Fault Line
May. 15th, 2010 12:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stoutfellowJust a bit ago, I was tossing Buster's current favorite toy for him to chase. I inadvertently tossed it in a direction that caused him to run over Gracie. While petting and apologizing to her, I began to wonder about the word "fault". It has the marks of having been a past participle - but of what? "Fail"? "Fall", perhaps? Off to the dictionary!
"Fault" does, indeed, derive from the same root as "fail", both apparently coming (via Old French) from a Latin word meaning to conceal, hide. "Fall" is unrelated. As long as I was looking at "f*l" words, though, I took a look at "fell" - not the past tense of "fall", but the other one, meaning savage, as in "one fell swoop". No connection to the others, but it's related to "felon", from an Old Frankish word meaning one who skins/whips. Skins? Hmmm... Let's check "pelt". Yep: "pelt" skin is related. (That /p/~/f/ correspondence is one to keep an eye on, especially if you're looking at Germanic languages.)
Let's try a little ablaut. "Flaw" is derived from an old word meaning chip, and related to "flay", which brings us back to skinning; it's another child of the same family. "Flee" and "fly" aren't, but they are related to each other, and to "flow", which leads in turn to Latin-derived cognates "flux" and "fluent". ("Fluent" literally means flowing; Newton used this word where we would now say "variable". The derivative of a fluent was its "fluxion".) Somewhere the concept of flowing water gets mixed in, and another /p/~/f/ flip leads us to words like "pluvial" rainy.
(I spent a bit more time looking up "play", "ploy", "blow", "bloom", and a few other words, without running into anything immediately interesting. Dictionaries are fun.)
"Fault" does, indeed, derive from the same root as "fail", both apparently coming (via Old French) from a Latin word meaning to conceal, hide. "Fall" is unrelated. As long as I was looking at "f*l" words, though, I took a look at "fell" - not the past tense of "fall", but the other one, meaning savage, as in "one fell swoop". No connection to the others, but it's related to "felon", from an Old Frankish word meaning one who skins/whips. Skins? Hmmm... Let's check "pelt". Yep: "pelt" skin is related. (That /p/~/f/ correspondence is one to keep an eye on, especially if you're looking at Germanic languages.)
Let's try a little ablaut. "Flaw" is derived from an old word meaning chip, and related to "flay", which brings us back to skinning; it's another child of the same family. "Flee" and "fly" aren't, but they are related to each other, and to "flow", which leads in turn to Latin-derived cognates "flux" and "fluent". ("Fluent" literally means flowing; Newton used this word where we would now say "variable". The derivative of a fluent was its "fluxion".) Somewhere the concept of flowing water gets mixed in, and another /p/~/f/ flip leads us to words like "pluvial" rainy.
(I spent a bit more time looking up "play", "ploy", "blow", "bloom", and a few other words, without running into anything immediately interesting. Dictionaries are fun.)
