When you look at the roots of our vocabulary, a surprisingly small set of root concepts gets elaborated into an amazing variety of particular terms. By making little changes to an existing word you can split it into two distinct words, and by making metaphorical use of a word consistently enough, you can change its perceived meaning until its new form is heard as literal and concrete. We don’t think of, for instance, the word “indented” as meaning like a toothmark, or “digital” as meaning like fingers. We don’t think of words like “inflamed” or “florid” or “petrified” as metaphorical, but they are, referencing fire, flowers, and rock respectively.
For an example of this divergence, consider the words “glazier” and “glacier”. One is a trade profession and the other is a geological phenomenon, yet they differ in only one letter, and both have roots in the same glac- root word, which referred to ice in Roman times, and before that to anything shiny. Glass, the substance, might well have been so named because it looked like ice to the first people who dealt with it… but apparently that’s not actually the case: the sense of “shiny” passed through Germanic languages into English without going through Latin and without specifically meaning ice.
Some other words in English coming from the same origin include “gloss” and “glaze” and “glare”, and medical terms like “glaucoma”… maybe even “glow”. Our modern words for the sheen of varnish, the frosting on a donut, and a hostile stare may have originated with them being metaphorically compared to ice or glass.
For another example, consider words like “plan”, “plane”, and “plain”. We use these for all sorts of meanings: a scheme or plot, a scale diagram, an abstract surface in geometry, a heavier-than-air flying vehicle, a tool for shaving wood, a meadow or prairie, and the quality of being bland and unadorned and ordinary. We even use it for the name of a musical instrument, by borrowing the Italian version of the word, “piano”, which has almost all of that same range of meanings, from scheme to meadow, and also meanings such as floor or deck. What do they have in common? Every one of them got its name, directly or indirectly, from resemblance to a flat surface. The sense of scheme or plot apparently derived from the sense of, like, “floor plan” — a 2D diagram for how you intend to build something. (And there are plenty of additional similar words related to flatness from the same or similar roots, such as “plank” and “flake” and “placid” and “flag”.)
There’s nothing flat about a piano, but in the Italian musical tradition they started using the word “piano” in the sense of bland ordinariness to mean playing softly, and then they combined it with “forte” (strong) to make a portmanteau word to describe a keyboard instrument that could play soft or loud notes at will, and people shortened it to piano, keeping just the part of the name that described its ability to play some notes without emphasis — you might say, flatly.
It’s pretty common for a foreign word such as piano to be borrowed for a narrow specific meaning when, in its original language, it had a much broader and more general range of meaning. For instance, in English we use “chef” to mean a haute-cuisine cook, but in French the word just means any kind of chief or boss or leader. The German word “gestalt” basically just means “shape”, but in English we use it only in particular abstract and abstruse ways. In Japanese the word “sensei” means any kind of teacher, and “bukkake” just means “splash”. “Kung fu” (or gōngfu in modern pinyin) means mastery or accomplishment in general, without referring to any particular area of skill.
The process goes the other way as well. “Handy” is a fairly broad word in English but when borrowed in German it means cell phone. “Smoking” in French or Spanish means a formal jacket or tuxedo, and “pull” in French means a pullover sweater or jersey. Words like “surf” or “piercing” have many senses in English but usually only one when borrowed into a language like Spanish. In Japanese, the borrowed German word “arbeit” (or arubaito), means specifically a part-time job rather than work in general, “bike” (baiku) means motorcycle but not bicycle, and “charge” (chāji) means making an electronic payment, and only in some contexts.
One notorious example of divergence is the set of words arising from a root of blu- or ble-, which referred to the sky, from an earlier bhel- that indicated brightness. This gave us not only the color “blue”, but a whole range of words related to paleness or featurelessness including “blank”, “blanket”, “blanch”, “bleak”, “bleach”, “blush”, “bland”, “blonde”, “blend”, “blink”, and “blind”. In romance languages it became blanc, meaning white… yet by another path some say it is also the origin of “black”. The closely related alb- root, meaning “white”, has plenty more derivatives.
Words from “edge” to “aggressive” to “acumen” to “acid” to “acne” to “exacerbate” to “mediochre” to “paragon” to “oxygen” all come from a common ak- root which means sharp or pointy. Even the word “hammer” shares this origin according to some, though all resemblance is now lost.
In these various kinds of mutations, at least the spelling and pronunciation often change to accommodate the added meaning. We can easily hear the difference between, for instance, “extract” and “traction” and “tractate”. But what about the simple word “track”? In the dictionary I see about three dozen distinct meanings, from the act of monitoring a flying object’s location by radar to the linked steel belt that a bulldozer rides on, all using exactly the same spelling and sound, and all derived in some metaphorical way from the concept of a footpath, or footprints.
And there’s another gotcha here… some of the words I mentioned earlier, and related ones like “tractable” and “tractor” and “tract”, are apparently derived from a separate root unrelated to “track” — maybe even more than one other root. And “trachea” is from yet another distinct root, though it sounds like it could plausibly have come from a word for a path. Sometimes as words diverge from each other and spread to cover a wider area in the space of pronounceable sounds, they run into other words traveling in the opposite direction… for example, the noun “egg” (what birds lay) has a different root from the verb “egg” (to provoke or goad), with the latter being another derivative of ak-. They’re probably no more connected than the Japanese car make Mazda (a flattened form of Matsuda) is to the Zoroastrian deity Ahura Mazda (since flattened to Ormazd)… but it’s hard to be certain. Some of these may be words that started together and drifted apart in ancient unknowable times before swinging toward each other again, while others may have begun farther apart than we’ll ever know. However far apart they began, often when they get close together people will just start pronouncing and spelling it the same as a familiar word, snapping them together. For instance, the Germanic word “schrubben” (to clean with a brush) may have become “scrub” in English because that was already a familiar word for bushes and small trees.
I still prefer this kind of back-and-forth spread over the situation where more and more meanings are piled onto a word without it changing. The worst case I can think of is the word “set”. One dictionary I checked listed 93 distinct meanings for this word! It does seem like most of them derive in some way from the concept of remaining in a particular place, though that’s not very apparent in cases like the setting of the sun, or a set of golf clubs. And the words “sit” and “site” and “settle” and “sediment” and “situation” clearly derive from that same sense of fixed location… so it could have been worse.
Personally, I’m glad of the variety — I appreciate the value of having words drift far enough apart so that the musical term “opera” and the mathematical term “operand” are not easily confused with each other. (Both derive from a root that means work or effort.) And it’s impressive what a range of variety and specificity we’ve come up with, starting from a far more limited range of simple words for things like stone and sky and wind and water.
In this, evolution of words really does resemble the evolution of life. Seeing all these root word relationships, it would be pretty much impossible to argue, say, that language was created whole and complete in one act. It’s clearly grown over the years to be much larger and wider than it once was. But the diverging nature of life is nearly as self-evident, and people deny that all the time.
Supersonic Man 