One of the things that I find most interesting about analyzing the roots, and therefore, the original meanings of English words is the way in which they tend to change from the functional to the symbolic. What I mean by this is that English has changed so much over its lifespan that modern English words derived from Old English tend to have undergone contraction and simplification that obscures their original, literal meanings. These original meanings often tend to be functional and additive in nature, while the modern meanings, divorced from their roots, have no literal meaning and tend to map directly to archetypal images in our brains that, while slightly different for each person, are consistent in their broad outlines.
Lord and Lady are a good example of this. When I hear the word lord, an image pops into my head of a man who is wealthy, powerful and benevolent. It makes sense that lord became a synonym for the Christian God in English. While lady has a few different connotations depending on context, when I hear it connected to lord, as in the formulation “Lord and Lady X,” I think of a similar character: wealthy, refined and charitable. In both cases, however, there is apparently no substrata to the word; a lord is simply a lord and a lady is simply a lady and everyone understands what those words mean without thinking any more deeply about it.
However, a lord was originally a hlafweard in Old English. This is a compound word that breaks down into two parts:
hlaf– loaf
weard– keeper or guardian (cognate with modern English warden)
So, lord originally meant something like “loaf warden”. Things brings a bit of a different image to mind, doesn’t it? Personally, I see a sort of paranoid medieval petty official, guarding the king’s food supplies against raiders and unruly peasants.
Lady follows a similar pattern. In Old English the word was hlæfdige, which is a compound form of:
hlaf– loaf
dæge– kneader
So, lady originally meant something like “loaf maker,” bringing it into a tidy, if traditional, relationship to lord.
What I find fascinating here is that, due to the evolution of English over the past ~1,500 years, these original meanings, in all their charming functionality, have been lost and replaced with what I consider to be archetypal symbols. I don’t know to what extent this happens in other languages. As I have noted elsewhere, German seems to retain the literal meanings of its words much more clearly than English, which is something I appreciate about the language. However, I don’t know to what extent German speakers are aware of those meanings on a daily basis as they use the language.
Anarcheologos 