Glossing the etymon of brain as ‘refuse’

may seem unlikely, but a few other words for

‘brain’ confirm this reconstruction. One of such words is G Hirn (< OHG hirni ~ hirn). On the strength of MDu hersene Seebold (EWDS^21-24) gives the protoform of Hirn as *hersnja- or *herznja-. OHG hirni and OI hjarni (with ja < *e) supposedly lost z between r and n (see also NEW: hersenen), but it is equally probable that -z-, or rather -s-, was a suffix hirni and hjarni never had. Mitzka (EWDS²⁰) cites G Hornisse ‘hornet,’ alongside Du horzel, both alleg-edly going back to *hurzu-, as another example of a spirant in rzn ~ rsn from *r(r)n. Seebold expunged reference to Hornisse in the entry Hirn. He also has doubts that OI hjarsi ~ hjassi ‘crown of the head’ are related to Hirn and hjarni.

Only one point has not been contested, namely that Hirn acquired its meaning from a word mean-ing ‘skull,’ judgmean-ing by its apparently unshakable cognates L cerebrum ‘brain’ and Gk kranàon ‘skull, cranium.’ Despite the consensus, that etymology may be less secure than it seems. G Harn (< MHG <

OHG harn) means ‘urine,’ but its original meaning was at one time *’bodily waste,’ as suggested by MHG hurmen ‘fertilize, spread manure over a field.’ Its likely cognates (with s-mobile) are OI skarn, OE scearn ‘dung, muck,’ and L ex-cer-mere ‘to separate’ (akin to ex-cre¤-mentum ‘excrement’). Hirn (with i < *e) – Harn – hurmen form a perfect triad.

OI hjarni had a synonym heili. Its origin is un-known. The cognates proposed by older etymolo-gists are unconvincing (AEW). Magnússon sug-gests its kinship with OI hárr ‘gray’ (< *haira-; he traces heili to *hailar- or *hailia-) and glosses the protoform as ‘gray matter.’ The Germanic words for ‘marrow’ (OE mearg, OI mergr, and so on) have been shown to derive from the root *mozgo-, whose Proto-Slavic reflex was *mozgu- ‘brain.’ If Peters-son’s comparison of *mozgo- with the cognates of E mast ‘fruit of forest trees as food for pigs’ is right (1915:125-6), the original meaning of *mozgo- was

*’fat.’ Marrow looked like fat (gray substance) to those people. Some etymologists gloss Gmc

*mergh- as ‘mass, lump, bunch’ (Arnoldson 1915:6/2.03, with references). (However, Sverdrup [1916:41] perhaps went too far in believing that the existence of so many words related to mearg ~ mergr testifies to the early Indo-Europeans’ profi-ciency in cooking meat.)

Brain Brain

Baskett (1920:50, no. 39 A1) cites E reg pash

‘brain,’ a word defined as ‘rotten or pulpy mass;

mud and slush.’ The idea of the brain as a mass is sometimes emphasized by the use of the corre-sponding words in the plural. In Russian, only the plural (mozgi, stress on the second syllable) denotes the dish brains, which is also the case in English. In German, the situation is different: the dish is Hirn, while the organ is more often Gehirn, a collective noun. Ten Doornkaat Koolman was wrong in con-necting Brägen directly with brechen, but his idea that the brain was at one time understood as some-thing broken into small pieces or somesome-thing squeezed together testifies to his sound linguistic instinct. He also quoted the saying Er hat keine Grütze im Kopfe (literally ‘He has no porridge in his head’), said about a stupid, brainless person.

Grütze in this context is not unlike E reg pash and G Brei, which Schwenck offered as a cognate of Brägen.

Buck (1949:213/4.203) states: “Most of the words for ‘brain’ are cognate with words for ‘head’

or ‘marrow’.” Germanic words do not confirm the first part of his generalization. No common Indo-European name of the head and no common Ger-manic name of the brain existed. In the Scandina-vian area, hjarni competed with heili ~ heilir. The usage in the mythological poems of the Elder Edda suggests that heili was the most ancient or most dignified word for the gray mass in the head. The primordial giant Ymir had a heili (the sky was made from it), not a hjarni. Perhaps the home of the etymon of hjarni should be sought to the south of the Scandinavian peninsula. Gmc *mazga- probably also first meant ‘brain.’

