The Search for the Missing English Cognates

Exposing the powers that be

As West Germanic languages, it’s no surprise to see that German, English, and Dutch share a lot of similar words. English speakers “drink water,” while our linguistic companions “drinken water” or “trinken Wasser.” These spellings hide a bit of the difference, of course. The High German “w” corresponds to an English “v,” and the Dutch one rests somewhere in between. North Americans, like myself, also tend to say something that sounds more like “jrink wadder,” and one usually hears the Dutch “-en” ending gets spoken as “-uh.” Still, we can see and hear the similarities. Things line up for a lot of common words:

• come, komen, kommen

• eat, eten, essen

• I, Ik, Ich

• blue, blauw, blau

• three, drie, drei

• better, beter, besser

Other times, we see similar words with slightly different meanings. One example includes the Dutch “stoel” or the German “Stuhl.” You’ll recognize this as the English word “stool,” although our version refers to a specific type of chair, while theirs refers to all chairs. All Dutch dogs are “honden” and all German ones are “Hunde,” but only some English dogs are “hounds.”

Yet, some terms don’t match. The Dutch word “worden” and the German word “werden” translate to “become.” I’ll let you figure out the etymology of “become” on your own, but you can see that doesn’t share its ancestry with the Dutch or German term. In other cases, Dutch and German contain two words when English has one. The English word “know” can mean both “be familiar with” and “have information.” In the first case, we see a clear cognate with Dutch and German “kennen.” However, Dutch speakers will use “weten” for the second meaning, and Germans will say “wissen.” Another split occurs with the word “live.” This can mean “being alive” (matching Dutch “leven” and German “leben”) or “dwelling in a certain location” (matching neither Dutch “wonen” nor German “wohnen.”).

When it comes to finding the cognate of “worden,” I’m afraid that our search will end in disappointment. We will find the “wonen” and “weten” cognates, but we’re going to have to take a couple of detours first.

WHAT

As I mentioned in the previous article, English spellings tend to provide a window into our language’s history. You may wonder why the “h” sticks around in “why” and “what,” but we can find the answer in the epic poem Beowulf. In fact, we won’t have to look too far. The epic poem begins:

Hwæt.

I like to imagine some hard-of-hearing bard was asked to tell the story, so he responded “What? Oh, tell the story of Beowulf? Got it.” Unfortunately, that’s not what happened. “What” was an interjection that scholars translate to “so” or something to that effect. It was a way of saying “listen up everyone,” and we should definitely bring it back. Though the meaning has drifted, it does represent the ancestor of our modern “what.” It would have been pronounced something like “hwat,” rhyming with “cat.”

Ok, so that’s the Old English translation, but what’s the Even Older English word? What’s the true classic way to start an epic poem? To answer that, I’m going to take a detour that will eventually cancel out the first detour. Trust me.

When I talk to people about this topic, I often hear the misconception that German is “older” than English. Asking which language is older is a bit like asking whether your left hand is older than your right one. German and English both stem from Proto-Germanic, a language that was spoken but never written, around 500 B.C. The languages diverged from that ancestral language, so neither is “older” in any technical sense. That’s a bit of a cop-out though, as German is clearly more conservative in some ways. German maintains the three genders of Proto-Germanic, and English has no grammatical gender. German uses three or four cases and some word order flexibility while English has no cases and stricter word order. We can conclude, then that German grammar is somewhat more conservative. Don’t take that too far, though, as Proto-Germanic grammar didn’t sound much like what you’ll hear in today’s Germany. This brief snippet from Wikipedia shows a language that heavily differs from its contemporary children:

Ok, so German grammar is kinda-sorta older. Fine. But there’s another way in which English looks more like its linguistic forefather: consonants. Take “water/water/Wasser” triplet from earlier. Yes, we pronounce the “t” with that weird alveolar flap, but the spelling indicates that English used a normal “t” sound in recent times. The odd ones out, then, are the Germans. That’s because of the High Germanic Consonant Shift. Note that “high,” in the context of Germany refers to altitude, not map placement. Thus, the “high” countries represent the southern portion of the nation, which is why you can still hear something more like “water” in the North. In this consonant shift:

• “t” became “s” or “ts”

• “p” became “f” or “pf” (“apple” vs “apfel”)

• “d” became “t” (“day” vs “tag”)

• k became the German “ch” sound (“cook” vs “kochen”)

There’s an additional change that scholars sometimes group with High Germanic Consonant shift. You’ll notice that all the German “the” words (der/die/das/den/dem/des) begin with a “d.” Dutch has two “the” words, with the more common one being “de.” Clearly, if both Dutch and German use the same sound, the change must have occurred in England. Nope. The “th” sounds came first, and everyone except the English decided to speak without sticking their tongues between their teeth.

