How could the words "denouement" and "knot" possibly be linked?
As I have mentioned several times on this blog recently, almost all languages of Europe and across the Iranian Plateau into the northern Indian Subcontinent are derived from a single language, which began splitting up into different languages 5000-4500 years ago. That language, Proto-Indo-European, can be reconstructed from its daughter languages, particularly because we know that some sound changes are common - i.e. that they are typical and happen more than once.
Take the Early Latin word stlocus (accusative stlocum - that is the relative form as it is almost always the one taken on by daughter languages), meaning 'place'. That is some mouthful and we know that, often, when you have consonant clusters at the start of a word they come to be simplified - as in the English pronunciation of 'psychology' discussed yesterday. By the time of Caesar and Cicero this had been simplified to locus/locum, and in fact already some speakers at that time would already also have been dropping the final -m (which was nasalised in any case). This left locu in late Latin, which became luogo in Italian, lloc in Catalan and (via a slightly circuitous route) lugar in Spanish - it also gives the English borrowings 'local', 'location' and so on.
French is, of course, an exception because its pronunciation became so reduced over time, meaning that locu developed in the Paris area and ultimately in Standard French into lieu, with even the intermedial consonant -c- dropped. We see this regularly - Latin petra/petram became Italian pietra, Catalan pedra, Spanish piedra (it also gives English 'petrify') but French pierre.
Way back in Proto-Indo-European there was a word gnoud (or something similar) which was a verb meaning 'tie' or 'bind', which was then taken over as a noun to mean something that was tied or, put more simply, 'knot'. We can see this in the English spelling, if not in the pronunciation, because k- and -t are actually simply devoiced versions of g- and -d; simplify the vowel a bit and it is basically still the same word as 5000 years ago, except as so often we have in speech simplified the consonantal cluster at the start. In German the k- in Knoten is indeed still pronounced.
That same process as occurred in Spoken English occurred long ago - perhaps 3000 years ago - in the Proto-Italic language which broke off from Proto-Indo-European and became Latin. The Latin word for 'knot' had already dropped the initial consonant, giving nodus/nodum. Though a similar process to locu above (amended slightly to take account of surrounding sounds), this became nodo in modern Italian, nudo in Spanish but noeud in French (now with a silent final -d).
Take that word noued, ignore that unsounded final -d, add the prefix des- (now also simplified in French to dé-) and add the common abstract noun ending -ment and you get dénouement - an 'unknotting', or an 'unwinding' (i.e. something which unwinds to its conclusion).
That is how 'denouement' and 'knot' are ultimately the same word.
The 'April Fool' here is that everything about this is true...!
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