Learned coinages and local words must have existed at all times. One of them was OE ex(e)

‘brain,’ the origin of which is unknown (from *axe, a variant of asce ‘ashes’ – ‘ash-colored substance’?).

When synonyms meet, they clash and narrow down their meaning, unless one of them disap-pears. Thus heili is lost in the continental Scandina-vian languages (N and Dan hjerne, and Sw hjärna are reflexes of *hjarni) but survives in Modern Ice-landic, in which hjarna- occurs only in a few com-pounds; there is also hjarni ‘skull.’ In addition to mergr, Old Icelandic had mœna (> ModI mæna), re-lated to mœnir ‘ridge of the roof’ and E mane, the original sense being evidently *’spine.’ It is now a term used in describing vertebrates.

Fr harsens and Du hersens suggest that the pro-spective invaders of Britain also had a similar word. A late (1137) Old English hapax hærn ‘brain’

is hardly native, and E reg harns, as well as ME

hærnes, harnes, and hernes, is from Scandinavian.

Early in their history, speakers of northern Ger-man and Frisian seem to have borrowed a “low”

Celtic word that with time lost its slangy charac-ter. In Frisian and Dutch, it edged out the inher-ited name of the brain, whereas in Standard En-glish it ousted the cognates of harsens ~ hersens.

The doublets OE brægen ~ bragen may owe their origin not to some vagaries of Old English re-gional phonetics but to the existence of a similar pair in the lending language. To sum up, brægen and bragen seem to have been taken over from the Celts with the meaning *’refuse, waste matter,’ ac-quired the meaning ‘brain,’ competed with *harn-, and eventually won out, but they never meant

‘elevated place, hill’ (Liberman [2004a]).

CHIDE (1000)

Chide (< OE cı@dan) has been compared with verbs of similar form and meaning in languages as remote as Sanskrit and Finnish, but it can hardly be related to any of them, and no reason exists to treat it as a migratory or onomatopoeic word. Although modern dictionaries characterize chide as isolated and etymologically opaque, OE cı@dan ‘scold’ and gecı@d ‘strife’ are probably related to OHG *kîdal ‘wedge’

(MHG kîdel, ModG Keil). The early meaning of *kîdal must have been *’stick for splitting or cleaving.’ If this suggestion is right, gecı@d started from ‘exchange of blows,’ whereas cı@dan probably meant ‘brandish sticks,’ with ‘scold, reprove’

being a later figurative use of the same.

Section 1 discusses the existing derivations of chide, and section 2 contains the proposed etymology.

1. The verb chide is of unknown origin, though it has existed in written English since the year 1000 (it first occurs in Ælfric). OE cı@dan, a weak verb of the first class, meant what it means today. The morphological variants—chode and chidden for chided—appeared later. Old English had the noun gecı@@d ‘strife, altercation; reproof,’ and some dic-tionaries say that cı@@dan was derived from this noun (see, for example, W³ and AHD). Even if gecı@@d is the etymon of cı@@dan rather than a back formation from it, the etymology of the root cı@@d- remains opaque.

The oldest dictionaries offer many putative cognates and parallel formations of chide: G schel-ten ‘scold,’ Du kijven ‘quarrel, wrangle’ (Minsheu, he calls both words Belgian, that is, Flemish or Dutch; Skinner), Gk kaàw ‘burn, singe’ (also Min-sheu) and kudßzw ‘scold, vituperate’ (Casaubon [1650:293]; still so Townsend [1824:81]), OI kífa

‘strife, wrangle’ and possibly L cave¤re ‘be on one’s guard’ and cavillor ‘jeer, taunt’ (Ihre, kif; he also mentions “Belgian” kifwa), Finn kidata and kitistä

Brain Chide

‘creak; shrink; press together’ (Wedgwood: he mis-spelled the second verb), and Skt hı@d ‘be angry’

(Leo [1877:286/39; he gives hit ‘vociferavit’). The Finnish verbs are too remote from chide semanti-cally to be of interest, and all the others have initial consonants that do not match OE k.

