- The History of Meaning Change
If the history of meaning change had to be summed up as one process, it would be that of specialization. The Anglo Saxons 1500 years ago made do with perhaps 30,000 words in their complete vocabulary, while Modern English has anywhere from 500,000 to a million words, depending on whether or not scientific vocabularies are included.
The origins of language will never be known, but the first language probably had a vocabulary of a few hundred words, providing a rich enough vocabulary for a primitive people who had few materials and fewer abstract concepts. Many of the words of the first languages had very broad senses of meaning.
For instance, the word inspire is from the Latin inspirare, which literally means "to breathe into". Its archaic meaning is "to breathe life into", with newer meanings like "to be the cause of", "to elicit", "to move to action", "to exalt" and "to guide by divine influence". Now if a minister were to speak of Adam as dust inspired, he might mean by that not just that the dust is having life breathed into it (the original etymological meaning), but also that the dust is being exalted and given form, that it is being moved to action, and that it is being divinely guided (these are the metaphorical or extended meanings). In other words, this minister might not mean just one of the definitions of inspired but all of them simultaneously.
The extended meanings are branches that have split off from the trunk, and our hypothetical minister has simply traced them back to the root.
If you seek to create a language from an earlier time, you should probably develop a small vocabulary, with it words having much more overlapping of meaning than the vocabularies of modern languages. Imagine a word spiratholmos -- an ancient ancestor to Latin inspirare -- meaning "wind, breath, voice, spirit." A speaker who used the word spiratholmos would regard the wind in the trees as the breath of the earth, the voice of God, the spirit animating each of us.
Meaning change can be viewed dispassionately as a natural process, but it can also be invested with a spiritual significance, as Tolkien and Suffield have done. A model language is an art form and its crafting can even convey this theme of spiritual isolation. As Ronald Suffield wrote, "no word is still the word, but, a loafward has become lord."
The Types of Meaning Change
Generalization (a word's meaning widens to include new concepts)
Also known as extension, generalization is the use of a word in a broader realm of meaning than it originally possessed, often referring to all items in a class, rather than one specific item. For instance, place derives from Latin platea, "broad street", but its meaning grew broader than the street, to include "a particular city", "a business office", "an area dedicated to a specific purpose" before broadening even wider to mean "area". In the process, the word place displaced (!) the Old English word stow and became used instead of the Old English word stede (which survives in stead, steadfast, steady and -- of course -- instead).
Generalization is a natural process, especially in situations of "language on a shoestring", where the speaker has a limited vocabulary at her disposal, either because she is young and just acquiring language or because she is not fluent in a second language. A first-year Spanish student on her first vacation in Spain might find herself using the word coche, "car", for cars, trucks, jeeps, buses, and so on. When my son Alexander was two, he used the word oinju (from orange juice) to refer to any type of juice, including grape juice and apple juice; wawa (from water) referred to water and hoses, among other things.
The opposite of generalization, specialization is the narrowing of a word to refer to what previously would have been but one example of what it referred to. For instance, the word meat originally referred to "any type of food", but came to mean "the flesh of animals as opposed to the flesh of fish". The original sense of meat survives in terms like mincemeat, "chopped apples and spices used as a pie filling"; sweetmeat, "candy"; and nutmeat, "the edible portion of a nut". When developing your model language, it is meet to leave compounds untouched, even if one of their morphemes has undergone specialization (or any other meaning change).
For an example from another language, the Japanese word koto originally referred to "any type of stringed instrument" but came to be used to refer only a specific instrument with 13 strings, which was played horizontally and was popular in the Edo Period.
Metonymy is a figure of speech where one word is substituted for a related word; the relationship might be that of cause and effect, container and contained, part and whole. For instance, the Greek word dóma originally meant "roof". In the same way English speakers will metonymically use roof to mean "house" (as in "Now we have a roof over our heads"), the Greeks frequently used dóma to refer to "house", so that that is now the standard meaning of the word. A Russian word will provide a similar example: vinograd, "vineyard", was so frequently used to refer to "grapes", as in "Let's have a taste of the vineyard" that it has come to mean "grapes".
Metaphorical extension is the extension of meaning in a new direction through popular adoption of an originally metaphorical meaning. The crane at a construction site was given its name by comparison to the long-necked bird of the same name. When the meaning of the word daughter was first extended from that of "one's female child" to "a female descendant" (as in daughter of Eve), the listener might not have even noticed that the meaning had been extended.
Metaphorical extension is almost a natural process undergone by every word. We don't even think of it as meaning change. In its less obvious instances, we don't even see it as extending the meaning of a word. For example, the word illuminate originally meant "to light up", but has broadened to mean "to clarify", "to edify". These meanings seem so natural as to be integral parts of the words, where senses such as "to celebrate" and "to adorn a page with designs" seem like more obvious additions.
A few specific metaphors are common to many different languages, and words can be shown to have undergone similar, if independent, developments. Thus the Welsh word haul and the Gaelic word súil, both meaning "sun", have both come to mean "eye". Nor is this metaphor a stranger to English, where the daisy was in Old English originally a compound meaning "day's eye", from its yellow similarity to the sun.
