Virtuous Werewolves, Single Midwives, and Commoner Queens
The history of how we refer to people
Where did “Were” Come From?
Let’s start with a 2018 board game called “Werewords.” I’ve never played it, but I can’t stop thinking about the title. The game seems to feature mythological entities, with the title referencing the word “werewolf.” That’s a simple compound word: “were” and “wolf.” In this word, “wolf” means what you expect it to. What, though, is a “were?” We don’t use this term in modern English, and I can’t think of any other English words with this root. We also don’t see a word that looks quite like in it Dutch or German. Let’s see if our neighbors to the South can help us out.
In my previous linguistics article, I presented the Latin consonants as more “original” than the Germanic ones. Around three thousand years ago, Germanic tribesmen embarked on a series of consonant shifts known as Grimm’s Law. We still pronounce “foot” with an “f” and “heart” with an “h” due to these pre-historic shifts. The Germanic tribesmen weren’t alone in Europe. Down to the south, one could hear a group of languages called the “Italic” branch. The peninsular featured a handful of languages, including Faliscan and Osco-Umbrain. Unfortunately, these speakers made the bizarre decision not to start one of the world’s most powerful empires. As a result, we usually only talk about one Italic language: Latin. I highlight Latin for two reasons. First, a ton of Latin words made their way into English. Second, Latin did not undergo anything like Grimm’s Law, keeping its consonants closer to those of the original Proto-Indo-European.
However, it’s not entirely correct to state that Latin consonants are more original than English ones. Grimm’s Law only impacted fricatives and stops. Granted, most constants are fricatives or stops. Most, but not all. There’s still one small way in which we sound more like those ancient kurgan-builders from the Russian steppes: the voiced labial-velar approximant. You probably recognize it as the “w.”
The ancient Romans spoke with a “w” sound for much of their history, though the character itself didn’t exist in their script. When celebrating Bacchus, the Romans drank something called “vinum.” The Germanic languages borrowed this word, leading to the English noun “wine.” It’s tempting to think that a modern Romance language, rather than a Germanic one, has maintained the original constants. Don’t let the “v” fool you, the classical Romans didn’t pronounce that first consonant much differently than we English speakers do today. Modern linguists transcribe the “v” in “vinum” as “u̯,” which sounds much more like an English “w” than the “v” you’ll hear in present-day French. The “w” to “v” shift occurred in later versions of Latin, while no such change transpired in English. Yes, the famous “veni vidi vici” probably sounded more like “weni widi wiki.” No wonder the empire collapsed.
Readers might wonder: wait, didn’t that same w→v shift occur in German? Yes, though the two aren’t related. One should expect people with similar tongues, lips, and teeth to create similar similar verbal shortcuts. Consider English “flapping,” where we pronounce the “t” in “water” as a sort of rapid-fire “d.” This change occurred independently in North American and Australian English. If there’s a way to economize our speech, different groups will stumble upon it.
Back to Latin. If we pronounce the native version “w,” then we should pronounce the Latin load-word with a “v.” Thus, the Latin version of “were” should look something like “v_r,” with the underscore representing a vowel. In fact, we do find that root in several words like “virility” and “virtue.” That might leave you even more confused. What do werewolves and virtuosos have in common? Not much, except for something quite basic: they’re both dudes. That’s the solution to our mystery. A “virile” person, the Romans thought, acted in a masculine manner. A “werewolf” is half-wolf, half- bloke. “Were” referred to a man.
This is why I love the title “Werewords.” They deployed the term “were” to signify the product’s spooky theme. Yet, “were” was the mundane part. That just meant “dude” or “bloke.” “Wolf” was the scary part! They have sharp teeth and stuff. A recent Sonic The Hedgehog game allows the titular protagonist to transform into a half-wolf, half-hedgehog creature called a “werehog.” Considering the term’s original meaning, the “were” makes no sense. There’s no human, let alone an adult male one, contained in this creature. Even the “hog” doesn’t quite work. Sonic is a “hedgehog,” and the “hedge” part seems pretty important. Without it, “hog” just refers to a pig. I would have named the creature a “hedgewolf.” Instead, the developers opted for the two terms that don’t describe the beast in question. That just about sums up the Sonic video games.