The complex kid or kud hardly renders the sound of creaking, shrieking, screaming, and so forth; yet both latest etymological dictionaries of Finnish (SKES and SSA) call kidata, as well as kitistä

~ kitistää, onomatopoeic. G schelten may be related to E scold and OI skáld ‘poet’ (‘the author of vitu-perative verses’), but l belongs to the root in all three of them, so that the basis of comparison be-tween skeld- ~ skáld- and cı@d is absent. Initial h- in Skt hı@^d. is incompatible with Gmc k-, and the origin of hı@^d is unknown (G Geist ‘spirit,’ E ghost, and so on are its possible cognates, KEWA III:60). Du kij-ven is related to G kabbeln, kibbeln, and keifen ‘scold, wrangle’ and to OE ca¤f ‘quick, strenuous, bold’ (a proper name Cı@fa also existed). Sw reg skvappa, together with E reg swabble and E squabble, appear to belong to the kabbeln—keifen group. Their ono-matopoeic or sound symbolic origin is not improb-able, but, as l in schelten is part of the root, so is the labial in kijven and the rest.

Since positing the root *kı@@- ‘wrangle, quarrel;

scold’ with the enlargements -d and -b (f, p) is an unappealing proposal, we can assume that none of the words listed above has anything to do with chide, even though the correspondence of sound and meaning between OE cı@dan and Gk kudßzw, to which ORuss kuditi ‘scold’ and Skt kutsáyati ‘vitu-perates, scolds’ should be added, is curious.

The onomatopoeic nature of OE cı@@dan cannot be ruled out. Compare G kitzeln, L titilla¤^{re, and} Russ shchekotat’ (stress on the final syllable), all meaning ‘tickle.’ Russ reg shchekatit’ (stress on the second syllable) ‘quarrel noisily and indecently’

(Samuel Johnson’s definition of brawl) sounds al-most like shchekotat’ ‘tickle.’ The sound shape of OE citelian ‘tickle’ is not particularly suggestive of the action it designates. For more words of the structure k + vowel + d, t, or s meaning ‘battle, fight, press,’ from Welsh to Chaldee, see the early editions of Webster’s dictionary (1828; only Mahn expunged this array of words in the 1864 edition).

An example of an onomatopoeic kud is Russ kudak-htat’ ‘cackle’ (stress on the second syllable).

Wedgwood compared OE cı@dan and SwiG kiden ‘resound.’ The Swiss verb appears in Stor-month and Mueller¹ as a tentative cognate of cı@dan, but is was soon realized that Swi kiden is a reflex of

*qvidan (Go qi_tan) ‘speak’ (Mueller²). Regel

(1862:111) believed that at one time the verb cı@^dan had exact correspondences in most Germanic lan-guages and treated Go qi_tan, OE cwean, and OI kvea as closely related to Gmc *cı¤dan. Thomson cited “Gothic” (= Swedish) kuida [sic] and Saxon (?) ciden in his dictionary. Bosworth (1838) repro-duced Regel’s etymology at cı¤dan, but Toller (BT) deleted it. Pott (1859-76:IV, 838/1852) referred to Regel’s article; however, he admitted that the prob-lem had not been solved.

Skeat, in Skeat¹, hesitatingly compared chide with OE cwean, and in the Errata and Addenda he cited, also with hesitation, Sw reg ke(d)a ‘hurt, sad-den’ and Dan kiede (its modern spelling is kede)

‘bore one,’ which he found in Rietz and which Rietz compared with Skt khid ‘hurt, sadden.’ The Danish adjective ked, occurring in such phrases as være ked (af noget) ‘feel irritated (by something),’

gøre nogen ked af noget ‘hurt, sadden,’ goes back to OD keed and has close parallels in Swedish and Norwegian. According to DEO⁴, -d in ked may be secondary, perhaps added under the influence of its synonym led, as in the tautological binomial led og ked. DEO⁴ compares ke(d) and LG keef, N reg keiv

