic origin! I am happy to report that so is soap.

Incidentally, Latin also had the word sapor “taste, flavor,” which (by way of French) ended up as English savor. To repeat: the words describing the “activity” of the mouth tend to depend on the complex sp– not only in Germanic but also outside it. The British scholar John Rupert Firth (1890-1960) was especially interested in such complexes (he called them prosodemes, a rather unfortunate label), but though he has, or at least had, a sizable following at home, he is little known in the US and elsewhere, which is a pity.

Once we become aware of the “mouthy prosodeme” sp-, we are beginning to wonder whether spit, spew, and even speak belong to our story. No doubt, sp- is at least partly sound-imitative, and once it established itself, it acquired a symbolic meaning, and many words, vaguely belonging to the same sphere, came into being. Since people spit and “sup” in the same way all over the world, it is no wonder that we have quite a few verbs sounding alike even in unrelated languages. A supper with an etymologist is rich but leaves you hungry. Sorry!

POSTSCRIPT: A question and a comment

QUESTION. What is known about the etymology of the word core?

The answer is: “Next to nothing.” The word surfaced in the early fifteenth century in the form we still have today. Its earliest recorded sense was also familiar: “the core of an apple”. The word has always been spelled with final e, which indicates that this sound was not mute. The French word for “heart” did not have this e. Core supplanted the dialectal (northern) word colk (the same meaning). But both core and colk also referred to what is today called coke, another dialectal word of unknown origin. One wonders who needed a special little-known word for the core of a fruit! Obviously, we are dealing with a regionalism, a technical term, whose origin we’ll probably never be able to discover. The fact that core sounded somewhat like French cœur “heart” may have contributed to its longevity (mere guessing). The verdict remains: “Of unknown origin,” and it is to be regretted that some dictionaries do not make this verdict sufficiently clear.

A Lover’s Complaint

A correspondent who is very particular about good usage was shocked to read a politician’s phrase less than fulsome information, in which fulsome means “full.” Many people like language history, but no one wants to be part of it. Fulsome did once mean “full,” but then “deteriorated” and stayed mainly as part of the phrase fulsome praise, that is, “excessive and insincere praise.” However, language has always changed under the influence of the uneducated, who don’t care whether what they say is correct or wrong from professors’ point of view. For many years, most of our young people have been reading only pulp fiction and one another’s emails. If troublesome means “full of trouble,” and if the main epithet for all situations is awesome, then fulsome obviously means “quite full.” This change has been going on for decades. Too bad! The same man dislikes the pronunciation gerrymandering with g, as in get. Incidentally Governor Elbridge Gerry did pronounce his last name with hard g. Thus, our “correct” pronunciation is wrong! Now those who have never heard the word mispronounce it, without knowing that Mr. Gerry would have been happy. Inscrutable are the ways of language. What is wrong is correct, and what is correct is wrong.

_{Featured image: Photograph by Lewis Hine. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.}