You’d expect that somebody named Waters used to live beside some waters, just as somebody named Rivers used to live beside a river. It ain’t so. Just pronounce the name Walters as if you were from Phiwadewphia: Waowters. The dark English “l” was swawwowed up in the fowwowing consonant: cf. “walk,” “calm.” So the name Waters is a variant of Walters, as Wat was the old diminutive for Walter. That gives us Wat’s Son = Watson, Watts, and Little Wat’s Son = Watkins, Watkinson, and Little Walter = Watt. The unit of electrical power was named after the scientist James Watt. So, if your surname is Waters, that’s related to the word “wattage,” but it is not related to “water.” The name originally denoted the ruler of an army: cf. English “wield,” German “Gewalt,” German “Heer,” army. The underlying idea is the same as in the Greek name Polemarchus: war-ruler, army-ruler. Romance language speakers couldn’t pronounce that initial w: they “heard” it with a g coming before it (round your lips, pronounce a hard w, and you’ll understand why). So we have Italian Gualtieri, French Gautier. English, that most unusual language, has “doublets” beginning with g or w, depending on the road the word took to get here: guard, ward; guerrilla, warrior.
Thursday, December 20, 2012, 10:00 AM
December 20th, 2012 | 11:01 am
Another example of double borrowing in English would be “gage” and “wager.” (Late Latin Vadium) “Gage,” meaning pledge, tends to be legal or archaic, but it is found in compounds like “mortgage” and “engage”
St Vedast (who instructed Clovis in the Faith)is St Waast in Flemish and St Foster in English (he has a church at the back of St Paul’s in London). In France, he is St Gaston.
I have seen “Wydo” for Guy, in an old Latin feu-charter.
December 20th, 2012 | 5:31 pm
Same thing with William: Guglielmo, Guillermo, Guillaume; also with “wizard” / Guiscardo … Funny language, English is.
December 20th, 2012 | 6:57 pm
I’d never noticed the W/Gu change before. Slavic languages don’t have that problem, but they do “hear” our H sound as a G, whereas you’d think they’d hear it as their kh sound. In Russian, for example, “O’Henry” becomes “О’Генри” rather than what I would have expected, “О’Хенри”.
December 20th, 2012 | 7:04 pm
Side note: it’s interesting that the word for water in Hittite is watar, making the word at least about 4,000 years old, even if its trajectory from Hittite to English may not have been linear or even connected at all.
I like old words. One of my favorites is almost universal: cha (tea).
December 20th, 2012 | 10:39 pm
“You’d expect that somebody named Waters used to live beside some waters, just as somebody named Rivers used to live beside a river. It ain’t so.”
The origin of family names is fascinating. When studying medieval history, I learned that woolen cloth was cleaned by pounding it with the feet, a process called fulling. The people who did this were “walkers” or “fullers”. So all the Walkers and Fullers might have been related way back when.
December 20th, 2012 | 11:17 pm
Heather: Hittite is an Indo-European language, I do believe; those words are related. Our word “water” is related to Greek “hydor”; also to Latin “unda,” where the n is a parasite; it should be “uda”. Throw in Welsh “dwr”.
Jack: Welsh speakers did the same thing when they “heard” w-words from Germanic or from Latin: so “gwerdd,” green, = Latin viridus; probably a loan word, though I’m not certain of that. Other Welsh gw-words are original to the language, and correspond to Germanic w and Latin v (w): Welsh gwr, man (husband) = English wer (cf. werewolf) = Latin vir. But the Irish didn’t palatalize the w sound: Latin vir = Old Irish fir.
If we keep the g / w interchange in mind, we can understand why the medieval poet sometimes calls Gawain “Wawan”. There are other g / w doublets in English that come solely from our own medieval dialects: tug, tow; slug, slow; bag, bow; raw, rough …
December 20th, 2012 | 11:22 pm
Peg: Yes, the verb was weolcan, having to do with tossing a thing round and round. It’s the origin of our word “walk,” which is an exceedingly odd word; but a Walker is a Fuller, you’re right about that.
Medieval occupation-names are fascinating and revealing. The -ster suffix was feminine, so that a Webster is a woman weaver, a Baxter is a woman baker, and a Spinster is — a woman spinner. Chaucer also mentions “fruitesters,” and “tappesters,” women fruit sellers and barmaids.
My favorite occupation name: Fletcher, the man who makes arrows fledge.
December 21st, 2012 | 12:22 am
How about the surname “Waterman”? Here by the Chesapeake Bay, we have lots of watermen, the word for those who ply the depths for crabs and oysters. And I just saw a TV documentary about a California anthropologist of the last century, Thomas Waterman.
December 21st, 2012 | 4:36 am
I’m from Philadelphia and I think you have it backwards. I’ve been trying to say “Walters” and have it come out “Waters.” It doesn’t. But the way I say “water” if I’m speaking Philadelphian sounds something like “Walter.” Kind of like wawter. I used to say “Get the bawss’s dawter some cawfee” to let people know I was from Philly.
December 21st, 2012 | 4:57 am
Peg
Apart from the obvious trade-based surnames (Mason, Miller, Smith, Taylor) one has Cooper (a barrel-maker) Fletcher (an arrow-maker, from French Flèche =arrow) Redman (Reed man, a thatcher) and many more.
My own family name of Seymour comes from the original home of the family, Saint-Maur-des-Fossés in the île de France. A member of the family settled in Scotland in the 12th century. The arms borne by the various branches of the family all include one or more of what Scottish heralds call a “clove gillyflower,” blue on gold. It is, of course, the fleur-de-lys of the île de France, with the colours reversed. By a curious coincidence, my great-uncle was billeted there, during the Battle of the Marne.