‘crooked, twisted,’ and so on. They lead either to

*kib ‘split, turn aside’ or to the root represented by OI keikr ‘bent backward’ and possibly by OI keipr

‘rowlock, oarlock’ and Dan kejte ‘left hand.’ See more on kejte and the rest at KEY and KITTY-CORNER. Although the adjectives and nouns united by the meanings ‘bent, twisted, left-handed’ form a rather cohesive group despite the variations in the pos-tradical consonants, the words whose referents are

‘strife, noisy quarrel; scold, wrangle; sadden’ can-not be shown to belong to it. Rietz’s Sanskrit verb (see khidáti ‘he tears, presses’ in KEWA I:309) is not related to OE cı¤^dan.

Conjectures on the origin of chide gradually disappeared from dictionaries. Two more ety-mologies—by W. Barnes (1862:103, from the mythical root k*ng ‘stop back anything’) and Par-tridge (1958; chide: allegedly related to -cı¤^{d- in L} occı¤dere ‘slay’)—may be dismissed out of hand.

Dictionaries of Old and Modern English, including Holthausen’s (AeEW, cı¤dan), agree in stating that chide is isolated and that nothing can be said about its history. Jellinghaus (1898a) listed 106 English words going back to Old English but having no cognates in Low German. Chide is one of them (p.

464). Attempts to find some traces of this verb in place names have failed. In Kent, in a village called Chiddingstone (formerly Chidingstone), near the church, a certain stone is popularly known as Chiding Stone. “The village tradition is that on

Chide Chide

it the priests used to chide the people, whence the name” (Lynn [1889]). But Ekwall’s explanation (1960; probably from a personal name) destroys local etiological legend. In the later dictionaries of Germanic languages, chide turns up only once.

Modern Icelandic has kia (first recorded in the 17^th century) ‘rub, scratch, move with short steps’; the corresponding noun is ki. Exact parallels are wanting. Nynorsk kjea (< *kia) ‘work negligently, bungle; wrangle’ and OE cı¤dan are listed tenta-tively as its possible cognates and referred to the Germanic root *kı¤- (< PIE * g'ei- ‘split’; ÁBM). Ties between ‘rub, move with short steps’ and ‘quarrel angrily’ are hard to detect even if one takes ki^a and cı¤dan for the full and zero grades of ablaut of the same root.

2. It is not surprising that all hypotheses on the etymology of OE cı¤dan revolve around the roots

*kı¤^{d- ~ *kı}¤- or *kı@- followed by some other postrad-ical consonant. However, stringing words with kı@^- is a formal procedure that can easily get out of con-trol. For instance, Wortmann offers numerous words, supposedly related to G keimen ‘germinate’

(Go keinan*, OS kînan, OHG kînan ‘germinate’; OE cı@nan ‘gap, yawn, crack’ is believed to have re-tained the original meaning of that verb). Chide is allegedly one of them (Wortmann [1964:57]). The semantic basic of chide would then be ‘split of friendly relations.’ This is a shaky bridge between

*kı@- and chide, for kı@nan and its derivatives consis-tently refer to the process of bursting forth, shoots, and branches, while cı@dan with equal consistency denotes scolding and altercation rather than sever-ance of friendship. The solution offered below is not different from some of those mentioned above, but it aims at reconstructing the semantic ties be-tween the recorded meaning of cı@dan and the pos-tulated meaning of its ancient root.

One of the words traced to the base *kı@- is G Keil ‘wedge.’ Middle High German had kîl (< OHG kîl) and *kîdel ‘wedge, peg.’ If Keil is connected with *kı@nan, its original meaning must have been

‘tool for splitting or cleaving.’ Kîdel apparently goes back to OHG *kîdal (< *kî-la), a doublet of

