Erstwhile Firsts
Dec. 23rd, 2022 11:50 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
steepholmWell, I followed Covid, after a two-week gap, with a flu chaser. Apart from a bout of heatstroke in Japan in 2017, and a weird series of nosebleeds in Japan in 2018 (see a pattern here?), these are my first illnesses for goodness knows how long. I assume that Covid lowered my resistance generally.
Since I'd been vaccinated against both, I'd like think that both were milder than they otherwise would have been, but neither was pleasant.
Anyway, in the stilly watches of last night I started pondering the way languages get mixed up in number systems. First Japanese, with its weird mixture of native Japanese and Chinese-derived terms that vary according to context, in ways that no doubt seem obvious and natural if you're brought up in the language but otherwise very arbitrary. And then English, which is much the same except that there we're dealing with an even more bizarre mixture of Old English, Latin and also French.
Anyway, I got to wondering about the etymology of the word "first", which I realised with embarrassment I didn't know anything at all about. It didn't "feel" like French or Latin, but neither was it connected to its corresponding cardinal, "one". Why don't we say "oneth", or similar?
Well, it turns out that not having an ordinal version of the number 1 is pretty common across Indo-European languages - why, I don't know. As for "first", the "st" turns out to be a superlative suffix, the whole thing being something like "the most fore" or "forest" if you want to be confusing - i.e. the one at the front. In German, meanwhile, "erst" does something similar - but using the cognate of our "ere" [=before]. Erst is thus a cousin of "earliest".
This may not be news to you at all, or very boring news, but I found it occasioned a general sliding of the number tiles in my brain into a new configuration, and I rather liked the sensation.
The next question, of course, involves "second". What is that Franco-Latin cuckoo doing in the German nest of English-language ordinals? Well, according to OED:
This make sense, I suppose, but I'm getting the impression that Old English was culpably negligent in such matters.
Since I'd been vaccinated against both, I'd like think that both were milder than they otherwise would have been, but neither was pleasant.
Anyway, in the stilly watches of last night I started pondering the way languages get mixed up in number systems. First Japanese, with its weird mixture of native Japanese and Chinese-derived terms that vary according to context, in ways that no doubt seem obvious and natural if you're brought up in the language but otherwise very arbitrary. And then English, which is much the same except that there we're dealing with an even more bizarre mixture of Old English, Latin and also French.
Anyway, I got to wondering about the etymology of the word "first", which I realised with embarrassment I didn't know anything at all about. It didn't "feel" like French or Latin, but neither was it connected to its corresponding cardinal, "one". Why don't we say "oneth", or similar?
Well, it turns out that not having an ordinal version of the number 1 is pretty common across Indo-European languages - why, I don't know. As for "first", the "st" turns out to be a superlative suffix, the whole thing being something like "the most fore" or "forest" if you want to be confusing - i.e. the one at the front. In German, meanwhile, "erst" does something similar - but using the cognate of our "ere" [=before]. Erst is thus a cousin of "earliest".
This may not be news to you at all, or very boring news, but I found it occasioned a general sliding of the number tiles in my brain into a new configuration, and I rather liked the sensation.
The next question, of course, involves "second". What is that Franco-Latin cuckoo doing in the German nest of English-language ordinals? Well, according to OED:
Old English had no proper ordinal for the number two (like German zweite , Dutch tweede , French deuxième ), the sense being expressed by óðer (see other adj.); this being ambiguous, the French word found early acceptance.
This make sense, I suppose, but I'm getting the impression that Old English was culpably negligent in such matters.