The kings of etymological rings

It is amazing how many words Indo-European languages have for “supreme ruler; potentate.” In English, the main one is king. But outside English, a host of others exist. Two of the best-known examples are Latin rex (which also meant “priest”; see a variation on this theme below!) and Hindi raja(h). Rex and raja(h) share an ancient root, but those two venerable titles are rather isolated in their royal splendor. Only Irish ríg belongs with them, even though the same root turns up in some other common words—for instance, English right (its cognates are, among others, Latin rēctus and German recht). English region is also related. According to a plausible explanation, the ancient REX traced out the line for cities (!), regiō “region” being the point reached out in a straight line. This explanation will come as a surprise to many.

Engl. rich also belongs to our story, and so does its German cognate reich (the same meaning). In both German and English, this adjective once meant “powerful, great”; hence “having abundant means.” (Power brings wealth, does it not?) The German noun Reich “empire, realm,” as in Hitler’s infamous Third Reich, meant to last a thousand years, returns us to the same root. As regards the names for rulers, we recall the English word basilica “church built on the model of a royal palace,” from Greek. Basileús is still another word for “king.”

Incidentally, the plant name basil goes back to an adjective meaning “royal” (because of its fragrance?), and the name of the fabulous reptile basilisk is a rendition of Greek basilískos. According to Pliny, the name is due to a crown-like spot on the reptile’s head. Since no one has ever seen the creature, we needn’t contest this explanation. By contrast, the lizard basilisk is quite real and in one respect exceptional: it can run on water (hence its other name the Jesus Christ lizard!). The proper name Basil and Slavic Vasily belong here too.

Usually, when the origin of an old Germanic word is discussed, the first form dictionaries cite is Gothic. This is natural, because the Gothic Bible (part of the New Testament) is the earliest long consecutive text we have in any Germanic language. But the Goths did not know the word king! The Gothic for Greek basileús was þiudans (þ has the value of th in Engl. thick). Other Germanic languages retained exact cognates of this noun. For instance, in Old English, it meant “ruler, lord” and even “God.”

Most probably, the Goths had no kings in the sense known later to the rest of the Germanic-speaking world. Þiudans is most often used about Jesus, though some earthly kings are also called thatin their text of the New Testament. It must have been the speakers of West Germanic (to which Old English belongs) that began to use the word kuningaz in the sense familiar to us today (that is, king).

To us king is “a sovereign ruler of the state,” but when this word and its synonyms were coined, the implication must have been approximately “tribal leader,” with the emphasis on tribal. King is, obviously, related to kin. At present, we are no longer aware of this connection. But when fifteen or sixteen centuries ago, people said cyning or still earlier kuningaz (the original form of king, mentioned above), that connection must have been clear to the speakers.

Several words for “kin; people” existed in Germanic. One of them was þeod– ~ þiud (to repeat, þ has the value of th in Engl thick). We can still detect it in the German word Deutsch “German,” originally, “related to the people” (its d goes back to þ). The Goths also had a cognate of English cyn “kin,” but in translating the Greek word for “king” chose its synonym (we cannot decide why).

In any case, the Gothic word for “tribal chief; king” (þiudans) had no analogs among the other Germanic tribes, while cyning sounded almost the same in Old Saxon (kuning; some such form became Modern Dutch koning), Old High German chuning (in German, this word died without issue), and Old Norse konungr. The Germanic forms spread far and wide. Finnish has kunningas, and Russian has kniaz’. The Russian form has changed almost beyond recognition, but it is undoubtedly of Germanic origin. Isn’t it curious that in the Russian phrase Kniaz’ Vasily “Pince Vasily” the first word is Germanic and the second is Greek! Beware of nationalism.

The derivation of king from kin seems obvious, and one wonders why so many researchers tried to find another etymology for this rather transparent word. The difficulty is not in the word but in the concept. The oldest Germanic speakers had no kings in the modern sense of this term. And we have seen that no one followed the Gothic choice (þiudans “king”). The northerners did have a cognate of king, namely konungr (borrowed from their neighbors?), but their main word for the person we would call “king” was dróttinn (drótt meant “the military chief’s bodyguard”). To give another example: those people knew the word Caesar but had no analog for it; hence German Kaiser, a borrowing.

The less known attempts to explain the origin of the word king are ingenious but sometimes fanciful. Konungr (the Scandinavian form) from kven-ungr (kvenna “woman,” ungr “young”)? Or indeed from kin (in its oldest form) but with reference to the king as one specially born, perhaps as a being of divine origin. Or perhaps –ing goes back to the name of an earth god as the progenitor of the human race? Old Norse konr “sexual partner” exists. Does king refer to it? With this word we are returned to the previous hypothesis.

Finally, think of the English word ken “knowledge,” for example, as it is used in the phrase “beyond one’s ken.” German kennen means “to know.” Is it possible that the root of king contains reference to this root and thus has nothing in common with kin? Germanic chiefs were supposed to be also priests and possess arcane knowledge. This etymology has an influential modern supporter. I find his approach unprofitable. A few more exotic conjectures along similar lines are hardly worth mentioning. All this being said, most probably, –ing is the suffix we find in words meaning “descended from,” while the root of king is the same as in kin.

The history of king is instructive in several ways. We have a word with multiple cognates in old texts, we seem to understand what it meant, but its meaning has changed in a subtle way from antiquity to the modern period, because the social milieu behind the word has changed. The king of today is not what the word designated two thousand or even fifteen hundred years ago. I have once referred to the theme “Words and Things” in etymology. The history of king is a good example of how the “thing” refuses to give a definite answer to the question about its earliest meaning of the word. Hence our uncertainty concerning its origin. Yet the simplest etymology is probably correct. Long live simplicity! Long live the king!

_{Featured image: Image by Alexey Komarov. CC-BY-3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.}