December 21st, 2012 | 1:47 pm
Heather: “Hittite is an Indo-European language, I do believe; those words are related. ”
It would be very cool if indeed they were; I mean, it’s almost exactly the same word, and so very old.
It’s just something I found in an etymology explanation online. There wasn’t much information about the trajectory of the evolution of the word, only how the word “water” was said in various languages of the past. Not that many words remain intact like this for so long, that’s also why I wonder just how much of a linear link there could be between the two words.
December 21st, 2012 | 6:26 pm
“How about the surname “Waterman”? Here by the Chesapeake Bay, we have lots of watermen, the word for those who ply the depths for crabs and oysters. And I just saw a TV documentary about a California anthropologist of the last century, Thomas Waterman.”
I think this was discussed in the 1986 book and TV documentary “The Story of English”. The term came from ca. 16th century England, and referred to boatmen who used their vessels for many tasks (i.e., not only to fish but also to ferry people from one side of a river to the other, etc.). They were more than fishermen or ferrymen, thus the more generalized term “watermen” to describe them.
The term fell out of use in England, but stayed in the boondocks. I gather that is not unusual—the
Motherland moves on, but the folks out in the boondocks keep the old ways. In fact, the peculiar dialect of Smith andTangier Islands probably is a vestige of Shakespearean speech. The accent of the islanders is said to resemble that of some English counties.
December 22nd, 2012 | 9:39 am
One of the livery companies in the City of London is, “The Worshipful Company of Waterman and Lightermen.”
The watermen functioned as cabs for people going to and from ships moored in the Thames. The lightermen ferried cargo to and from ship to shore.
December 23rd, 2012 | 7:36 pm
The most consequential examples of the Germanic “w” becoming a Romance “gu” are Welf and Waiblingen, the one a Bavarian duke, the other a castle in Swabia. The Italians heard these as Guelph and Ghibelline. The quarrels in Germany between the descendants of Welf I and the dukes of Swabia from the time that Conrad III, himself a Hohenstaufen, was elected Holy Roman Emperor over Henry the Proud, conveniently leapt the Alps to become the Guelphs, followers of the popes, and the Ghibellines, supporters of the Emperor. The designations and those claiming allegiance to one another became progressively more confusingas time passed. I do recall that Frederick Barbarossa was both Guelph (his mother was Henry the Proud’s sister) and Ghibelline, his father was Conrad’s brother, I believe.
This peculiar rivalry had immense consequences, more in Italy than in Germany probably. An interesting footnote to the controversy was that when Barbarossa at last triumphed over his cousin Henry the Lion, henry was deprived of his properties under feudal but left with the duchy of Brunswick. Eighteen generations later one of his descendants, through his son William, was Queen Victoria, though it was not through that line that she came to the throne: she was also the granddaughter of George III.
December 24th, 2012 | 5:11 am
George III was Elector of Brunswick-Lüneburg until 1814, when, along with Westphalia, it was erected into the Kingdom of Hanover.
On William IV’s death in 1837, the crown of the United Kingdom descended to Queen Victoria, the daughter of William’s deceased son, the Duke of Kent. The crown of Hanover, under the Salic Law, descended to her uncle, Ernest Augustus, Duke of Cumberland. It was annexed by Prussia in 1866.
December 24th, 2012 | 12:16 pm
“On William IV’s death in 1837, the crown of the United Kingdom descended to Queen Victoria, the daughter of William’s deceased son, the Duke of Kent.”
William had no legitimate son. Victoria was the daughter of Prince Edward, George III’s fourth son, who was, as you say the Duke of Kent; but he was William IV’s younger brother, not his son. Her mother, a German princess, was also named Victoria.
Victoria was descended from English kings in two lines. One, which I mention above, was Henry II through his daughter Matilda, who married the arch-Guelph Henry the Lion. Their son was William of Winchester, Lord of Lüneburg. By and by, his line descended to George Louis, the son of Sophia of the Palatinate, who was the granddaughter of James I/VI (England/Scotland), who was in turn the great-grandson of Henry VII through his daughter Margaret Tudor, wife of James IV. George Louis became George I on the death of the last Stuart monarch, Queen Anne in September, 1714. Sophia died just three months too soon, else she would have inherited the crown herself due to the Act of Settlement of 1701, which, because, there was alive a 13-year-old male Stuart, James the Old Pretender, son of James II, posed a danger, as the Whigs and William III saw it, of a return of a Roman Catholic to the English throne. They thus sought out the Hanoverian claimant descended from James I and Anne of Denmark, namely, Sophia.
Thus through just one pair of great-great-grandparents, Ernest Augustus,Duke of Brunswick and father of George I, and the Electress Sophia, Victoria was a direct descendant of two kings: Henry II and James I. That led directly to the Jacobite risings in 1708, 1719, and, of course, 1745, the last saw the extinguishing of all hope for the Stuarts at Culloden.
December 24th, 2012 | 12:20 pm
“. . . . through just one pair of great-great-grandparents,” should be one pair of great-great-great-great-gandparents.
December 25th, 2012 | 5:41 am
Joe Sansonese
“William’s decesaed son was, of course, a slip of the pen. I meant to say George III’s deceased son, the Duke of Kent.
“the last saw the extinguishing of all hope for the Stuarts at Culloden.”
As regards the Stuart line, here in Scotland, many Catholics refused to take advantage of the Roman Catholic Relief Acts of 1778, 1791 and 1793, because these required an oath of allegiance to George III. However, here in Ayrshire, the Sheriff Court books show a large number taking the oaths in the autumn of 1807, my own forebears amongst them and one finds the same thing throughout Scotland. I fancy this was not unconnected with the death of King Henry IX (the Cardinal Duke of York) on 13 July of that year
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