Whispering
In last week’s post we
took a look at words meaning to raise
one’s voice, so it seems only fair to look this week into the quieter end
of the spectrum.
The early 1300s brought us
the word mutter, meaning to mumble.
It came from an imitative Proto-Indo-European word mut-, to grumble or mutter.
Murmur, an expression
of discontent made by grumbling,
came to English in the 1400s from the Old French word murmure, which came from
the Latin word murmurare. It wasn’t until the 1600s that murmur meant softly spoken words (noun) or to speak softly (verb).
In the early 1300s the
word mumble
(spelled momelen) meant to eat in
a slow, ineffective manner. By the end of the 1300s it picked up the
meaning to speak indistinctly. Though
it seems logical it might have come from the word mum, as in mum’s the word, mumble predates mum by two centuries,
& nobody really knows mumble’s parentage.
The verb hush
showed up in English in the 1540s, with the noun & interjection forms appearing
in the 1600s.
The oft-ignored word susurration
appeared in English in the 1400s from Latin, meaning a whispering or murmur.
The word whisper
is an Old English word, once spelled hwisprian, meaning to murmur or speak softly. Though many
modern speakers can’t even hear the difference, those of us “of a certain age”
were taught to pronounce words beginning with wh- differently than
those beginning with w-, & the Old English spelling hwisprian
throws a little light on why the burst of air comes before the w- in words like the word whisper.
Please share any thoughts
on all this in the comments section.
Susurration is a new one for me. Must find an occasion to susurrate in someone's ear. Amazing how many of these words are onomatopoetic! .
ReplyDeleteAnne, I'm honored to have introduced a new word. Mi susurration es su susurration.
ReplyDelete