The reason English spelling is full of inconsistencies and silent letters is because it’s not simply encoding how words sound.
If English spelling were aiming to represent sound it would indeed be a total failure.
But English spelling encodes words' meaning and history as well.
Image from stone inscription designated Elegest I, reading "𐰚𐰇𐰝𐱅𐰭𐰼𐰃" <köktŋri>. Literally "Blue Sky", but also meaning "God of Heaven"
You could calque "blue sky" into Old Siberian Turkic instead! Oh wait
I think my son and I probably started building that when he was 9 and finished it when he was 11 🙃
The English word "shark" was two different meanings: a predatory cartilaginous fish and a predatory scoundrel. We sometimes understand the predatory scoundrel to be by metaphor from the predatory fish, but evidence suggests these two meanings have entirely separate origins—German … and Maya??
🧵 1/18
The underlying layout engine is graphviz.org
Then I have tools built on top of it, mostly python text processing.
If you want to make specifically word family graphs, you can use most of my tools through the web interfaces at
lab.aidanem.com/wordfamily/
and
lab.aidanem.com/wordfamily/w...
This would make "shark" possibly the only word borrowed from a Mayan language into English directly. And one of only a very few possibilities (likewise tenuous) for Maya words in English at all, (the others being transmitted through Spanish and/or Nahuatl)
19/18 🙃
So in the 1560s it is definitely possible that an English speaker might have added an intrusive "r" into the spelling of a borrowed word perhaps with /ɑː/ or /ɔː/ that might otherwise be spelled "shawk".
(Compare how Kipling in an author's note says that the name "Kaa [...] is pronounced Kar")
18/18
The 1500s and 1600s is also when we start to see a significant uptick in non-rhotic pronunciation being represented in alternate spellings in English, and Ben Jonson comments on post-vocalic r being distinct from pre-vocalic r in his English Grammar published posthumously in 1640.
17/18
This requires interpreting that resemblance as a sampling error—we went looking for the earliest example that could be found of a word like "shark" in English referring to a fish, so we found one.
16/18
And this is definitely not a later borrowing from English—in Classical Maya hieroglyphs, a glyph of a fish with prominent shark-like teeth is used to represent the near-homonym "xoc": "to count".
15/18
Specifically, the word xōc (/ʃoːk/) means "shark" in coastal Mayan languages (and a more abstract water monster in Mayan languages further inland).
14/18
In this broader context, it seems likely that 1) Bekynton's "le Shark" was a foreign/foreignism proper name, and not a word that had any special connection to fish at the time; and 2) that John Hawkins' crew brought an entirely new word "shark" home from the Gulf and Caribbean coasts.
13/18
because large sharks are so much more common there than on the shores of Europe that this felt like an entirely new thing, distinct from the small "cazón"/"dogfish" Europeans were familiar with and had well established words for.
12/18
Notably, Portuguese and Spanish sailors in that area had recently brought back a new word: "tubarão"/"tiburon" for shark from somewhere in the Arawakan-Cariban language contact area (perhaps from a word related to Old Tupi "yperu": "shark"?),
11/18
Who is Captain Hawkins whose men call it a Sharke? That would be Captain (later Sir) John Hawkins who earlier that same year had returned from a long and fairly disastrous voyage (i.e., one requiring several stop for repair and resupply) in the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea.
10/18
The 1569 broadside with a blockprint of a thresher shark Headlined "The true discription of this marueilous straunge fishe, which was taken on Thursday wassennight, the .xvi. day of June, this present month, in the yeare of our Lord God .M.DLX.IX." from "The Xoc, the Sharke, and the Sea Dogs: An Historical Encounter" (Jones 1985)
The illustration and description in the broadside allows identification of the fish as Alopias vulpinus, the common or Atlantic thresher shark.
The broadside goes on to say "Ther is no proper name for it that I knowe, but that sertayne men of Captain Haukinses, doth call it a Sharke."
9/18
There is no further use of "shark" in reference to a fish for 127 years, until in 1569, a broadside is printed publicizing the catch and preservation of a "marueilous straunge fishe, [which] here hath neuer the lyke of it ben seene".
8/18
It's pretty unclear what's going on here. Why exactly does Bekynton switch to apparent French grammar but a not-at-all French looking word "le Shark" in the middle of this Latin letter?
Is this fish a kind of fish called "le Shark", or an individual fish that had been named "le Shark"?
7/18
"I'd been travelling for about an hour in the evening, at an estimate, and the ship was followed by a fish called le Shark, this fish was struck twice by a harpoon and withdrew."
6/18
"Circiter horam vijam in sero per æstimationem navem sequebatur piscis vocatus le Shark, qui quidem piscis percutiebatur bis cum uno harpingyren et recessit."
5/18
Now, there is one use of "shark" to refer to fish in Middle English, before contact between English and American Indigenous languages. In 1442, in the Letters of Thomas Bekynton, Secretary to Henry VI:
4/18
This is traced to Middle German verb "schurgen": "to push, to drive, to incite", and probably appears in OHG "vir-scurgo": "fire-tender". This is very similar to modern German "schüren": "to stoke, to stir up, to fuel", probably a -k- intensive of the same.
3/18
The scoundrel is borrowed from German "Schurke": "villain, scoundrel", also borrowed in Dutch as "schurk" and Swedish as "skurk".
2/18
The English word "shark" was two different meanings: a predatory cartilaginous fish and a predatory scoundrel. We sometimes understand the predatory scoundrel to be by metaphor from the predatory fish, but evidence suggests these two meanings have entirely separate origins—German … and Maya??
🧵 1/18
English royal houses, translated badly:
the Night Knives
the Love Pourers
the Undermen
the Wolves
the Brooms
the Really Hollow (Brooms)
the Campsite (Brooms)
the Pigwich (Brooms)
the Derricks
the Pig Guards
the Crooked Waves
the Wet Heads
the Over the Top
the Knife-Cows and Water
the Windybanks
Afaik, only vaguely. PIE family terminology seems very clearly patrilocal, so the mother's family is the starting point for movement in a way that the father's family isn't.
Note, *h₂ews-: "dawn, east", another word about starting points of movement also with *h₂ew!
Though they have been colliding for 1000+ years now, there is probably at least a reinforcement effect from "from"
It's also not entirely impossible that PIE *h₂éwh₂os/*h₂éwh₂s: "maternal grandfather, maternal uncle" may be derived from *h₂ew: "away from, since, again" in the first place 🙃
Feeling Darwinian today. That is, "very poorly [...] & very stupid & hate everybody & everything."
what I’m seeing here is that it’s perfectly viable as an English speaker for me to pronounce it samwich
Samd
