Meanings change

THE origins of words are soon forgotten with the passage of time. A part of this process of amnesia is a semantic change. Words keep changing their meaning and semantic change is a part of the ever-growing corpus of words. Those who have read Shakespeare or Milton or Chaucer can well appreciate how words keep changing their meaning. Take the word gay, for instance. When in a jocular mood in the past, it was quite accepted to say ‘We are really gay today’ or ‘What a gay party!’ Today, one needs to think carefully before using this word because of its homosexual implications. Chicken, once the little one of the hen, has broadened in meaning to include hen and rooster as well. Any poultry dish on the table has become chicken. A chick is also a pretty young woman and an old person is no spring chicken.

Four kinds of semantic change have been documented. A word goes through extension or generalisation when it widens its meaning. This process can be seen in the religious field very clearly where words like office, doctrine and novice have taken on a more general, secular range of meaning. Pigeon was once a young dove, whereas today it refers to all dove-like birds.

Narrowing or specialisation takes place when a word becomes more specialised in meaning. Deer once meant any four-legged beast but now means only the members of a particular zoological family. The word engine was earlier used in a general sense of a mechanical contrivance, especially of war or torture. Since the Industrial Revolution it has come to mean a mechanical source of power.

A word often begins with a negative association, but develops a positive sense of approval by and by. Revolutionary, once associated in the capitalist mind with an undesirable overthrowing of the status quo, is now used as a sign of desirable novelty. This change is called amelioration. Sometimes, the reverse occurs. A word develops a negative sense of disapproval. The Middle English villein described a serf or slave, today a villain is by no means neutral. Similarly, lewd meant ‘of the laity’, but today has developed a sense of sexual impropriety. Here lewd has undergone deterioration.

Tap-root

Some words in Hindi are a compound of two languages. These are called sankar words. For instance, motor gadhi (English + Hindi), rail yatra (English + Sanskrit), boriyat (English + Arabic), Chuhe dani (Hindi + Persian), thanedar (Hindi + Persian) and gharana (Hindi + Persian).

— Deepti

This feature was published on July 31, 1999