To Write

For my first post I bring you… a brief history of the verb to write. This is, of course, in lieu of actually doing any writing. I’m procrastinating madly to avoid NaNo word counts (and unblocking the drains with a substance that I’m pretty sure will turn the flesh of my hands into soap if I splash it on myself, a process which I’m sure is pretty damn painful if you’re the soapee).

So… on to the linguistic pretty:

According to this website, the modern word write comes from the Old English strong verb writan (to score, outline, or draw a figure of, as well as to write), which has cognates in a bunch of other Germanic languages, including Old Frisian, Old Saxon, and Old Norse. All these words are, unsurprisingly, not very different from the English and OE words, and mainly differ in whether they have the w in front (although the OHG is quite different, because German’s strange that way. )

This in turn comes from the Proto-Germanic verb *writanan, and there it stops. Origins: A Short Etymological Dictionary tries to go a bit further and suggest a PIE root *wreid-, to tear or scratch. Perhaps not the most interesting etymology, but it amuses me anyway.

In contrast, the Latin verb scribo is a bit well-travelled, as words go. It is thought (all of this is educated guesswork, a bit like planetary science, composed thoughts like ‘well, it would make sense…’) scribo, which gives us the words scribe and script, comes from the Indo-European root *skribh, which meant to cut, separate or sift according to the American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots. Like write, scribo originally meant to scratch or incise before it came to mean write. The online etymological dictionary also tells me that the Greek word skariphasthai is to scratch or sketch, along with various other related words. On the other hand, Germanic borrowed scribo, so that it became *skriban. The Old English cognate term scrifan meant to allot or assign, which gives us the word shrive. Mmmm… Shrove Tuesday. Pancakes!!! From inscriptions to pancakes in a few easy steps.

I’ll stop now before I scare people away. As I get used to this, I hope to make my occasional linguistic diversions less dry and crusty. Etymology makes me so ridiculously happy, that I tend not to notice the people sitting there with their heads in their hands. I haven’t marked length in the linguistic roots given here because, quite frankly, I’m feeling lazy today, but I’ll try and get some length marks in the next time.

This was all inspired by discovering Scrivener which I want almost painfully much, and which might make the mess of this story come a little clearer.

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