The end of the witch hunt

My sincere thanks to all those who commented on the recent posts. I have never heard about the rule about one day referring only to the future. Naturally, I immediately Googled for it and found that the rule does not exist. I also checked its equivalent in several other languages. The result was the same. Perhaps one day is indeed more often used about future events, but this is as far as we should go. Pedants are fond of enforcing such suspicious rules. Many years ago, an editor (not for this blog!) insisted that though should be used in the middle of the sentence, while for an opener only although is allowed. I refused to be bullied. Usage is in general a delicate matter, and before following someone’s advice, one should always check the source of the information. Even such things that are certainly wrong refuse to go away, stay, and (whether we like it or not) become the norm. The most instructive and entertaining book written about such matters is still Fowler’s Modern English Usage (especially the earliest editions).

With the ghost of one day laid to rest, we may pick up where we left off last Wednesday and return to the origin of the word witch. The Old English for “witch” was wicce. This form referred to females (Old English had three genders, like Latin and Modern German). The masculine counterpart of wicce was wicca, that is, “wizard,” and it turned up in texts more than a century before wicce. We will briefly return to wizards below.

Two problems complicate the search for the etymology of wicce. In the previous post, I wrote that we don’t know (or at least, don’t know exactly) what women and men, endowed with supernatural powers, were called wicce ~ wicca, and it is hard (almost impossible!) to discover the origin of a word if the object it names remains unknown. At one time, an excellent journal with the German title Wörter und Sachen (“Words and Things”) existed. It was devoted to exactly such problems and read like a series of detective stories. The contributors were historical linguists, specialists in material culture, ethnographers, and more.

The second problem is the oldest extant form of witch, that is, wicce. In it, the letters cc designate a real long consonant (the technical term for such a sound is geminate: think of the constellation Gemini), as in Italian ecco “here” or in English book cover. Geminates were extremely rare (almost nonexistent) in Old English, and in wicce, cc may have been the product of assimilation (some consonant plus k; by way of analogy: when this shoe becomes thish shoe, as it always does, we witness assimilation). Thus, wicce might go back to witce or some other form like it. However, even this statement is not a hundred percent safe, because a few Old English geminates arose under emphasis, and a word for “wizard; witch” (whatever the original reference) aroused all kinds of associations and was, very likely, “emotional.” We can see that both the ancient meaning of wicce and its original form remain hidden. It is therefore no wonder that we still don’t know the exact answer to our riddle.

In search of a solution, language historians have wandered for ages in the thicket of similar Germanic and non-Germanic words. They compared wicce with Gothic weihs “holy” (the main Gothic language monument is an incomplete fourth-century text of the New Testament), Old English wiglian “to divine; to practice witchcraft” (though the vowel in its root might be long), and Latin victima “sacrifice.” Several verbs, related to English wiggle, have also been pressed into service, because völva, a mysterious prophetess, known from Old Scandinavian myths (see the post for last week!), was supposed to roll in the process of divination. But too little is known about such practices to justify a reliable etymology, and we cannot be sure that the Old English witch was supposed “to see into the future,” let alone “wiggle.”

The oldest attempt to break the spell over the word witch involved the roots of wit (as in to wit and witty) “to know” and of wizard, the latter being always and correctly understood as “wise man.” But it is better to stay away from wizard, because this word surfaced only in the fifteenth century. Old English wīt(e)ga “a wise man” appears as the source of witch in many good dictionaries. Yet this etymology cannot overcome several phonetic difficulties, which I will not discuss here, since the effort to understand them will not pay off. I can only say that both the first edition of Skeat’s etymological dictionary and The Century Dictionary shared this etymology, and it was copied by multiple sources. (Beware of dictionaries and popular books that suggest etymologies without explaining how they were discovered.)

On the whole, two “schools” emerged as regards the origin of witch. One tried to connect the English word with the root wit-, while the other favored wik-. At the end of his career, Skeat favored the second option and referred to verbs, meaning “to tun away, divert.” The volume of the OED with the word witch appeared long after the death of James A. H. Murray and Henry Bradley, the two greatest editors of the original OED, who among other things, excelled in etymology, and witch was left almost without any hypothesis about its origin. Today’s OED online has a somewhat different format from the first edition. The problem is that most people look on the verdicts in the OED as examples of absolute truth. As I understand, today’s team wisely refuses to play God. When the problem defies a definitive answer, the OED now gives a brief summary of the state of the art in notes and refrains from taking sides.

Surprisingly, today, we don’t seem to know much more about the etymology of witch than our predecessors did four, three, and two centuries ago. The latest serious attempt to break the spell over this word goes back to 1979, but the proposal by the American linguist Martin Huld also left some important questions unanswered. Against this bleak background, I may risk offering my hypothesis, certain of being dismissed like my numerous “forerunners.” Whatever may happen, I’ll remain in good company. In my opinion, witch goes back to the form wit–ja– “divinator” or perhaps “healer.” The root wit meant “to know.” If this is correct, the negative connotations inherent in Modern English witch may have emerged later. The verb witan “to know” often referred to people’s familiarity with arcane things. Characteristically, Old Icelandic vitt meant only “witchcraft, charms.”

Two more words can be mentioned in a postscript. One of them, discussed above, is wizard, now understood to be a male counterpart of witch. But this late coinage is made up of the root of wisdom and a suffix, as in coward, drunkard, and the like. Wiseacre “smarty,” a late sixteenth-century word, is believed to be a borrowing from Middle Dutch. The ironic connotations that have always been present in this word make the idea of borrowing from Dutch credible. My Walpurgis night is over. Next week, I will discuss  a few words that share the page with hag and go over to more mundane things.

_{Featured image: Illustration from the first edition of The Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.}