Word confusions

Some words have ended up with the same form in English today despite their different origins. Take port, for example.  This could be:

port, the harbour, from the Latin portus.

Or port, the wine, from the Portuguese city Oporto.

Or port, the suitcase, a shortening of portmanteau.

There are other ports but you get the idea.

Context sorts these out so that they present no difficulty.

There are other words that end up with forms dangerously close to each other so that we become confused about which is which.

Etymology is the study of origins of words. The Greek word etymon meant ‘true’. As applied to words it meant the word in its literal sense, thought of as being the original and primary and most important meaning. There were those who thought we should not stray from the etymons. The suffix -logy means ‘the study of’.

Entomology is the study or insects.  Again we have the -logy suffix for ‘the study of’. The entomo- comes from the Greek entomos meaning ‘cut up’ from the observation that insects had segmented bodies.

Bought and brought are another pair that would have been easier for us to deal with if they had each followed a different path. Bought is the past tense and past participle of buy from Old English.  We could have retained boucht or bowt for the verb and gebought for the past participle but we simplified them both to bought.

Brought is the past tense and past participle of bring, again a word from Old English.  We could have kept the dialect brung for both of them and it would have been easier to differentiate them from bought.  And it would be in line with native intuitions. If that is too much, we could have had, from the many possible forms, brout and browt. But we have ended up with two forms that have only an r between them. You have to feel sorry for us.

After that we have words that should follow a pattern in English but don’t for various reasons. This means that we have to remember that they are exceptions to the rule and we don’t always do that.

For example, genealogy is often pronounced and spelled geneology.

Genealogy, the tracing of one’s ancestry, comes (via Latin) from the Greek genealogia.  The final bit, logia, relates it to all those words that are the study of something, in this case, one’s descent or genea.

Because we have so many ologies — geology, anthropology, rheumatology to name a few that come to mind —  genealogy lines up with these and we produce geneology.  Google Ngram is encouraging. It shows a strong line for genealogy with a steep increase in frequency in the 2000s, reflecting the general interest in writing family histories, and a steady decline in the occurrences of geneology  from the 1980s to now.  Wiktionary on the other hand does list it as an erroneous form of genealogy, so it still considers it worth a mention.

Another example of erroneous pattern-forming is pronounciation.  The verb is to pronounce.  Therefore the noun derived from it should be pronounciation.  Unfortunately, etymologically speaking, we have it the wrong way round. The real question is how did we get the form pronounce when the Latin verb is  pronuntiare to proclaim and the Middle French was pronuncier.  It seems that Anglo-Norman parted company with Middle French and adopted pronouncer, pronouncier for the verb, so we ended up with one form for the verb and a different form for the noun.   But we assume that pronounciation is a derived form from pronounce because this is such a strong pattern in English.

Often, in cases like this, the only thing to do is to make up a little mnemonic that can help jog the memory.