As soon as we handle the foundation of ship and motorboat (the names of things with respect to material tradition), issues are very nearly predictable. Such terms might have been lent from a language that is unknownor from an attested language, but definitive evidence of the text is wanting) or created in ways we’re not able to reconstruct, but spouse? Yet its etymology isn’t any less obscure. My proposition will increase the current stock of conjectures, together with future will show whether or not this has any possibility of success, let alone acceptance.
The few items that can probably be said about spouse without hedging are as follows. Within the past, it had been pronounced wif, utilizing the vowel like in contemporary Engl. wee. It implied “woman,” not spouse that is“female” because it nevertheless does in housewife, midwife, old wives’ tale, German Weib, and Dutch wijf. Extremely early, man(letter) “person” ended up being put into it, and also by a number of phonetic changes wifman became girl. Old Engl. wif had cognates in German, Dutch, and Frisian. Old Icelandic wif (i designates “long i,” the vowel that is same when you look at the Old English term) happened in poetry, but whether it had been indigenous in Scandinavian or borrowed from English (an even more likely choice) is not clear. A Germanic language, recorded in the fourth century CE in any case, wif was not a common Germanic word, because it did not turn up in Gothic. Neither is it an extension associated with the primary Indo-European term for “woman,” which we detect in gynecology and whose Germanic cognate could be the now obsolete Engl. quean (quean is linked to queen, however they are various terms).
Wife, present in a big but restricted area, seemingly have been a term endowed with a specific feeling; otherwise, a cognate of Gothic qino “woman” (compare gyne-, above) might have pleased the speakers. Similarly problematic may be the origin of bride, this time around a typical Germanic term. When controling woman, wife, and bride, we can not stay in the sphere of “pure etymology,” for we need to investigate your family relations of previous epochs as well as the precise meaning of kin terms. One term would designate a married girl, another a nubile woman, a third a bride, and so on. In such instances manipulating origins and suffixes is insufficient, once the attempts to give an explanation for derivation of spouse show with depressing quality. Hypotheses in the beginning of wife are wide ranging, as well as the obstacle that is main etymologists is based on the sphere of sentence structure, as opposed to semantics. Old Engl. wif (like contemporary German Weib) is neuter. Exactly just just How could a noun meaning “woman” be neuter? No conjecture in the beginning of spouse is well worth such a thing unless it could account for its grammatical gender.
This might be a photo of a feminine Weaver, obviously perhaps not the ancestor of anybody’s spouse or any girl.
But first let me reveal a brief summary of the most widely used theories. One guide after another derives wife through the verb weave. Some individuals nevertheless help this derivation. But, it is indefensible from the point that is phonetic of, with no you have had the opportunity to describe why the term for “weaver” need to have been neuter. Recommendations to your expected low status of old weavers are nonsense. Then there’s Gothic (bi)waibjan “surround, encompass; clothe, wrap” (bi- is a prefix). Its cognates frequently suggest “swing, sway, vacillate,” as noticed in Engl. waver. Biwaibjan and its particular congeners provided increase to a different etymology that is well-known of. Presumably, the link that is sought-for spouse and clothe ended up being the veil. “Wife,” according for this reconstruction, suggested “a veiled bride,” because the veiling associated with the bride ended up being customary among all Western Indo-Europeans. Nonetheless, aside from many semantic problems, that I will skip, it stays a puzzle the way the line between “bride” and “woman” ended up being crossed (no culture, and therefore no language, confuses these principles) and exactly why a female individual about to marry, even when veiled, obtained the neuter sex in Germanic. Other recommendations over the exact same lines had been you can forget persuasive. Instead of “veil,” various items of a woman’s attire had been called, however the idea that is basic: “from clothing to person”, such as he chases every skirt. Nonetheless, there is certainly scarcely a solitary solid exemplory instance of a term like dress, apron, or bonnet turning by metonymy into a day to day name for “girl” or “woman.”
Because could possibly be anticipated, some social individuals hoped to get the etymon of spouse in a word for the woman’s genitals. A neuter noun keeping down some vow resulted in just in Tocharian, which can be maybe maybe maybe not advantageous to this etymology, because spouse, as noted, had restricted money even yet in Germanic. In Tocharian B it sounded kwipe and suggested “shame place,” with regards to “penis,” whereas Tocharian A kip implied “mother’s pity human anatomy,” so either “vulva” or “womb.” Secure Tocharian cognates of also typical Germanic terms are very few, and, if the Tocharian noun were associated with the protoform of spouse, it really is nearly unimaginable that this term will never have resulted in somewhere within Asia Minor and Medieval Germania. Also, because can be viewed, neither kwipe nor kip implied directly “woman’s genitals.” Nevertheless, this etymology, as with any the last people, discovered several distinguished supporters.
I will go by other, also less convincing, conjectures and arrive at my very own proposition. Discrepancies amongst the grammatical sex for the term while the intercourse for the person it designates are not unusual, and lots of other examples of neuter nouns for “woman” exist. Every one of them requires an explanation that is detailed. right Here only 1 reality ought to be mentioned. In all the old Indo-European languages the latin mail order brides type of the feminine single coincided with that associated with neuter plural. This situation poses intriguing and complicated questions regarding the foundation associated with the grammatical sex and relations between an organization (which is why the neuter plural is normal) plus a specific girl. Whatever the case, the road for the collective plural up to a single, either feminine or masculine, happens to be attested more often than once. an anthologized instance is god. Old Germanic had just the neuter plural (gods). The masculine noun appeared after Germanic-speakers had been converted to Christianity.
Among the list of Old Scandinavian goddesses, we find Sif.
Her title, produced from Indo-European si-bh, relates to Engl. sib and Latin su-us “one’s own.” Sif will need to have been the patroness of household ties. The only recorded myth in which she plays an obvious part, points to fertility, instead of affinity by wedding, nevertheless the ideas of household and fertility are close. I compared Sib as well as the pronoun that is personal. The protoform of we was wis (with “long i, that is, wees, if spelled in today’s English); -s ended up being an ending. I do believe that Old Germanic wibh, the protoform of spouse, ended up being wi-bh a formation parallel to sibh. If i will be right, sibh meant “all the individuals associated by marriage,” while wibh known an organization tracing its beginning to your exact same girl. It had been term like y’all. Wibh, because it was the name of a community whose members descended or believed that they had descended from the same woman as I see it, had to be neuter. It included both men and women, plus in Germanic, whenever a pronoun like they covered “mixed company,” the proper execution was always neuter (John and Jack needed the masculine they, Betty and Mary could be included in the womanly they, whereas Jack and Jill required the neuter they). As time continued, the term meaning “we, descendants of 1 woman” arrived to suggest “woman.” Wife emerged as a phrase of social relations, however the old grammatical sex stayed. The old word that is indo-European “woman” (preserved by Engl. quean) also survived, however it narrowed its sphere of application and arrived to denote “woman inside her biological (son or daughter bearing) function.”
Anyone who has difficulty thinking that the exact same term can make reference to an organization also to an person should remember Engl. youth “young individuals” and youth “a young man” or individuals and an individuals, not to mention one sheep
numerous sheep, regardless of the factors behind this use may be. Evidently, the difference from a woman’s part while the creator of a clan and her part of a possible mom had not been universal, because even in Germanic it had been limited by a specific area. Nor have we retained it: girl acts both purposes similarly well, and quean, to your level it is nevertheless used outside some dialects that are rural means “slut.” Someone may state that Germanic wib has not yet been attested with its collective meaning. Quite therefore. If this feeling had proceeded to the literary epoch or lingered in a few archaic dialect, my etymology could have been available in the eighteenth century during the latest.