Radiation is metaphorical extension on a grander scale, with new meanings radiating from a central semantic core to embrace many related ideas. The word head originally referred to that part of the human body above the rest. Since the top of a nail, pin or screw is, like the human head, the top of a slim outline, that sense has become included in the meaning of head. Since the bulb of a cabbage or lettuce is round like the human head, that sense has become included in the meaning of head. Know where I'm headed with this? The meaning of the word head has radiated out to include the head of a coin (the side picturing the human head), the head of the list (the top item in the list), the head of a table, the head of the family, a head of cattle, $50 a head. But I'll stop while I'm ahead.
Other words that have similarly radiated meanings outward from a central core include the words heart, root and sun.
The word undertaker originally meant "one who undertakes a task, especially one who is an entrepreneur". This illustrates contextual specialization, where the meaning of a word is reshaped under pressure from another word that had frequently co-occured with it: thus undertaker acquired its meaning from constant use of the phrase funeral undertaker; eventually, under the pressure towards euphemism, the word funeral was dropped.
Another example of contextual specialization is doctor, which originally meant "a teacher" and then later "an expert", where it came to be used in the phrase medical doctor; now of course this is redundant and medical is omitted, with the primary sense of doctor having become more specialized.
Shifts occur when the sense of a word expands and contracts, with the final focus of the meaning different from the original. For some reason, words describing clothing tend to shift meanings more frequently than other words, perhaps because fashion trends come and go, leaving words to seem as old fashioned as the clothing they describe. Who today wants to wear bloomers, knickers or pantaloons?
The word pants has an interesting history. It's ultimate etymon is Old Italian Pantalone. In the 1600s, Italy developed commedia dell'arte, a style of comedy based on improvisation using stock characters. Pantalone was a stock character who was portrayed as a foolish old man wearing slippers and tight trousers. Through regular metyonmy, speakers of Old French borrowed his name to describe his Italian trousers. Their word was then borrowed into English as pantaloon, which in time was shortened to pants and came to mean trousers in general. British speakers of English have modified the meaning again to the sense of "underpants".
Cast like discarded laundry along the divide separating British and American English are quite a few words for clothing, as the following table shows.
-
Word
Meaning
jumper
Etymon:
English dialect jump
Original:
"loose jacket"
American:
"pinafore"
British:
"a light pullover"
pants
Etymon:
pantaloon, from Old French pantalon
Original:
"men's wide breeches extending from waist to ankle"
American:
"trousers"
British:
"underpants"
suspenders
Etymon:
suspend
Original:
(unchanged) "straps to support trousers"
American:
(unchanged)
British:
"garter"
Suffield's poem gave many good examples of amelioration, including priest from "old man". A complementary term, pastor, likewise underwent amelioration, originally meaning "shepherd" (a sense surviving in the word pastoral), but coming to mean its current sense of "minister" by the extensive Christian references to "the Lord is my shepherd" as a call to ministry.
The following table shows other examples, including pluck in the sense of He has a lot of pluck.
| Word | Old Meaning |
| enthusiasm | "abuse" |
| pastor | "shepherd" |
| queen | "woman" |
King James II called the just completed St. Paul's Cathedral amusing, awful and artificial. Call the just completed rock and roll museum in Cleveland amusing, awful and artificial, and you may be accurate but you will mean something quite different from King James. When he lived, those words meant that the cathedral was "pleasing, awe-inspiring and artful" respectively. The meaning of each word has grown more negative with time. People seem much more likely to drag words down than to lift them up, to build museums instead of cathedrals, as the following examples may demonstrate.
-
Word
Old Meaning
crafty
"strong"
harlot
"a boy"
obsequious
"flexible"
vulgar
"popular"
Occasionally a word will shift so far from its original meaning that its meaning will nearly reverse. Fascinatingly enough, the word manufacture originally meant "to make by hand".
-
Word
Old Meaning
counterfeit
"an original"
manufacture
"to make by hand"
A contronym is like a word that has undergone semantic reversal, only the tension has not eased: the word still preserves its original meaning, along with a contradictory -- if not exactly counterposed -- meaning.
Interestingly, biannual means only "twice each year", with no recorded sense of "every other year" in Webster's II New Riverside University Dictionary.
The word cleave (meaning "to split or separate" or "to adhere or cling") is actually two different words, both from the Old English (cle-ofan and cleofian respectively) but by changes in pronunciation, these words have evolved the same current form.
The nadir of semantics is meaninglessness. The final semantic change. The death of meaning. The defeat of sigor.
The word sigor is Old English for "victory". It is now meaningless to almost all English speakers, except for those familiar with Old English or with German (where its cognate survives in Seig).
Imagine for a moment that sigor had survived. It might have been changed to siyor, and its meaning could have generalized to "success". It would then stand in contrast to the German Seig.
Sister languages, or dialects of a language, often have the same basic word with different meanings. These word pairs then become known as "false friends" to speakers trying to learn the other language. For instance, German Lust means "pleasure", which is in fact the original meaning of the English word, which comes from the same common ancestor as Lust. In English, lust underwent specialization and pejoration, as speakers associated it with only one type of pleasure. The British and American English clothing terms also show how related languages can send words off in different directions over time.
As you develop your model languages, you should have words in related languages undergo different semantic changes. Situations where a word's meaning changes in two related languages are relatively rare, the example of the Irish and Gaelic words for "sun" evolving into "eye" notwithstanding.
When languages borrow words, they frequently change the meanings of those borrowings, typically making generic words more specific, in the same way that one language's place names often grew out of another language's generic words for concepts such as "hill", "river" and "town". Take the history of the Low German word spittal, derived from a generic Romance word for "hospital" but then applied to "a hospital for lepers".
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