We’re not quite done with our “water/water/Wasser” triplet. The spellings match, but we don’t agree on how to pronounce “w.” One articulates the German and Dutch “w” with the top set of teeth and the bottom lip, while English requires both lips and no teeth. The Germans, however, articulate it as fricative, while English and Dutch speakers treat it as an approximant. As for who changed, it’s not us, it’s them.

As I stated in the grammar portion, remember not to take this too far. English doesn’t sound like Proto-Germanic. Not even close. It’s just important to remember that language changes everywhere all the time, and you never know where you’ll find the original version of something. For example, The German and Dutch words for “fast” (“schnell” and “snel”) lack a clear cognate for most of today’s English speakers. One can read the word “snel” or “snell” in Old English, but, today, you’ll hear it in Scotland.

Listen

Old English verbs, similar to modern German ones, ended in “-an.” Later, English speakers ditched “n,” and verbs ended in more of an “uh” sound that the Dutch would recognize. English speakers dropped that sound too, leaving us without verb endings. Since there’s no “-en” or “-uh” to delineate between parts of speech, we often can’t tell if a word began a verb or noun. This allows terms to float between parts of speech. It’s why you can answer a question and question an answer. Note that “listen” maintains the old “-an” ending, because, as I said before, you find the original versions of things in unexpected places.

We’re now ready to search for the missing cognate. Let’s start with the German word “wissen.” First, we know that English lost the verb endings. Let’s remove than and get “wiss.” We also know that the Old High Germanic Consonant shift often turned “t” into “s.” Roll that back, and we find ourselves with “wit.” We’ve found the English cognate! You would have heard the word “witan” in Old English, though its modern ancestor lives as a noun and adjective. Speaking of living…

What happened to “wonen?” I had to scroll through a few pages of Google to find an example, but you can see its cognate it in this ESPN article:

Judge, as he is wont to do, downplayed his individual effort in the Yankees' 12-8 victory over the Brewers, saying: "We've got some big games coming up. That's really the only thing on my mind right now."

That non-contraction “wont” shares its ancestry with “wonen” and “wohnen.” You might also see the adjective “unwonted,” which derives from the verb receiving two past-tense endings.

As for “worden” and “werden,” I initially connected these terms to “worth.” Unfortunately, our modern “worth” does not stem from an old verb meaning “become.” There was a verb-y “worth” that you might have seen in old-timey phrases like “woe worth the day,” and that one does share its ancestry with “worden” and “werden.”

It’s a strange word to lose, too, considering its importance to our sister languages. It is needed to use the passive voice in Dutch, and, if you want to speak German, you will need it for the future tense. Speaking of which, why can’t the West Germanic languages agree on how to form the future tense?

Like Russian and Japanese, Old English lacked a future tense, relying on context. Today, we often indicate the future tense with the “will” + [verb]. The word “will” once meant “want,” and we can see cognates with Dutch “willen” and German “wollen.” You can still find some fossils of the non-auxiliary usage of “will” in words like “unwilling,” “strong-willed,” or “willful.” “Want,” by the way, used to mean “lack,” and, we hear that old meaning in the phrase “left wanting.”

The Powers that Sindon

In fact, it’s pretty common for idiomatic phrases to contain old features of the language. You know what “whet your appetite” and “one fell swoop” mean, but what do “whet” and “fell”¹ mean? An especially weird one is the phrase "the powers that be." These words still exist with the same meaning, but someone seems to have screwed up the grammar. Why don't we say "powers that are?"

We find a few more missing cognates in these “be” words. English speakers say “he is,” while the Dutch say “hij is.” Cool, we’re on the same page there. We say “I am,” and they say “Ik ben.” Some divergence, but it’s hard to miss the “be” in “ben.” Head to the first person plural, and you’ll hear “we are” and “wij zijn.” Germans say “wir sind,” so they’re not on our page either.

