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From: alderson@netcom16.netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III)
Subject: Re: etymology question (note: slang, may be offensive to some...)
In-Reply-To: Dan Clore's message of Mon, 17 Mar 1997 11:35:43 -0800
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	<332D9D0F.523C@columbia-center.org>
Date: Wed, 19 Mar 1997 18:46:32 GMT
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In article <332D9D0F.523C@columbia-center.org> Dan Clore
<clore@columbia-center.org> writes:

>The word "cunt" has been in English language since the beginning. It appears
>in Chaucer. It has cognates in many Indo-European languages; Latin cunnus, for
>example.

Chaucer is hardly "from the beginning," and in fact is very much post-French-
influence.  The word is a borrowing from French.

In order for _cunt_ to be aboriginal English, that is, to derive via Germanic
from Indo-European, the cognates in other languages, such as Latin _cunnus_ and
Greek _kustho's_, would have to start with _g_; given that they start with _k_,
any English cognate would have to start with _h_.

This is the most basic of all correspondence sets in Indo-European studies,
Grimm's Law.  Given the violation in correspondence, we have to seek elsewhere
for a source of the English word; borrowing from French in the massive imports
of the 14th century (Chaucer's floruit) is the most economical explanation.
-- 
Rich Alderson   You know the sort of thing that you can find in any dictionary
                of a strange language, and which so excites the amateur philo-
                logists, itching to derive one tongue from another that they
                know better: a word that is nearly the same in form and meaning
                as the corresponding word in English, or Latin, or Hebrew, or
                what not.
                                                --J. R. R. Tolkien,
alderson@netcom.com                               _The Notion Club Papers_
