I've been rummaging around in the giant
bag of word origins and histories for some time now, and what I find
never ceases to amaze me. One of the most fascinating aspects of
doing this is the discovery of and investigation into derivations
from the same root which have come down through time into modern
English via disparate roots, or even routes.
One such set of derivations is from the
Indo-European root for “run”. One came to us from Latin, either
directly or through the mediation of French, and even Croatian and
Hungarian. The second came initially from Gaulish, the language of
ancient France, was borrowed into Latin and ended up creating a set
of derivations that entered English via Latin, French and Spanish.
The third and last is good old English, coming down through the ages,
unmediated just like many other words from Old English, but packing a
surprise in its wake.
The Latin for “run” was currere. From this we get an abundance of derivations.
- Something which is running is literally current,
though current affairs are not really carried out at a running pace.
An electric current is electricity running along a wire, and running
rivers have currents. Equally, something which has relevance to the
present has currency, presumably including dollars, pounds
and euros, though the only running they seem to do is out of my
wallet.
- From Latin cursus, a running, came course via
French, firstly as a place where running takes place and later as
something which runs for a time, especially in education, though not
much running happens during five-course banquets. Strangely, in
English a concourse is a place where people literally run
together, but in other languages it means a competition. Naturally,
if you run between people, you engage in intercourse, and if
you do it at the same time then it's concurrent. If you need
to run back to something, you have recourse to it. I suppose
that if several people have recourse to concurrent intercourse on a
concourse, it would be rather interesting.
- If your writing runs along nicely, then it's cursive,
and if you run past something with your eyes, you just give it a
cursory look. Oh, and I'm typing all this stuff up on my
trusty computer with the aid of the cursor, which is now
running across the screen.
- If you run together with someone, as we saw above, you
concur. If you run into something, you might find that you
incur it, like a fine or someone's anger. If you run in the
way of something, something bad might occur, and if something
runs again and again, it recurs.
- Why would you run up to someone? In Roman times, it would
have been to help them – hence sucurrere, help. This
produced French secours, Spanish and Portuguese socorro
and Italian soccorso, and the rather posh English succour.
I suppose speed was of the essence when bringing help, and
sauntering wouldn't quite get the job done. But what if you ran to
succour someone who then tricked you and robbed you? Would you be a
succour sucker?
- Now, one very wet runner would have been a corsair,
which came into English via French. It can be applied to the swift
ships pirates used, or equally to the pirates themselves, though I
don't suppose pirates did much running at sea.
- So, are there any derivations from currere which still
literally run around? Well, one is courier, literally runner,
which we get from Italian via French, though a courier might just as
easily be on two or four wheels, as on two legs. Another type of
person who used to do a lot of running around was a huzzar,
or hussar, and the word did a lot of running around itself.
It started out the same as a corsair, but it galloped over to
central Europe and found its way into Croatian, from where it
cantered into Hungarian, designating a particular kind of light
cavalry, and then trotted its way back to the languages of western
Europe. Huzzah!
- The most obvious thing here
is that the things we use which have names derived from carrus all
have wheels: car,
carriage and chariot.
Car and carriage came via Anglo-French, thereby keeping the
unchanged c-, and generally referring to the same thing, while
chariot came from standard French with the initial change from c- to
ch-. In any case, they're all variations on wheeled vehicles.
Nowadays, we'd say a car runs smoothly. Presumably an ancient
charioteer would have said the same thing about his wheels.
- Latin produced a verb
carricare from
carrus, and this led to the modern verb carry.
Strictly speaking then, if you carry something, you should either
have it in a car, a chariot or a carriage, or you should be running
with it in your hands. What you actually carried in your carriage
would be cargo, which
came to us from Spanish, from the verb cargar,
load (for transport). What French did with carricare was to create
charger, also meaning
to load. After coming into English, charge has extended into a lot
of other areas, getting its running feel back with the cavalry.
So we come to the last word. This one
is the true English one. We can see the connection with running, with
speed; yet perhaps the most fascinating thing is that in English the
act of running was inextricably bound up with an animal, the animal
most recognisably a runner, the animal which has lent its speed to
humanity in its growth and development over hundreds of years. Of
course, I can only be talking about one animal, the runner par
excellence – the horse.
And this is where one ancient root
echoes down the centuries, testimony to the fascinating and enduring
nature of language, but also to the vagaries of history, which allow
three strains which parted company so long ago to intertwine once
again for real. A courier might carry his letters on a horse. A car
with 1000 horsepower might run round a racecourse. Horses go with
carriages, and chariots, of course. Horses for courses indeed – or
should that be courses for horses? This could run and run...
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