Some yuletide etymologies
Hello, and happy holidays, all!
I’ve been frantically trying to finish my work and get the Kickstarter book laid out (I should be able to order proofs soon, which means I’ll be able to get the PDF out to backers early next year), which hasn’t left me much mental capacity to figure out a newsletter topic, so I’m going to take the easy route and write about something seasonal.
Yuletide etymologies
Christmas is attested in Old English as Cristes mæsse, or ‘Christ’s mass.’ Mass here is the act of going to the church to attend Mass (because the Reformation hadn’t happened yet, so there was only the Catholic Church). While the pronunciation of Christ has shifted to [ai], the way we pronounce that part of Christmas is closer to the original pronunciation. We also often see the abbreviation Xmas, which I usually pronounce as /eksmas/. The X represents the Greek letter chi, which is the first letter in the word Christ (christos). It’s also seen in the chi-rho symbol.
The first noël, however, was borrowed from Old French in the 14th century, and it derives ultimately from the Latin root verb nasci, which means ‘to be born.’ It’s been spelled a variety of ways, including nouel in Middle English and nowell in a Christmas carols piano book I had as a kid.
The yule log is a tradition that’s probably carried over from pre-Christian Germanic traditions, which is where that word probably also originates. The Old English word geol, pronounced “yol,” is of uncertain origin. It could be cognate to (descended on its own from a Proto-Germanic root) or have been borrowed from Old Norse yol, but no one is quite sure where that comes from, either. When two languages are that closely related and had a long period of contact, it can be hard to tell what exactly happened. Yuletide greetings are good wishes for the season of Yule, and speakers of any of the other Germanic languages will see a familiar word: North Germanic tid, German Zeit, Dutch tijd, all of which mean ‘time.’ English now uses tide mostly to refer to the oceanic phenomenon, but the meaning of ‘time, season’ crops up in Yuletide and poetic words like eventide or noontide.
A tannenbaum has lovely branches, and, like the song, it originates in Germany. Tanne means ‘fir’ and Baum means ‘tree,’ and using the principle of German compound building, a Tannenbaum is a fir tree. The practice of bringing a fir tree into the house around the winter solstice probably originates in pre-Christian Germanic traditions, and German immigrants to the US brought it with them.
The Anglo-Saxons probably also roasted chestnuts over an open fire. The word is attested in Old English as cisten (/chisten/), and it’s derived from Latin castānea, which itself is derived from Ancient Greek kastáneia.
I hear those sleigh bells jingling, and I thought the word would be much older than it is (because of how it’s spelled; it’s a very pre-Vowel-Shift spelling). It didn’t appear in English until 1703, and it was borrowed from Dutch slee, ‘sled.’ Sled is much older in English, but it, too, was borrowed from Middle Dutch around 1300. There are cognates in all the other Germanic languages (including Old Norse sleði and Old High German slito), and Old English had the verb slidan ‘to slide,’ which was cognate with them. They all derive from Proto-Germanic *slid-, but, for some reason, Old English didn’t have (or didn’t write down) a noun that you use to slide things across the ground. This phenomenon is called a doublet, and they’re just so cool. (I have no idea why they decided to spell it like that; maybe because it rhymes with weigh and neigh. Which are both pre-Vowel-Shift spellings.)
Of course, you couldn’t call anyone a Scrooge until 1843 or a Grinch until 1957, and Santa Claus wasn’t on the scene until 1773 (borrowed from Dutch Sinterklaas, which can be traced back to Middle Dutch, or sometime between 1150 and 1500).
The advent wreath is a much bigger deal in Germany than it was for me growing up in the US, but Christians in the US still use the term to refer to the 4 weeks leading up to Christmas day. The word comes, as you probably know or have guessed, from Church Latin advenire and its past participle adventus, ‘to arrive, to come to.’ Advent leads up to the nativity, ultimately from Latin, of course, but it arrived via Old French (12th century).
Epiphany is 12 days after Christmas. That’s when the three kings arrived to celebrate the Messiah’s birth. This term derives ultimately from Hebrew mashiah ‘the anointed’/mashah ‘to anoint.’ It arrived in English via Late Latin around 1300, and the Latin term was derived from Greek, which in turn was derived from Aramaic. Epiphany was borrowed from Old French epyphanie, which came from Latin, which came from Ancient Greek epipháneia ‘manifestation, striking appearance,’ from epiphaínō ‘I appear.’
The three kings are also called the Magi or the three wise men. The term Magi didn’t appear in this usage until the late 14th century, though its use to mean ‘astrologer, magician’ (from Latin magus ‘magician’) is attested in the 1200s.
The three kings couldn’t bring incense until the late 13th century, when the word arrived from Old French, but gold goes further back than we have written records. Their third gift, myrrh, arrived with the Normans around the 11th century. The German word Weihnachten ‘Christmas, holy night’ has a tangential link to incense. The verb weihen means ‘to consecrate,’ and incense is called Weihrauch, or ‘consecrating smoke.’
How does etymology work?
Historical linguists or philologists compare written evidence of language and make educated guesses about what older forms of the word could be based on what the word for the same thing looks like in more closely and more distantly related languages. Using hypotheses about sound change (often called “laws”), they reconstruct forms of the root word that could have led to the different words.
Sometimes a word doesn’t appear at all in an older form of a language, and then it does one day. This can be evidence of either borrowing or invention. English borrows words all the time, as I have discussed before, and we’re not shy of inventing new words, either. The telephone didn’t exist until some guy made it up (out of repurposed Greek root words), and in the last 20 years, we’ve seen the invention of the smart phone.
For this piece, I relied mostly on Etymonline and Wiktionary. Unless you have access to the OED, you’ll have to rely on those sources and the various dictionaries that have abbreviated etymologies in them (Merriam-Webster has some). Anatoly Liberman has written several books for the general public about etymology, and he writes a column for Oxford University Press on etymology. His post from 18 December has a very familiar theme.
Until next time!
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