Anarcheologos

I have long been interested in the word boor, in terms of its relationship to its obvious cognates, the Dutch boer and the German bauer. All three words ultimately stem from the reconstructed Proto-Germanic word *buraz, which means “house” or “dwelling.” This word in turn comes from *bheu, which means “to be” or “to become,” with associated meanings related to “growth” or “increase.” The connection between being a farmer and the concepts of “growth” and “increase” is direct and obvious.

While the modern Dutch and German words simply mean “farmer,” the English boor has lost this literal sense and now means “rude” or “uncouth” person. While farmers are often stereotyped as rude and uncouth, I suspect that the transition of boor into a term of disparagement has more to do with the linguistic politics of Late Medieval England. It was replaced by the late 14th century by “farmer,” a word of French origin and a legacy of the Norman invasion. The negative connotations associated with boor appear to be in evidence by the 16th century.

While I always find these types of investigations interesting, a chance encounter with the Irish word bóaire allowed me to consider boor from another angle. Bóaire literally means “cow noble,” being composed of bó (“cow” or “cattle”) and aire (“noble,” from the Sanskrit arya).

Breaking the word down in this way reveals another level of meaning and makes clear the word’s ancient Indo-European roots. A noble is a noble, defined by blood and family, but in the archaic societies in which wealth was measured in cattle, a “cow noble” is someone who has achieved a high level of social status, a form of nobility, through economic means. In modern terms, we might call someone like this nouveau riche or, more in keeping with the word’s agricultural theme, a gentleman farmer.

Some time ago I translated the comic tale Hreiðars Þáttr from Old Norse into English.  While working on the translation I came across the word þreyta, which piqued my interest.  (The letter þ is called “thorn” and is a voiceless dental fricative pronounced like modern English “th” in “think”.  It has a voiced counterpart called “eth” that is written ð and pronounced as “th” in “this”).  I didn’t recognize þreyta and had to look it up.  Once I did, though, I felt dumb; it is a fairly obvious cognate with the English word threat.

As it turns out, þreyta isn’t exactly equivalent to “threaten” but rather means “to wear out or exhaust.”  Threat goes back to the Old English noun threat, which means “pressure,” and the verb form threatian, “to press,” which connects nicely with þreyta on a thematic level.

Knowing that dental fricatives such as “th” and alveolar plosives such as “t” and “d” often switch places over time and between languages, I considered whether I could think of any other words that contained these letters, along with an “r” in secondary position, and had a connection with the the concept of “pressing.”  It didn’t take long to come up with tread (tredan in Old English, troða in Old Norse, and treten in German) and throttle.  While the literal meaning of tread is “to step on” or “to walk on,” and throttle means “to choke” the connection with applying pressure to something is obvious in both instances.

Old Norse seems particularly rich in words of this type.  In addition to þreyta, there is þraut, which means “hardship,” þrátta, which means “dispute” or “quarrell” and þrúd (as in Þrúdheim, Thor’s hall), which means “power” or “might.”  This vein runs so deep in Old Norse that Þra- is a common element of compound words indicating persistence or obstinance (e.g., þrálátr=”stubborn”).

Based on this, it seems that there is a connection in the Germanic language family between the application of pressure or force and the following series of sounds:

• voiceless dental fricative (“th” as in “think”) or alveolar plosive (“t” or “d”)
• alveolar trill (“r”)
• alveolar plosive (“t” or “d”)

I was able to find an Indo-European connection to this theme quite easily with the IE root tred-, which means “to drill” and is connected widely to various words in the Indian and Slavic branches of the language family, and even into Spanish: tratar means “to try” which implies effort and, in a sense, pressure.

Sometimes a word just leaves me filled with questions.  For example, what exactly is a fishmonger?  And what does one have in common with a gossipmonger or a hatemonger?  Finally, are there any other types of mongers out there and, if so, what do they do?

I’ve always understood intuitively that a fishmonger sells fish and that, by metaphorical extension, a hatemonger “sells” hate and a gossipmonger “sells” gossip.  What piques my interest here is why this act of selling makes the person in question a monger, as opposed to a seller or some other word.  

As it turns out, monger comes from the Old English word mangere, the noun form of mangian, meaning “to trade.”  This is in turn related to the word for “many” or “much” in Old English, monig, which turns out to have deep connections within the Germanic and, further back, Indo-European language families.

As an example, related noun forms include the Old English menigu and Gothic and Old High German managi.  Related adjectival forms of the word include the Dutch menig, Norwegian mange, Old Saxon manag, ancestors of the proposed Proto-Indo-European *menegh.  This Indo-European root remained remarkably stable in the Slavic and Celtic branches of the language family, as evidenced by the Old Church Slavonic munugu, Old Irish menicc and Welsh mynych.   This stability seems to me to indicate the foundational or fundamental nature of the concept of many, hence the need for the word from time immemorial.