For all Mankind
Terms like “mankind” and “man-made” can feel awkward. The “-man” suffix in words like “Congressman” or “repairman” seems to exclude half of humanity. Heck, “man” even appears in “woman” itself. What’s going on here? Were the Angles a bunch of misogynists? I mean, probably, but that’s not why this phenomenon occurred. As the last section taught us, they had a male-only word: “were.” What, then, did “man” used to mean? To answer this question, let’s head north and return to the Germanic languages.
Have you ever attempted to make a general statement, but it ends up sounding like it’s directed at a particular individual? For example, you say something like “You shouldn’t drink bleach.” You don’t mean one particular individual, though. The “you” refers to a general, hypothetical person. You could say “One shouldn’t drink bleach,” but, let’s be honest, that sounds stilted. German resolves this issue with the pronoun “man.” This “man” refers to everyone: not just the person you’re speaking to, and certainly not just males. Dutch uses the pronoun “men” for the same purpose.
If the answer remains unclear, let’s check out other nouns. What do you think Dutch “mensen,” Swedish “människor,” and Icelandic “manneskjur” mean? They all translate to “people.” That’s also how the English words “man” and “men” used to function. The “man” in “mankind” or “man-made,” referred to everyone, not just males while our contemporary gender-neutral word, “person,” comes from the Latin “persona.” As a side note, the “man” in “human” is just a coincidence. That word’s root is the Latin “homo,” as in Homo sapien.
So we’ve uncovered the secret behind the second syllable of “woman,” but what’s the history behind the first? Dear God no, it isn’t “womb.” I don’t know who posited this, but it’s silly once you realize that “womb” meant “stomach.” I’ll leave the anatomy expertise to Erin E, though I’m fairly confident in stating that you can find stomachs among both sexes.
Since the “wo-” represents a truncated version of the original word, I’ll skip to the conclusion. The “wo-” in “woman” used to be “wife.” The full word was “wife-man.” Of course, that just replaces one mystery with another. What was the term “wife” doing in “woman” in the first place? Looking to our sister languages won’t help too much. You could refer to a Dutch woman as wijv, though I wouldn’t recommend it. What did “wife” mean in Old English?
To answer this question, let’s start in the most obvious place: Moby Dick. In Chapter 37, Herman Melville writes (emphasis mine):
I leave a white and turbid wake; pale waters, paler cheeks, where'er I sail. The envious billows sidelong swell to whelm my track; let them; but first I pass.
What was Melville attempting to communicate in the opening sentence of this chapter? We don’t see “whelm” much anymore. Instead, you’ll usually hear people say “overwhelm.” What, then, did the “whelm” mean in “overwhelm?” It’s simple: the “whelm” in “overwhelm” meant… overwhelm. Do you know what the “fore” in “before” meant? Yup, it meant “before.” In fact, you can still hear something similar in German: “Vertiel vor acht” means “a quarter before eight.” Speakers enjoy crafting duplicative redundancies that repeat information that has already been said. You don’t need the “right” in “right now” or the “single” in “every single time,” but the phrases just don’t feel right without them. Ask a German for navigation help, and they might tell you to walk “always straight.” Why? In German, they say “immer geradeaus” when providing directions. The “immer” doesn’t mean anything, but they like to say it anyway.
Similarly, the “wife” in “wife-man” meant… “woman.” This old meaning has stuck with us in the word “midwife.” You can become a single midwife because the phrase predates the shift in meaning from “woman” to “married woman.”
That leads us to one last question: what was the archaic term for a married woman? Our Italic brethren can help with this. We see the Latin word for “woman” in terms like “gynecologist.” “Gyn” doesn’t sound much like “woman” or “wife”, but it matches another female-specific word we use in modern English. Remember Grimm’s Law: where we see a “g” in Latin, we’d expect a “k” sound in English. Our version should sound something like “keen.” Still don’t recognize anything? Try saying that “k” with rounded lips. That’s right: “queen” started as a generic word for a married woman, without any royal implications.
"That just about sums up the Sonic video games." <== cracked me right up
Finally got around to reading this, my apologies, but I can confirm that both men and women have stomachs. I hope your readers haven't been too agitated waiting to find out.