Let’s take a step back though. Be? Am? Is? Sind? Zijn? For the same word? What the hell going on here?

Popular linguistic writing will often state that common words can maintain archaic rules of a language. If you search through threads on why we conjugate “to be” in such a bizarre fashion, you’ll hear see people cite this truism. I’ve read the same with regards to “went” as the past tense of “go.” It’s true that common words often contain old rules, but that doesn’t tell the whole story. In Dutch, the cognate “gaan” becomes “ging” in the past tense. That’s also irregular, though it’s a regular sort of irregular. I can live with a vowel change and a “g” turning into “ng.” But “go” and “went?” That’s going to keep me up at night.

Rest assured, there was never any rule so bizarre that it could turn “go” into “went.” There was no past tense rule where a “g” became “w” and the word added an “nt” ending. The past tense of “grow” wasn’t “wrownt,” and our linguistic ancestors didn’t say “wivnt” instead of “gave.” Rather, this represents a process called “suppletion,” where one word gets interpreted as an alternative version of another. Allow me to illustrate suppletion through a small story. I’ll make sure this story begins in a classic English manner.

What! You recognize “walk” and “walked” as, more or less, two versions of the same word. Imagine that the verb “amble” increases in frequency and wrownt grew to take the same meaning as “walk.” You hear “walk” as often as you hear “amble” and “walked” as often as you hear “ambled.” Over time, people being to prefer “amble” to “walk” and “walked” to “ambled.” The less common versions slowly churn until you end up with only “amble” in the present tense and only “walked” in the past. At that point, you find yourself in a situation where “walked” has become the past tense “amble.” That’s suppletion. It’s not the maintenance of an old rule. It’s the creation of a new one that occurs among words with similar meanings.

That’s how we end up with “went” as the past tense of “go.” Old English featured two verbs, “go” and “wend,” with their own (relatively) normal conjugations. Slowly, English speakers began to interpret “wend” as the past-tense version of “go.” German still uses that old “wenden” verb, which means something like “turn.”

Let’s wend back to the original point of this section: to be. There was never any linguistic alchemy that turned “be” into “are.” Instead, there were two words in Proto-Germanic: “beuna” and “wesana.”² The first version gave us “am,” “ben,” “bist,” (among others) in today’s English, German, and Dutch. The latter produced “was” and “are” in English. If you’re confused about how “wesana” turned into “are,” it may help to know that Germanic languages have often replaced the “z” with an “r,” and a “z” is just a voiced “s.” This explains the mystery of “the powers that be.” In Old and Middle English, some people used “beauna” variety of the word instead of the “wesana” one. The latter stuck, and the former only survive in that one strange phrase. According to David Crystal’s A History of The English, some Old English writers even used a German-esque conjugation. We can see “they be,” “they are,” and “they sindon” in older versions of the language. But, wait, where did “they” come from?

The Masculine Plural They

If you have any familiarity with German, you know about the case system. Here’s how “the” works in that language:

What an absurdity, right? The article of a masculine word gets an “m” in the dative case and an “s” in the genitive one. The feminine one gets an “r” in both. Could you imagine such an absurdity? Well, as it turns out, you won’t need much imagination.

We still have a similar case system, but only for pronouns.

• He → him (direct/indirect object) —> his (possession)

• She —> her (direct/indirect object & possession)

“They” fits the feminine mold, going to “their” in all other cases. This is a good example of common words maintaining an old rule. In German and Dutch, however, we hear the same word (“ze” and “sie”) used for both “she” and “they.” Why doesn’t English follow the same pattern?

In Old English, “he,” “she,” and “they” all began with an “h.” That’s why we say “her” rather than “sher.” Due to some vowel shifts, all three pronouns merged into a single pronunciation. Given that the language relied on grammatical gender, the Anglo-Saxons needed some new pronouns. There’s some debate around the origin of “she,” but everyone seems to agree that “they” came from Old Norse, where it acted as the masculine, plural pronoun. The next time someone complains that the singular “they” represents the downfall of the English language, tell them you agree. Then, demand that they use “they” only for masculine plural nouns, and rebuke them for their lack of proper Old Norse decelerations.

1. “Whet” meant to sharpen an item, while “fell” meant “cruel.”

2. Keep in mind, Proto-Germanic was never written down. The writing I’m using here represents a rough of approximation of what you might have heard back then.