*kı@-tla by Verner’s Law. That etymology, offered by Sievers (1894:340), has never been contested and has found its way into works on Indo-European (Birgit Olsen [1988:15-16, sec 2.20]), though the re-lationship between kîl and *kîdal is not clear. This question has been discussed in connection with the enigmatic change _tl > hl in Germanic and espe-cially with the history of G Beil (< bîhal) ‘ax.’ All of it is of little consequence for the etymology of chide if we disregard the suggestion that *kîdal is a

sec-ondary formation or kîl with a syllable inserted, like 15^th-century G meder for mehr ‘more’; G Speil and Speidel, both also meaning ‘wedge’ and resem-bling Keil ~ Keidel, are words of obscure history (DW, Keil). MHG kîdel must be an ancient word. It survived in German dialects and has been pre-served as a family name (Keidel), whatever the na-ture of the reference to ‘wedge’ may be (Gottschald and Brechenmacher give different explanations).

E. Zupitza (1904:397) compared kîl (< *kı@l) and Skt kı@^lah ‘wedge, peg,’ but WP I:544 and IEW 355-56 rejected his idea of initial consonantal doublets (k- in Sanskrit and k- in Germanic).

The root kı@@d- probably meant ‘stick,’ and it seems to underlie both OE gecı@@d ‘strife’ and cı@@^dan

‘scold.’ The original meaning of gecı@@^{d would} then emerge as ‘exchange of blows,’ while cı@@^dan could be glossed ‘brandish sticks,’ with ‘scold, reprove’ being a later figurative use of the same.

E haggle from ‘mangle with cuts’ to ‘wrangle in bargaining’ and especially rebuke ‘chide severely, reprimand’ < AF rebuker = OF rebuschier provide a close semantic parallel. The verb bushier (OF buchier, buskier) meant ‘beat, strike,’ properly ‘cut down wood,’ for busche meant ‘log’ (ModF bûche

‘log, cudgel’); see Skeat⁴ and ODEE (rebuke). The development is obvious: from ‘beat back’ to ‘re-prove.’ Rebuff and upbraid have come approxi-mately the same way as rebuke and chide. One can also cite E trounce, assuming that it is related to truncheon, and Go beitan* ‘bite’ versus andbeitan*

‘rebuke.’ In the extensive recent discussion of F chicane and chicaner (the etymons of E chicane / chi-canery), Littré’s idea (he traced chicane to a Persian word for a club or bat used in polo – via Medieval Latin and Medieval Greek) has not been men-tioned. It must have been given up as untenable, though Skeat, OED, and CD mention Littré’s deri-vation as a distant possibility. Yet the reasoning in this case is instructive: from the game of mall, to a dispute in games, dispute in general, and to sharp practice in lawsuits, pettifogging, trickery, and all kinds of wrangling.

If the etymology proposed here is right, the verb chide owes nothing to onomatopoeia or sound symbolism. Nor is it related to any of the verbs in Sanskrit, Classical Greek, Welsh, Finnish, Dutch, and German, mentioned above. Even ModI ki^a does not look like a cognate of chide. It would be tempting to connect cı@dan and E kid ‘tease,’ but no recoverable tie seems to exist between them.

CLOVER (1000)

Clover has cognates in all the West Germanic languages;

Chide Clover

the corresponding Scandinavian words are borrowings from Low German. The Old English forms were cla¤fre and clæ¤fre.

In Old English, several plant names had the suffix -re. The protoform need not have had *i or *j after -r-, for æ¤ in clæ¤fre was probably not the result of umlaut. WGmc *a¤ < *ai and *æ¤

< *a¤ (the latter corresponding to Go e¤1) could apparently al-ternate in the same root. However, the conditions under which that alternation occurred remain unclear. The etymol-ogy connecting clover with cleave ‘stick, adhere’ seems to be right. Clover is sticky because its thick juice is one of the main sources of honey. Several European plant names with the root pap and its equivalents, as well as the meanings of E honey-suck(le) confirm that idea.

The sections are devoted to 1) the arguments behind re-constructing *klaiwarjo¤n and *klab¤r(i)o¤n, 2) the existing etymologies of E clover and G Klee, 3) the origin of æ¤ in OE clæ¤fre and the origin of the suffix -re, and 4) the semantic history of clover (clover as a sticky plant). Section 5 is the conclusion.

1. Clover is a word with broad connections in