Intestinal Gas And The First Sound Shift

Somewhere around 1500 BC, people were running around Europe and parts of Asia speaking a language known to linguists as Indo-European. A group of folks, discovered by the Grimm Brothers, yes, those of fairy tale fame, shifted various sounds in their language about that time and began speaking something different from their neighbors. These people, clad in furs and steel helmets with horns and wings, were called "The Germanen," and this change in speaking became known as "the first sound shift." Why they made these shifts, no one knows. Perhaps the climate gave them perpetual head colds, perhaps a powerful warlord had a speech impediment. To keep one's position near the salt and one's head on one's shoulders, the socially mobile imitated his speech.
At any rate, the Grimm Brothers, when not soliciting gory stories from old ladies in the small villages around Marburg University, where they were studying, noticed some trends in different languages, one of which was the "p" sound. Apparently the Germanic people found the "P" sound to be not to their liking and changed it to the sound of "F". Thus the word "Pater" in Latin became "Fater" in the Germanic languages. And so the Germanic people went off to settle around Northern and Western Europe, there their languages morphed out into Norwegian, Danish, Dutch, German and, yes indeed, English.
Which brings us to intestinal gas . Take the simple, every day word "fart." While being vulgar and obscene to some, the very vernacular of flatulence is a striking example of the seismic linguistic change which led to our modern English. That simple word, in the Germanic tongues begins with "F," fis (I like that one, sounds like you get it from drinking too many carbonated beverages)is what the Swedes detect, while good Norwegian lytefisk causes a fjert. Sauerkraut gives the Germans Furzen, while we and the Dutch simply fart. Those people who kept the "P" like the Slavic and Romance languages view it differently. The Spanish do a pedo while their Italian cousins let fly a peto The French will waft a dainty pet, while the Czechs blast a prd and anything else that comes with it.
The point is, the next time you detect gas, and are disgusted by the vulgarity of it all, remember, what you are witnessing is the first sound shift in action.

The Origin of New Words

Sometimes I think about how languages change dramatically over the years. I guess that comes from not having much of a life. Consider, my high school German students could more easily decipher Middle German, spoken around 1200, than they could English spoken around 1000. And languages change fairly rapidly. The average person today could not read Old English, but would not find the English of 100 or so years later to be that difficult. In the span of history, that isn’t a very long time, two or three generations. If Old English had been spoken, say in 1909, we would have known people in our younger days who still spoke it. Pretty amazing, I would say, particularly when it just didn’t happen in one tiny village but all over the place. Most European languages that I am familiar with have made dramatic sound shifts at one time or another. German made one around 900AD. Look at the difference between the Spanish and Italian spoken today and the Latin that was its common tongue. The latter did not even have the definite article (“the”) The Germanic languages spoken by the Gothic tribes that invaded the areas during the collapse of the Roman Empire did, however. Perhaps that’s where it came from.
And then languages change on a personal family level. For example, since my oldest daughter Heather was born, the word “banana” has been replaced in our family language by “balana.” Breakfast has become “greface.” Rhododendrons have been replaced with “Road from Denvers.” My second daughter, Laura, interested in sports, introduced us to “lympics” and “nastics” for Olympics and gymnastics. To “train” for her coming Olympic, gymnastic career, she wore “norts” and “lockies,” or shorts and long socks. Even the beloved Red Sox have come into our speech as “The Lockies.” Since we are not important people, these will never make it into the common tongue, although I did hear my brother-in-law ask my sister for a “balana” the other day. If we were royalty maybe in 100 years, people would eat their greface under a Road from Denver.