De-Extinction: The Mammoth Walks Again

A word has a definable function if speakers regularly select it to convey a certain meaning (or, more generally, to achieve a certain communicative effect). As long as they have a reason to do so, a word  remains useful and there is a good chance that it will stay in circulation. A word which is used frequently will be transmitted to new users more reliably, especially if its function is easy to infer from the way it is used. Low-frequency words are prone both to semantic change and to lexical replacement: new speakers may quite accidentally fail to hear them used, or encounter them only occasionally in a context which doesn’t quite clarify their meaning. Word death is mostly due to accidental transmission breaks happening too often.

If historical linguists had any say in the matter, I’m sure that time-honoured words, priceless as evidence of language history, would enjoy special protection, and every care would be taken that they should be saved for posterity (no matter if we still need them for everyday communication). Alas, linguists have no such authority. It’s common usage plus quirks of fate that ultimately decide whether a word will die or survive.

A word already dead in spoken language may occasionally come back to life. Talking of fate and its quirks – here is one well-known case.

The descendant of the Old English noun wyrd ‘fate, destiny, fortune’ was practically extinct by the sixteenth century, ousted by its Latinate synonyms. It lingered on in Scotland long enough to be used by John Bellenden (in the 1530s) in his Scots translation of a Latin version of the story of King Duncan and Macbeth (published by Hector Boece a decade earlier). The three prophesying fairies which appear in the narrative, thought to be the supernatural “Fates” who control human destiny (comparable to the Greek Μοῖραι, the Roman Parcae or the Scandinavian Nornir), are called weird sisteris (literally = ‘the Fate Sisters’) by Bellenden. He didn’t invent the phrase; it can be found in earlier Scots sources referring to the three classical Fates.

The story told by Boece and translated by Bellenden was in turn adapted by the English chronicler Raphael Holinshed and his collaborators, and thus the weird sisters found their way into The Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland. The second edition of that work, published in 1587, was Shakespeare’s source for the plot of Macbeth. Some confusion must have taken place in the process. Shakespeare turned Holinshed’s “goddesses of destinie, or else some nymphs or feiries” into repulsive old hags with “choppy” fingers, skinny lips, and even beards to boot. Shakespeare and the compositors of the First Folio (1623) were apparently puzzled by the unfamiliar word weird. The original phrase underwent deformation into weyward or weyard sisters; the first word was possibly taken for an adjective similar to wayward, and pronounced as two syllables (although exactly how Shakespeare understood it and whether he actually confused it with wayward are moot questions). Later editors “restored” the spelling used by Holinshed and his Scots source (but not by Shakespeare), bringing back the form of weird, but not its original function. Like an Egyptian mummy from old horror films, weird rose from its tomb and strutted about, half-resurrected but not sure what to do in the modern world.

Nineteenth-century readers and playgoers deduced the meaning of weird from what they saw on the stage. They were shown three “Weird Sisters” portrayed as grotesquely hideous witches, bizarre and unearthly. “Ah,” thought the audience, “so that’s what they mean by ‘weird’.” Before long, weird became a popular adjective to describe anything strange or uncanny. Crucially for its further spread, it managed to colonise the colloquial register of English, in which there is a constant demand for new emotionally coloured words to replace those that have become hackneyed. A function was apparently there, waiting for a suitable word to express it. What remains of Old English wyrd is just the form, like an empty shell, co-opted for completely new grammatical and semantic uses. Those who would like to clone the mammoth should draw a lesson from it.

The life restoration of a 17th-c. word.

De-extinction can happen in various ways. The word twat, gone obsolete for about a century, was excavated by Robert Browning and mistaken for something entirely innocent (the context was again not clear enough and could suggest a nun’s headgear; see here and here at Language Log). Browning’s naive mistake was later exposed by the Wise Clerks of Oxenford, much to the delight of those who heard of it, and the seventeenth-century four-letter word came back to life, regaining even its high obscenity index. It’s probably far more frequent now (especially in British English) than it ever was in its former heyday. Please consider this cautionary example before you de-extinct the thylacine.

My personal favourites among the words that should have been saved (but were not) are old kinship terms. Proto-Indo-European had a large and complicated system of names for different kinds of family relations. Many of them were still used in Old English, but only a handful have survived till now ­–­ those refering to the closest biological relationships (mother, father, sister, brother, daughter, son, all of them with impeccable PIE pedigrees, even if sister was touched by Old Norse influence). A few have been substituted by terms borrowed from French (aunt, uncle, niece, nephew), also traceable back to PIE, but acquired second-hand. Note, by the way, that while Old English ēom, for example, referred specifically to a maternal uncle in the strictest sense (the brother of one’s mother), an uncle could be maternal or paternal already in Middle English. Furthermore, uncle may refer to the husband of one’s aunt (again maternal or paternal) – not even a blood relation. We are dealing here with a new system replacing an older one, not just a series of lexical replacements.

The boringly transparent “in-law” terms have replaced the Old English words for affinity relationships. Not a single one has survived. All that mattered in the late Middle Ages was the degree of affinity as defined by the Code of Canon Law (which prohibited sex and marriage between some people so related), and the “in-law” terminology made that explicit. Gone are such beautiful Old English relics as snoru ‘daughter-in-law’ (from PIE *snusós) and tācor ‘the brother of one’s husband’ (note that only a woman could have one) – one of the four kinds of brotherhood-in-law possible today. The latter word has relatives in Indo-Iranian, Balto-Slavic, Greek, Latin, and Armenian. The PIE stem is usually reconstructed as *dah₂iwér-, but the details of its development in some branches of the family (including PGmc. *taikuraz and its historical reflexes) are not quite clear, making it especially interesting.

Couldn’t we revive those forgotten kinship terms, just for fun? Well, I don’t think the two just mentioned would have much chance of success. Had snoru developed regularly, it would be *snore today, and I doubt if any woman would find such awkward homonymy acceptable. Tācor, in turn, would have become Modern English *toker. Unfortunately, such a form (orthographic and phonetic) is no longer up for grabs. We find it in the lyrics of “The Joker” (by the Steve Miller Band):

I’m a joker
I’m a smoker
I’m a midnight toker...

and it doesn’t mean an Anglo-Saxon brother-in-law.