How to use this Page

The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology (ODEE) says about the verb wrap (with the abbreviations expanded): “…of unknown origin, similar in form and sense are North Frisian wrappe stop up, Danish dialectal vrappe stuff; and cf. Middle Engl. bewrappe, beside wlappe (XIV), LAP³.” XIV means “the 14^th century,” and LAP³ is a synonym of wrap (as in overlap), related to lap “front part of a skirt,” which has a solid etymology. The quotation from The ODEE repeats what can be found in the OED. For “cf. wlappe” some dictionaries offer the dogmatic, unsupported statement that wrap is a doublet (so Skeat) or “corruption” of lap.

So once again we encounter the off-putting formula “origin unknown.” But, as we have seen more than once, in etymology, “unknown” is a loose concept. Minsheu, the author of the first etymological dictionary of English (1617), cited two words, which, in his opinion, could be akin to wrap. One of them was German raffen “to pile, to heap.” In 1854 the same idea occurred to a certain D.B., a contributor to Southern Literary Messenger (Richmond, Va.), the author of a four-page article on word origins. Like Minsheu, he also cited two probable cognates. To both authors’ second candidates we will briefly return below. D.B., I assume, was not a famous researcher, and Southern Literary Messenger is not everybody’s regular source of information on linguistic issues (again a mere guess). But in 1904 Heinrich Schröder, contrary to the semi-anonymous D.B., a distinguished, even brilliant German scholar, published a very long article in a leading philological journal and, and among many other things, proposed Minsheu and D.B.’s etymology as his own. Like Cato, who never stopped rubbing in his appeal Carthago delenda est (“Carthage should be destroyed”), I will keep repeating that we need summaries of everything ever said about word origins in any given language and only then shed words of wisdom to the public eager for reliable information. In the absence of summaries and surveys, etymologists, naturally, hit on the same, seemingly attractive hypotheses again and again, without realizing that the wheel has already been invented and even reinvented more than once.

Thus, three people suggested the affinity of wrap to German raffen. But not a single German dictionary I have consulted contends that raffen is akin to wrap, though, obviously, if A is related to B, B must also be related to A. This is another curious comment on the state of the art. While working on the entry raffen, the authors of German etymological dictionaries never thought of looking up wrap. And why should they have done so? In their sources, the comparison does not occur, and no one alerted them to the fact that in the English-speaking world some etymologists had tackled their word.

Closer to home than raffen is Engl. warp, whose original meaning was “to throw,” as evidenced by Dutch werpen and German werfen. Time and again, beginning with Minsheu, it has been said that wrap is a metathesized variant of warp. However, when a word falls victim to metathesis, which is a mechanical phonetic change not caused by semantic factors, the new form, with the sounds transposed (and this is what metathesis is all about), it continues meaning the same as its “parent,” while “to throw” and “to enfold” do not look like even remote synonyms. Another putative etymon of wrap that appears in some old sources is rap (so, for instance, in D.B.’s article). It is unclear which of several verbs spelled rap is meant. Perhaps it is rap “to give a quick blow, etc.,” still dimly recognized in the archaic phrase rap and rend? But that rap seems to have once had h before r, while in wrap, w- is genuine. The initial group wr- was simplified in southern English and subsequently in the Standard only in the seventeenth century, so that the fourteenth-century spelling of wrap inspires confidence. The other rap “to strike” may be a sound-imitative verb of Scandinavian origin, and neither h- nor w- has been recorded in it in any Scandinavian language.

Other conjectures are even less appealing. For instance, Old Engl. wrion “bend, contort” (its reflexes are hidden in Modern Engl. wry and wriggle) is phonetically too remote from wrap. Among several look-alikes, attention has been called to the short-lived and rare late Middle English words wrabble “to wriggle,” wrabbed “perverse,” and wraw “to mew.” The last of them is obviously onomatopoeic, like mew, moo, and the rest. The original sense of the Modern English verb warble was “to whirl”; hence “to sing with trills and quavers.” This verb had hw- at one time. The enigmatic wlappe “wrap” is said in the OED to be apparently a blend of the verb lap and wrap. But so little is known about most of those words that their mutual ties cannot be reconstructed. It only seems that at least some verbs beginning with wr- and hr- were sound-imitative and possibly sound symbolic. One of them was Greek raptein (historically, with initial h-) “to stitch together,” whence rhapsody (“the stitching of songs”), in English from Greek via Latin.

The initial sense of many such verbs was “to bend, twist, stitch; wriggle; *fold, *connect, *cover.” They crossed borders with ease. Engl. wrap may be a borrowing from Frisian. If it is so, we are left with the question about its origin there. The root of the Romance verbs that have become Engl. develop and envelop seems also to be lost in obscurity, but it is characteristic that envelop sounds somewhat like lap and means approximately the same as overlap. If all of them are “fanciful” sound symbolic formations, the similarity causes little surprise. Lap in lap up is obviously sound imitative.

