Corny/Grainy

In the previous post I ventured to put forth the greatest pun I ever invented, which climaxed with the line from Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale”: “Ruth amid the alien corn,” which you all knew from your expensive educations—or looked up in Google.

Now, all you North Americans out there—unlike the Brits—might have been wondering if that line was another of Keats’ historical whoppers—you know, like writing that Cortez discovered the Pacific Ocean.* How could a Biblical personage be anywhere near corn, when corn was native to a continent which was not to be discovered for more than a millennium in the future?

In this case Keats did not create another historical whopper. “Corn” is a native English word for “grain,” which happens to be a borrowed word, borrowed from Middle French. For residents of the New World, “corn” is applied to the native American plant maize, while “grain” has been delegated to denoting other plants, such as wheat and rye. Across the Atlantic, “corn” still equals “grain.”

From a language point of view the words “corn” and “grain” are classified as "doublets"—that is, words co-existing in a language or dialect from the same original source, but have come into that language or dialect via different routes. 

English is a part of the Germanic family of languages, which spun off from Western Indo-European (probably 3,000 to 4,500 years ago) and “corn” has been along for the ride. “Grain,” which we noted above, was borrowed from French (and was originally a Latin word**). 

Jacob Grimm (one of the fairy tale Grimm brothers) codified the consonant changes from Western Indo-European to Germanic, one of which was the change from a hard G sound to K sound. Over time some Latinate G words borrowed by English became a soft G (e.g, “genuflect,” which you do with your native English word “knee,” the initial consonant sound disappearing about half a millennium ago).

Now, another thing that’s interesting about “corn“/“grain” is the transposition of the vowel sound and the “r” sound. Transposition of sounds in a word (not only with the “r” sound) is known as “metathesis.” It has happened to other familiar English words, such as “grass,” “ask,” and “burn.”***

*

Note that not all “corn” words in English are native. Take “cornucopia.” That’s a borrowed word—from Latin—the “cornu” part is Latin for “horn,” a native English word. Think of the musical instrument the cornet—a horn. Here we have another of the sound changes of Grimm’s Law: Western Indo-European K (which Latin didn’t change) into Germanic H (initially). (There’s “casa”/“house” as another example.) We don’t have an English cognate for “copia,” but we have borrowed the root for “copious.” “Cornucopia,” is rendered in English as “horn of plenty”—a phrase that is half native and half borrowed.The Latin root of “plenty” we also find in “plenary” and other words. For a pure Latin example think of “Ave Maria plena gratia”—“full of grace.” “Plena”/full” is another example of Grimm’s Law****—Western IE P becomes Germanic F. Other examples; “pisces”/“fish,” “pedestrian”/“foot.”

Let’s end with a simple test: What can we say about “Gratia”/“Grace”?

You’re right. A native English word cognate with “gratia” would have to start with a K sound. So, “grace’ is a borrowed word.

Thanks for being gracious enough to read this.

*** 

* “On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer”—a superfluous footnote for some of you, I hope.

** The phrase “take it with a grain of salt” is a loan-translation of Latin’s “cum grano salis.”

*** Cf. German “brennen.” English “burn” and German “brennen” are "cognates"—words in different languages or dialects that stem from the same earlier word. Are you upset when someone says, "I'll aks him"? That's metathesis at work, and has been since Old English, whose texts alternated between ks and sk.

**** And another example of metathesis.

Note: The second greatest pun I ever invented came during a college class in Romantic Poetry. A fellow student who thought he was the world’s greatest Freudian was babbling on about “Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey.” The professor, exasperated, finally exclaimed, “Look at the words, Mr. Schleimer. Look at the words!” 

Whereupon I turned to my neighbor and said, “But what are the words worth?”