# thing



## humvee

Any idea about the etymology of the English word thing? 
I know thing in German is ding as in Kant's Ding an sich.
and chose,cosa in French and Latin. 
The thing is, they don't look similar. I mean. the thing/ding group and chose/cosa group. My guess is that "thing" is an native word of Anglo-saxon, which is not borrowed from any other language.
Am I right?
Last but not the least, I notice that English has a colloquial term for thing, that is "stuff", as in cool stuff. I'd like to know if it has counterparts in Romance languages.


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## Alxmrphi

Hi humvee, 

French & Latin belong to the Italic language family, English and Germanic belong to the Germanic branch, Old English had *þing*, just like modern Icelandic & Old Norse (*þing*) (The parliament of Icelandic is based on this word, *Alþing*).
So it's more likely words belonging to the same language family have related words, and this is the case in Germanic, with other Scandinavian languages having *ting*. It exists in Old Frisian as thing (quote)

Here's one side of the languages of Proto-Indo-European (Centum languages)
All the *Romance* languages (in the Italic branch) descend from Latin, and have a cognate that closely resembles Latin's (cosa/chose etc), so etymologyonline mentions a reconstructed Proto-Germanic root "from P.Gmc. *thengan".

So I hope that explains why it's expected that English / Germanic (Germanic languages) wouldn't have a necessarily similar word in Latin / French, belonging to a different language family (Italic) and that other languages in the Germanic family do have the same word with roughly the same meaning today (except for English 'thing' ) i.e. (i.e. meeting / assembly / appointed time)


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## humvee

Thank you Alxmrphi
I'd already found that link before I posted this question. Maybe my question is not well-formulated or a little bit amateurish. 
I should have asked plainly if there were any rule of sound change to explain the thing/chose connection? As far as I know, it's plausible. Grimm's law, great vowel shift... doesn't work here. 
To take it a bit further, is it possible to reconstruct them to PIE root?
Or chose, thing, when not referred to as the legal meaning, but a concrete object or item, was invented separately by Aglo-Saxonians and people outside them?
That sounds too good to be true, intuitively, thing seems to be a very elementary everyday word, which won't take a village to invent it post-PIE-ly? Right?


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## Alxmrphi

I think what might need to be established is that the meaning in Modern English doesn’t have to be linked back to other words that mean the same thing, for example the modern word used in Icelandic to represent the concept of a ‘thing’ is ‘hlutur’, this doesn’t mean that the cognate word þing (thing) has this meaning. Just like there might possibly be a cognate in Latin for the Proto-Germanic (I’m not aware of one) or like so many other words, one hasn’t survived, but the usage across languages doesn’t always link cognates in languages.

A good example where it does occur is, let’s say a fundamental word like *father*.
Father in English, *faðir* in Icelandic, *pater* in Latin and *padre* in Italian. These concepts express the same thing and can be explained by sound change rules, but for many many words different ones come in and take on separate meanings so I don’t expect that *cosa* has originated from the same word that developed into Germanic* þing* / *thing* / *ding*, because even within this language family they’ve come to represent different concepts.

I’m not sure when the development into English changed the meaning from the Old English one (i.e. meeting) into its generic modern form, there are some real experts on here that I’m sure can explain better than I can.


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## humvee

Alxmrphi, your explanation is somewhat insightful. But I'm afraid you miss my point. I'm in my best effort to elaborate my point thusly:

Theorectically speaking, there's one and only language spoken by every member before mass diaspora. Let's name it PIE, short for proto-Indo-European language.

And suppose there were no word for "thing" in this protolanguage

Later on, some of those Cro-magnon people moved out of the place they massively lived in. Say, some to the "Angle-land", some to the Norman land. And they barely contacted with each other. And they independently invented the word for "thing" which didn't exist in protolanguage. 

I could even go so far as to cook up a theory for this weird semantic change
In short, how the heck did the assembly/meeting meaning evolve into the "item" meaning?

assambly is an abstract and collective concept, and in assembly there are members in it. That said, it's a whole-for-part semantic change, or metonymy(not Robin Hood) in reverse!

What an ad hoc explanation! "Everyness" to "eachness". Jeez, too obsessed with word formation. Can't help it!


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## Outsider

humvee said:


> Later on, some of those Cro-magnon people moved out of the place they massively lived in.


The Cro-Magnon were around much too early to be Indo-European! 



humvee said:


> In short, how the heck did the assembly/meeting meaning evolve into the "item" meaning?
> 
> assambly is an abstract and collective concept, and in assembly there are members in it. That said, it's a whole-for-part semantic change, or metonymy(not Robin Hood) in reverse!


It was probably the other way around: the word for thing had that meaning before it was combined into the name of a political institution. There's a very well-known case, the word "republic", from Latin _res publica_, meaning "public thing". (And here's yet another IE word for "thing"!)
Maybe _Alþing_ was even based on this model.


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## humvee

Outsider, do you mean the word for thing was once a compound word? And as times goes by without a historical record, the trace of its origin meaing is well lost. Take for example the cpuntry name Portugal, was once Port of Gaya and combined into Portugal, a word formation which is opaque to non-Portugese?