What then is the summary? The verb wrap appeared in English in the middle period. It has a cognate, almost a twin, in Northern Frisian. Perhaps it was coined long before it surfaced in texts, at a time when Frisian and English were closer than in the fourteenth century, but borrowing in either direction cannot be excluded. Wrap is not a doublet of warp. Nor does it have direct ties with rap in any of its senses. German raffen is hardly related to it either. Wrap has no ancient (“Indo-European”) heritage. It looks like one of a sizable number of words beginning with wr- and wl- meaning “bend, twist.” Rare Middle Engl. wrabble and wrabbed are, most probably, related to it. Without certainty, warble can be added to the group. We have no way of knowing whether Middle Engl. wlappe had an independent existence or was a blend of lap and wrap. Some words structured like rap and lap (without initial h- and w-) were close to wrap, so that confusion between and among them was possible.

Despite all the caution required by such a hard case, it can probably be stated that wrap is a sound symbolic verb. The evidence at our disposal is meager and inconclusive, but I will repeat what I have said so many times: too often the verdict “origin unknown” fails to do justice to the words we discuss. Sometimes there is indeed nothing else one can say (notably so while dealing with slang), but a verdict that presupposes death sentence should not be returned without serious deliberation.

The post A wrapping rhapsody appeared first on OUPblog.

        

Related Stories

• Doing things with verve
• An etymological journey paved with excellent intentions
• The history of the word “qualm”

 

By Anatoly Liberman

Since I’ll be out of town at the end of July, I was not sure I would be able to write these “gleanings.” But the questions have been many, and I could answer some of them ahead of time.

Autumn: its etymology

Our correspondent wonders whether the Latin word from which English, via French, has autumn, could be identified with the name of the Egyptian god Autun. The Romans derived the word autumnus, which was both an adjective (“autumnal”) and a noun (“autumn”), from augere “to increase.” This verb’s perfect participle is auctus “rich (“autumn as a rich season”). The Roman derivation, though not implausible, looks like a tribute to folk etymology. A more serious conjecture allies autumn to the Germanic root aud-, as in Gothic aud-ags “blessed” (in the related languages, also “rich”). But, more probably, Latin autumnus goes back to Etruscan. The main argument for the Etruscan origin is the resemblance of autumnus to Vertumnus, the name of a seasonal deity (or so it seems), about whom little is known besides the tale of his seduction, in the shape of an old woman, of Pomona, as told by Ovid. Vertumnus, or Vortumnus, may be a Latinized form of an Etruscan name. A definite conclusion about autumnus is hardly possible, even though some sources, while tracing this word to Etruscan, add “without doubt.” The Egyptian Autun was a creation god and the god of the setting sun, so that his connection with autumn is remote at best. Nor do we have any evidence that Autun had a cult in Ancient Rome. Everything is so uncertain here that the origin of autumnus must needs remain unknown. In my opinion, the Egyptian hypothesis holds out little promise.

Vertumnus seducing Pomona in the shape of an old woman. (Pomona by Frans de Vriendt “Floris” (Konstnär, 1518-1570) Antwerpen, Belgien, Hallwyl Museum, Photo by Jens Mohr, via Wikimedia Commons)

The origin of so long

I received an interesting letter from Mr. Paul Nance. He writes about so long:

“It seems the kind of expression that should have derived from some fuller social nicety, such as I regret that it will be so long before we meet again or the like, but no one has proposed a clear antecedent. An oddity is its sudden appearance in the early nineteenth century; there are only a handful of sightings before Walt Whitman’s use of it in a poem (including the title) in the 1860-1861 edition of Leaves of Grass. I can, by the way, offer an antedating to the OED citations: so, good bye, so long in the story ‘Cruise of a Guinean Man’. Knickerbocker: New York (Monthly Magazine 5, February 1835, p. 105; available on Google Books). Given the lack of a fuller antecedent, suggestions as to its origin all propose a borrowing from another language. Does this seem reasonable to you?”

Mr. Nance was kind enough to append two articles (by Alan S. Kaye and Joachim Grzega) on so long, both of which I had in my folders but have not reread since 2004 and 2005, when I found and copied them. Grzega’s contribution is especially detailed. My database contains only one more tiny comment on so long by Frank Penny: “About twenty years ago I was informed that it [the expression so long] is allied to Samuel Pepys’s expression so home, and should be written so along or so ’long, meaning that the person using the expression must go his way” (Notes and Queries, Series 12, vol. IX, 1921, p. 419). The group so home does turn up in the Diary more than once, but no citation I could find looks like a formula. Perhaps Stephen Goranson will ferret it out. In any case, so long looks like an Americanism, and it is unlikely that such a popular phrase should have remained dormant in texts for almost two centuries.

