Lord & Lady: Their Surprising Origins from Bill Casselman's Canadian Word of the Day

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Lords & Ladies, Your Origins, Please!

There are modest truths of etymology that give pause to beginners, such as: 60% of English words of two syllables or more are likely to be derived directly from French. Consider these random examples.

despair - from Old French desespeir from Latin desperare ‘to lose hope

geography - from French géographie from Latin from Greek geo- ‘land,earth’ + graphia ‘writing about...’

gentleman - loan translation from Old French gentilz hom ‘man of good birth’

parent - direct borrowing from Old French from Latin present participle parens, parentis ‘having children’

Here's another axiom of everyday etymology: Most modern English words have been borrowed into our language and not altered excessively, so that, if we know French, Latin, Greek, German, and perhaps a few other European languages, we can recognize the language from which English borrowed a word.

Remember too that English is the great thief of tongues. Among the major world languages, English has the largest vocabulary of any language. We have borrowed more words from more languages than French or Arabic or Russian or German or Chinese. We have merrily filched words from every foreign language ever encountered in our scamperings across the globe of Earth.

But some English words have undergone extensive changes. The words lady and lord are two such changelings.

The terse roots and monosyllabic husks of English are Germanic. The basic Old English word stock, all those simple Anglo-Saxon words have survived into Modern English reasonably intact. True, these old words have not rolled down through the centuries untouched. But the majority of them have not suffered an obscuring metamorphosis. Lord and lady, on the other hand, are words mightily altered by historical condensings and shortenings. Linguistics applies more scientific names to these word-changing processes, names like crasis, elision, and vowel gradation.

Now and then English offers up a word so seemingly simple but so altered by age as to be startling when we discover its roots. Such a word is lady. Lady begins in Anglo-Saxon or Old English as hlæfdige ‘bread-kneader’ being compounded of hlaf ‘loaf of bread’ + dige ‘female kneader.’ So the first lady was she who kneaded the bread. Lord is what is left from Old English hlaf -weard> hlaford =, hlāf ‘bread, loaf ‘+ weard keeper, guard (think of ward, wardrobe, guard, garden [place where you keep or guard plants?] ). So the lady kneaded the loaf of bread and the lord guarded the bread as master of the household.

How did the word hlæfdige become the word lady? The precise details of all its transformations need not concern us here, except to state that Old English intervocalic g tended to soften to a short ‘yuh’ sound and then disappear. Let’s illustrate this process happening in another common English word. Compare our very English flower word daisy. Daisy began as an actual Anglo-Saxon phrase dæges-ēage ‘day’s eye,’ that is, the eye of day, a name both lovely and apt, referring as it does to the sun-like yellow center of the flower that closes its white ray petals each evening and opens them anew each dawn. This word of course refers to an English daisy of the Bellis genus. But the point worth noting is the disappearance in the phrase of both intervocalic g sounds. Thus all that remains of the Old English word for eye ēage is the final y of daisy.

By the way, compare Old English ēage with its modern German cognate, die Auge ‘the eye.’ An interesting related compound word came into English from the Vikings who brought with them when they raided and conquered parts of Britain, the Old Norse word vindauga literally ‘eye of the wind,’ (from Old Scandinavian vindr ‘wind’ + auga ‘eye’). A vindauga was a hole in a Viking dwelling to let in air. This gave us our English word window.

Returning to hlæfdige ‘loaf-kneader’ becoming lady, we note that the f sound in hlæf softened first to a light v and then went bye-bye too. When two vowels lose an interposing consonant (like the g dropping out of –dige and the gs dropping out of dæges-ēage) those vowels often blend together in a process called in linguistics crasis (from Greek krasis ‘a mixing, a combining’). The two vowels blend into one long vowel or a diphthong (diphthoggos Greek ‘made of two sounds’).

Origin of The Word Crater

Our English phrases lunar crater or meteor crater or volcanic crater have the word crater borrowed from Latin. The Romans borrowed it from Greek where krater was a big mixing bowl, usually for mixing water to lessen the dreadful, sour taste of ancient wine. The Romans regularly added honey to their revolting wine so they could drink it. In extant Latin literature there are no long lists of tongue-teasing vintage wines. You’ll read about wines like Falernian. But keep reading, to discover what the Romans had to add to their rough ferment to render it palatable.

Lord

Lord derives from Old English hláford , itself reduced from an earlier form hláfweard = hláf ‘bread or loaf’ + *weard ’ keeper, guard, warder.’ The lord guarded the larder and decided who ate bread at his table. The word lord’s popularity and persistence in English was guaranteed once early Bible translators decided to use it as the translation of the Vulgate’s Latin term for God and Jesus, dominus (Latin, head of the domus Latin ‘house’). To dominate meant originally is to lord it over other members of the household.

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A Sample of Old English

from about 893 C.E. found in writings attributed to King Alfred the Great:

Old English: Ohthere sæde his hlaforde, Ælfrede cyninge…

Modern English: And Uther said to his lord, King Alfred…

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Hláford as a type of compound word was common in Germanic and Scandinavian languages. Consider one Old English synonym for servant, hlāf-æta ‘bread-eater.’ Modern German still has Brotherr=Brot ‘bread’ + Herr ‘master, lord’ meaning literally ‘bread-master’ but referring to a man who employs others so that they can earn their daily bread. Swedish and Danish have a word that servants used when referring to their mistress of the household, matmoder ‘meat-mother.’ The term is probably of Old Norse provenance since it persists in Icelandic matmóđir.

Loaf & Its Cognates

The English word loaf, as in loaf of bread, has relatives in all the Indo-European languages. It derives from Old English hlāf ‘loaf of bread.’ Related are:

• Modern German Laib ‘loaf of bread’

• Modern Russian xлeб ‘bread, loaf ‘ pronounced ‘chlyeb’ and probably borrowed into Old Slavic from Proto-Germanic

• Old Norse (language of the Vikings) hleifr ‘loaf of bread’

• Latin libum ‘a sacrificial cake’

• Ancient Egyptian! hebnen-t ‘sacrificial cake’

Its appearance among the hieroglyphs of ancient Egypt suggests that this word for bread predates even the arrival of the Indo-Europeans, and further hints that they arrived in the Mediterranean area to find the word and the baking of bread already well established. The fact that the common IE word for bread was borrowed and is not a native IE word suggests that the Indo-Europeans may have learned after their arrival to bake bread from the Mediterranean peoples who populated the littoral of the great sea.