Part II · Chapter 6

The Rules of the Road

A trick you learn once

Imagine someone hands you a list of forty words in a language you don't know and says, "Learn these." Now imagine that instead they give you a single rule and say, "With this you can guess thirty of the forty." Which would you rather have?

Related languages don't change words at random. They change them by rules, and each rule applies to hundreds of words at once. Linguists call these rules correspondences: where one language has this sound, the other has that one. Learning a correspondence is learning a trick once and using it a thousand times.

This chapter teaches you several. But I'm not going to hand them over as a list. I'll put the words in front of you and you'll see the rule yourself. It works better that way: what you discover, you remember.

The h that used to be an f

Let's start with Spanish, the language you're most likely learning. Look at these words in four languages that come from Latin, and in Latin itself:

(They mean "to do," "son," "iron," "flour," "thread," "leaf," and "oven.") Look at the first letter of each column. What do you see?

Where Latin, Portuguese, Italian and French have f, Spanish has h. And that h is silent. In other words: Spanish lost the Latin initial f. Not in one word, but in all of these and many more.

So why is the h still written? Because it's the footprint of the f. In Old Spanish, some eight hundred years ago, people still said fazer, fijo, fierro, forno. Little by little the f softened into a puff of breath, written h, and then the breath disappeared too. Spelling kept the letter, the way you keep a photo of a relative who's gone.

And here's the good news for you as an English speaker: your learned English words kept the f. English borrowed them from Latin or French, where the f never went away. So every time a Spanish word starts with a silent h, try putting an f back and see whether an English word lights up:

The rule has rules of its own

Now look at these Spanish words: fuego (fire), fuerte (strong), flor (flower), frente (forehead). They come from Latin focus, fortis, flos, frons, and they kept their f. Do they break the rule?

Not really. Look at what comes after the f: in fuego and fuerte, the diphthong ue; in flor and frente, a flowing consonant, l or r. In those positions the f held on. (It wasn't always easy: for a while people also said huego, and in the end the f form won.) A rule whose exceptions have their own explanation isn't a broken rule. It's a more precise one.

What happens to the code

This has a consequence for the code. When Spanish loses the f, the code loses a class: filius started with Φ; hijo doesn't. Portuguese filho, Italian figlio and English filial keep it. If you want to find the original code of a Spanish word that starts with a silent h, it often pays to look at its cousins: they kept what Spanish lost.

What Spanish did with cl, pl and fl

Another table. This time the Latin word starts with two consonants together.

(They mean "key," "rain," "flame," and "full.") Four languages, four different solutions to the same problem. French kept the clusters cl, pl, fl. Spanish turned them into ll. Portuguese into ch (pronounced sh in Portuguese). Italian swapped the l for an i: chi, pi, fi.

English, again, often kept the Latin clusters in its learned words: flame (from flamma), plenty (from plenus), clamor (from the same root as Spanish llamar, "to call"). So when a Spanish word starts with ll, try cl, pl or fl and see what you find: llama → flame, lleno → plenty, llamar → clamor.

What it did with ct

One more. This time the Latin cluster is in the middle of the word.

The Latin cluster ct became ch in Spanish, it in Portuguese, tt in Italian. And look at the last column: English night and eight don't come from Latin but from the Germanic branch, yet they're co-derivatives of noche and ocho. They all come from the same Proto-Indo-European words. (English milk, by the way, is not a relative of leche: it comes from a different root. That's why the cell is empty.)

Grimm's law: where English has f, Spanish has p

Now for the trip that matters most to you: the one that separates English from Spanish.

More than two thousand years ago, the Germanic languages — English, German, Dutch, Swedish — went through a chain reaction in their consonants. It was described in 1822 by Jacob Grimm, the same Grimm of the Brothers Grimm fairy tales, which is why it's called Grimm's law. Latin didn't go through that change. So if you compare English words (Germanic) with Spanish words (from Latin), you can watch the law at work.

Look at these groups. In each one, find which English consonant matches which Spanish consonant.

Group 1.

Group 2.

Group 3.

Group 4.

Group 5.

Did you find them? Where English has f, Spanish (Latin) has p. Where English has t, Spanish has d. Where English has h, Spanish has k (written c or qu). Where English has th, Spanish has t. Where English has k (written c or k, even if it's silent now in know), Spanish has g.

Why this is good news for the code

Here's the best part. Look at which pairs of sounds Grimm's law swaps:

• f and p: both belong to the lips class, Φ.
• t and d, th and t: all three belong to the teeth class, Θ.
• h and k, k and g: all belong to the back class, Χ.

Grimm's law almost never moves a sound out of its class! It changes the costume, not the person. That's why the code of father and the code of padre are identical, Φ·Θ·Λ, even though the letters differ. And that's why the classes are such a good instrument for seeing kinship between English and Spanish: they're built so that the biggest change separating the two languages stays, almost entirely, inside each class.

From English to German

If you want to learn German, you have an advantage: German is much closer to English than Spanish is. But German went through a second chain reaction that English didn't.

Where English has t at the start, German has z (pronounced ts). Where English has t in the middle, German often has ss. Where English has p, German has pf or ff. Where English has k, German has ch. Where English has d, German has t.

Here, unlike Grimm's law, some changes do move a sound out of its class: the t of ten (Θ) became the ts of zehn, which ends in a hiss (Σ). When that happens, the code changes. That's not a failure of the method: it's information. It tells you this change was more drastic.

From Spanish to French

One last one, short. Look:

Where Spanish has ca, French often has cha or che (with an sh sound). And English borrowed some of these straight from French: your word chant comes from French chanter, which comes from Latin cantare, the same word as Spanish cantar. The last row is my favorite. French chez means "at the home of": chez moi, at my place. It comes from Latin casa, the same word as Spanish casa. It wore down so much that it ended up as a preposition.

Rules aren't iron laws

Everything you've seen in this chapter is a tendency with reasons, not an absolute law. There are exceptions. Some are explained by a finer rule (like the f in fuego). Others by a loan: a word that arrived after the rule had already acted, so it never went through it. Others still have no explanation.

Teaching you correspondences as if they were absolute would plant a false confidence. The right way to use them is as an informed bet: they help you guess, and then you check.

In the next chapter you'll find these rules gathered by language, like a pocket map for each language you might want to learn.