Be that as it may, I agree with Mr. Nance that a formula of this type probably arose in civil conversation. The numerous attempts to find a foreign source for it carry little conviction. Norwegian does have an almost identical phrase, but, since its antecedents are unknown, it may have been borrowed from English. I suspect (a favorite turn of speech by old etymologists) that so long is indeed a curtailed version of a once more comprehensible parting formula, unless it belongs with the likes of for auld lang sine. It may have been brought to the New World from England or Scotland and later abbreviated and reinterpreted.

“Heavy rain” in languages other than English

Once I wrote a post titled “When it rains, it does not necessarily pour.” There I mentioned many German and Swedish idioms like it is raining cats and dogs, and, rather than recycling that text, will refer our old correspondent Mr. John Larsson to it.

Ukraine and Baltic place names

The comment on this matter was welcome. In my response, I preferred not to talk about the things alien to me, but I wondered whether the Latvian place name could be of Slavic origin. That is why I said cautiously: “If this is a native Latvian word…” The question, as I understand, remains unanswered, but the suggestion is tempting. And yes, of course, Serb/Croat Krajna is an exact counterpart of Ukraina, only without a prefix. In Russian, stress falls on i; in Ukrainian, I think, the first a is stressed. The same holds for the derived adjectives: ukrainskii ~ ukrainskii. Pushkin said ukrainskaia (feminine).

Slough, sloo, and the rest

Many thanks to those who informed me about their pronunciation of slough “mire.” It was new to me that the surname Slough is pronounced differently in England and the United States. I also received a question about the history of slew. The past tense of slay (Old Engl. slahan) was sloh (with a long vowel), and this form developed like scoh “shoe,” though the verb vacillated between the 6th and the 7th class. The fact that slew and shoe have such dissimilar written forms is due to the vagaries of English spelling. One can think of too, who, you, group, fruit, cruise, rheum, truth, and true, which have the same vowel as slew. In addition, consider Bruin and ruin, which look deceptively like fruit, and add manoeuver for good measure. A mild spelling reform looks like a good idea, doesn’t it?

The pronunciation of February

In one of the letters I received, the writer expresses her indignation that some people insist on sounding the first r in February. Everybody, she asserts, says Febyooary. In such matters, everybody is a dangerous word (as we will also see from the next item). All of us tend to think that what we say is the only correct norm. Words with the succession r…r tend to lose one of them. Yet library is more often pronounced with both, and Drury, brewery, and prurient have withstood the tendency. February has changed its form many times. Thus, long ago feverer (from Old French) became feverel (possibly under the influence of averel “April”). In the older language of New England, January and February turned into Janry and Febry. However powerful the phonetic forces may have been in affecting the pronunciation of February, of great importance was also the fact that the names of the months often occur in enumeration. Without the first r, January and February rhyme. A similar situation is well-known from the etymology of some numerals. Although the pronunciation Febyooary is equally common on both sides of the Atlantic and is recognized as standard throughout the English-speaking world, not “everybody” has accepted it. The consonant b in February is due to the Latinization of the French etymon (late Latin februarius).

Who versus whom

Discussion of these pronouns lost all interest long ago, because the confusion of who and whom and the defeat of whom in American English go back to old days. Yet I am not sure that what I said about the educated norm is “nonsense.” Who will marry our son? Whom will our son marry? Is it “nonsense” to distinguish them, and should (or only can) it be who in both cases? Despite the rebuke, I believe that even in Modern American English the woman who we visited won’t suffer if who is replaced with whom. But, unlike my opponent, I admit that tastes differ.

Wrap

Another question I received was about the origin of the verb wrap. This is a rather long story, and I decided to devote a special post to it in the foreseeable future.

PS. I notice that of the two questions asked by our correspondent last month only copacetic attracted some attention (read Stephen Goranson’s response). But what about hubba hubba?

Anatoly Liberman is the author of Word Origins And How We Know Them as well as An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology: An Introduction. His column on word origins, The Oxford Etymologist, appears on the OUPblog each Wednesday. Send your etymology question to him care of [email protected]; he’ll do his best to avoid responding with “origin unknown.” Subscribe to Anatoly Liberman’s weekly etymology articles via email or RSS.

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only language articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.

The post Monthly etymology gleanings for July 2014 appeared first on OUPblog.

        

Related Stories

• Monthly etymology gleanings for June 2014, part 2
• Which witch?
• Monthly etymology gleanings for June 2014, part one