Why you should read Sir Gawain and the Green Knight This spring’s book club pick

This spring we're reading the whole poem together at the Dead Language Society book club.

I wrote about why it deserves your time here:

www.deadlanguagesociety.com/p/why-you-sh...

Here's what that wilderness ride looks like in the original:

Sumwhyle wyth wormez he werrez and with wolves als,
Sumwhile wyth wodwos þat woned in þe knarrez,
Boþe wyth bullez and berez, and borez oþerquyle,
And etaynez þat hym anelede of þe heʒe felle.

But when Gawain rides out through frozen wilderness, the poet switches to a Norse-inflected English:

- "felle" 'mountain' comes from Old Norse "fell/fjall"
- "dryʒe" 'patient' comes from Old Norse "drjúgr"

One of the joys of the poem is how it plays with language.

For example, when characters are at court, the language turns French: "plesaunce" 'pleasure,' "prys" 'excellence,' "ioye" 'joy.'

In some of these lines, every content word is French, with English supplying only the grammatical glue.

That's the opening of "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight," written in the 14th century by a poet whose name we’ve lost.

The poem survives in a single manuscript that nearly burned in the Cotton Library fire of 1731. Like Beowulf, we nearly lost it entirely.

A green man rides into King Arthur’s court. Green skin, green clothes, green horse.

He offers a game: any knight may swing his axe if he’ll accept a return blow in a year. Gawain takes the deal.

The head comes off… then the body picks it up and rides away.

Dead Language Society | Colin Gorrie | Substack English is weirder than you think. A weekly dive into the hidden history of everyday words. Click to read Dead Language Society, by Colin Gorrie, a Substack publication with tens of thousands of subsc...

Coming tomorrow: your complete beginner's guide to “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.”

www.deadlanguagesociety.com

His verse combines rhyme with alliteration, merging the old Germanic ways with the newer French fashions. It’s a glimpse at an English that might have been.

It helps that it’s a great story too.

The anonymous poet of “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” was a near-contemporary of Chaucer, but he wrote in a dialect so different from London English that Londoners like Chaucer would likely have struggled with it.

His vocabulary is four times as Norse as Chaucer’s.

Why you should read Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

Linguists tend to talk about “Middle English” like it was one thing (myself included).

But Middle English was the most diverse period in the history of the language.

If you only know “The Canterbury Tales,” you've only seen one kind of Middle English.

Eventually, the "ny" sound became an "ng," which isn't far away in the mouth.

The pronunciation of "Menzies" as "Mingus" is still heard, but it's competing with the version said with a 'z.'

The language changed — albeit in a small way — simply because printers didn't have a letter.

Hence the modern pronunciation of Mackenzie: with a 'z' sound.

The case of "Menȝies" is a bit more complicated.

Traditionally, it's pronounced like "Mingus."

It likely came from a Norman French name Mesnières, which ended up sounding like "Menyers" in Scots, hence the use of yogh: Menȝies

The 'ȝ' got replaced with a 'z': they looked similar and 'z' was easier to print.

The names were still pronounced with 'y' sounds by those in the know.

But not everyone was in the know.

When others encountered spellings with 'z,' they did the sensible thing: they pronounced them with a 'z' sound

The surnames "Menzies" and "Mackenzie" were never meant to be pronounced with a 'z.'

The original spellings used the medieval yetter yogh, which looked like this: ȝ

Yogh once represented a 'y' sound in both English and Scots. So the name "Mackenȝie" was actually pronounced like "Mackenyie."

Why you speak more Latin than you think The Latin words in the ancestor of English

Latin has been a part of English since before there was an English.

Full story here:

www.deadlanguagesociety.com/p/why-you-sp...

You've got to reverse the sound changes they've undergone.

And when you do, you see that they sort into three distinct layers, some borrowed before the Anglo-Saxons ever set foot in Britain.

Even the most homely, Anglo-Saxon-sounding words in your vocabulary might be Latin in disguise.

The reason: they were borrowed so long ago that their distinctive Latin shape has been worn away by centuries of phonetic erosion.

There are many stealth Latin words hiding in everyday English: "kettle," "kitchen," "pit," "wall"...

How do we know these are Latin at all, when they look so English?

"Pound," "street," and "cheap" are Latin words in disguise.

They come from "pondo" (by weight), "strata" (paved), and "caupo" (innkeeper).

They look nothing like the long, fancy words we normally associate with Latin borrowings: "formula," "curriculum," "decimation."

What's going on here?

A bluffer’s guide to etymology How to guess the age and origin of any English word

You don't need to learn Latin, French, or Ancient Greek to figure out where a word comes from, or roughly when it entered the English language.

Allow me to present: The Bluffer's Guide to Etymology.

Five simple rules to get it right, most of the time.

www.deadlanguagesociety.com/p/how-to-gue...

Around 80% of English words were borrowed from other languages.

You can often work out where a word was borrowed from (and when!) just by looking at it.

It works because words carry visible stamps of where they come from: suffixes, silent letters, even stress patterns.

These also map onto dates.

Dead Language Society | Colin Gorrie | Substack English is weirder than you think. A weekly dive into the hidden history of everyday words. Click to read Dead Language Society, by Colin Gorrie, a Substack publication with tens of thousands of subsc...

The words themselves give it away: in their spelling, their suffixes, and even where the stress falls.

English words wear their history on their sleeve, if you know what to look for.

I’ll show you the system tomorrow.

www.deadlanguagesociety.com

A bluffer's guide to etymology.

Here are four words: knight, courage, fabricate, hypothesis.

Without looking anything up, you can tell:

- What language each word came from
- Roughly when it entered the English language

How?

"Should" comes from the Old English verb "sċulan," whose earliest known meaning was — you guessed it — 'to owe.'

So the Old English word "sċyld" meant both ‘debt’ and 'guilt.' German still uses the related word "Schuld" for both.

How much of our moral language is debt collection?

Something similar happened in Latin.

"Dēbēre" 'to owe' became an 'ought' word too: it gave birth to Spanish "deber," French "devoir," Italian "dovere," all meaning both 'owe' and 'should.'

Even 'should' comes from debt.

"Ought" is the past tense of "owe."

At least, it was originally.

Both words come from he Old English verb "āgan," which meant 'to have.' The ‘owe’ meaning comes from a phrase "āgan tō ġieldenne" 'to have (something) to pay.'

Eventually, we dropped the "tō ġieldenne" 'to pay' portion.

What came before English? Watch now | The story of Proto-Indo-European

This is where the deep history of English begins:

www.deadlanguagesociety.com/p/what-came-...

Its descendants include English, as well as Hindi, Greek, Russian, Welsh, and many hundreds more.

Our reconstruction of their common ancestor is detailed enough to tell us what its speakers ate and drank, how they buried their dead, and even the names of some of their gods.

The method: compare what the descendant languages still share and work backwards from there.

The biggest success story of this comparative method is the reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European, likely spoken around six thousand years ago on the grasslands north of the Black Sea.

Linguists can reconstruct long-dead languages that no one ever wrote down.

These reconstructions can be surprisingly precise: individual words, grammar, sound changes, even something of the world the speakers inhabited.

But how?

Thank you very much!