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A section for all you budding etymologists where each week the origin of a word or phrase is investigated.
This week it is..... Have an inkling
Have a vague intimation of; have a slight knowledge of.
Clearly the understanding of the source of this little
term is based on knowing what an inkling is. It sounds as
though it might be something small, like a jot or a tittle.
It also seems to exist in the same neck of the linguistic
woods as the names of other minor sensations, like
tingling or tickling. We can tingle or tickle, but we don’t
inkle, so where did inkling derive from?
These days, there isn’t much we can do with an inkling
other than to have one. In the 13th century, when the
word was coined, inklings weren’t had, they were heard.
Inklings, like tinklings, were small sounds. Specifically,
an inkling was an indistinct hearing of the use of one’s
own name.
This meaning is demonstrated in the earliest known use
of the word, in the Alliterative Romance of Alexander
the Great, circa 1400–50:
“[Alexander] Herd a nyngkiling of his name, & naytis
him [exerted himself] to ryse.”
So, if you heard an inkling your senses were alerted to
listening for something that might interest you and it
is that sensation that has led to our current usage of
the word. To be more accurate, in the 13th century you
would have had a ninkling rather than an inkling. Inkling
is one of those nouns that were originally spelled with
an ‘n’ at the start of the word but later lost it in everyday
speech. In this case, sometime in the 16th century, ‘a
ninkling’ became ‘an inkling’. Other examples of this are
‘a napron’ and ‘a nadder’ [snake]. This reformation of
words is called metanalysis and these ‘n’ examples of
it are difficult to explain fully. There are examples of
words going in the other direction, that is, adding an
‘n’; for example, ‘an ekename’ is now ‘a nickname’ (eke
means also) and ‘an ewt’ is now ‘a newt’. Other examples,
like ‘nangry’ where the originally spelled ‘angry’ gained
an ‘n’ but then failed to become publicly accepted, show
how precarious such changes are. Curiously, the most
commonly heard example of an English word losing its
initial ‘n’ happened in France rather than England. The
French obtained ‘orange’ via a route through several
languages, ultimately from the Sanskrit ‘naranga’, and
‘une narange’ became ‘une arange’. By the time oranges
appeared in England they were already oranges - there
never was an English word noranges. On to more
inventive metanalysis from Duck Soup:
Chico: What is it that has a trunk but no key, weighs
2,000lbs and lives in a circus?
Prosecutor: That’s irrelevant!
Chico: A relephant. Hey, that’s the answer.
Is there an English phrase or saying that you would
like to know more about?
Email it to us on submissions@awolonline.net
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