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## Outsider

No, it was the word "republic" that started out as a compound of _res_ (thing) and _publica_ (public).
Just like _Alþing_. I was just suggesting that such compounds are common.


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## Kevin Beach

Not all ancient words in Indo-European languages are necessarily Indo-European in origin.

Other peoples and languages flourished in the *PIE diaspora before it came into being. When the *PIE-speakers began to migrate, they adopted pre-existing words from other languages in the areas they moved to, as well as taking their own language with them. These "substrate" languages had their own vocabularies that had nothing to do with *PIE. 

Modern Indo-European languages contain substrate vocabulary that may be shared among some of them but not among all of them. For example, I understand that about 40% of the modern German lexicon is not Indo-European, yet those words are ancient and are not recent loan-words. They entered the German language (and other Germanic languages, such as English) at various stages, as tribes migrated and encountered other languages.

The Germanic "thing" and the Romance "cosa" do not have to have the same *PIE root. One or both could well have come from a substrate language.


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## humvee

Kevin, I could get the picture. Many Germanic words were borrowed from Sanskrit. One can notice the similarities by reading Panini's grammar or other texts.


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## bibax

Necessary to add that the generic Latin word for "thing" is RES.
CAUSA means primarily "cause", i.e. a thing causing consequences. Both RES and CAUSA have many special meanings.

The Romans decided for some reasons to replace the word RES by the word CAUSA (later pronounced cosa) in their everyday colloquial speech.

So your assumption that "... intuitively, _thing_ seems to be a very elementary everyday word, which won't take a village to invent it post-PIE-ly" is obviously incorrect.

In the Slavic languages the word for "thing" is věc, vešt (etc.) which is cognate with German Wicht, Old Enlish with (= being, thing), etc. The proto IE root is *woiktis.


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## Kevin Beach

humvee said:


> Kevin, I could get the picture. Many Germanic words were borrowed from Sanskrit. One can notice the similarities by reading Panini's grammar or other texts.


Mmmmmmmm ... but Sanskrit is also an Indo-European language!


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## bibax

> All the languages in the Italic branch descend from Latin, and have a cognate that closely resembles Latin's (cosa/chose etc),...


The proper term is ROMANCE, not Italic.

The Italic languages spoken in ancient Italy (like Oscan, Umbrian, Faliscan) were not descendants of Latin.


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## Alxmrphi

Italic Branch encompases the Romance languages, just like the Germanic Branch encompases the Scandinavian languages. When describing the branches of a linguistic family tree you can refer to higher branches to show decendents.

Latin is an Italic language, therefore its children can also be considered Italic, though that subgroup is also called Romance.

Woops, I just noticed the way I phrased it, I meant the Romance languages in the Italic branch descended from Latin have a cognate that resembles Latin's, but as in the image I linked to above, I did not mean to say Umbrian etc came from Latin (my bad phrasing), I'll edit the above to clarify, I just wanted to reference that branch as I had referenced Germanic and wanted to show a synchronic comparison to French/Italian.


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## humvee

Alx, that superordinate-subordinate in language family tree is very problematic and controversial. Skeptic abounds. Some scholar like Pinker, went so far as to reconstruct a super protolanguage family. Pinker is no historical linguists, What I read might be secondary materials. But my point holds water.


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## Alxmrphi

humvee said:


> Alx, that superordinate-subordinate in language family tree is very problematic and controversial. Skeptic abounds. Some scholar like Pinker, went so far as to reconstruct a super protolanguage family. Pinker is no historical linguists, What I read might be secondary materials. But my point holds water.



Are you talking about Nostratic? If you are, then I have read that it's so much more controversial and disputed by linguists than the idea of that language family tree.
I've never come across anyone who has a problem with that reconstruction of the relationship of PIE languages and its descendants in such a way, it's probably my ignorance, can you explain what the controversy is? How is it problematic? I've read quite a few books on linguistics and as far as I know I have never come across anyone who raises an issue (but I'm willing to listen!)

[Edit]



> Vastly more controversial are hypotheses about relatedness which are _not_ supported by application of the comparative method.  Scholars who  attempt to probe deeper than the comparative method supports (for  example, by tabulating similarities found by  mass  comparison without setting up sound correspondences) are often  accused of scholarly wishful thinking.  The problem is that any two  languages have a huge number of opportunities to resemble one another  just by accident, so merely pointing out isolated resemblances has  little evidentiary value.  A famous example is the Persian word for "bad", which is pronounced (more or  less) just like English "bad".  It can be shown that the resemblance  between these two words is completely accidental, and has nothing to do  with the (rather remote) genetic connection between English and Persian.   For further examples, see  False cognate.
> Since supporting distant genetic relationships is so difficult, and the  methodology for finding and proving such relationships is not well  established (in the way that the comparative method is), the field of  locating remote relationships is riven with scholarly controversy.   Nevertheless, the temptation to pursue remote relationships remains a  powerful lure to many scholars--after all, Proto-Indo-European must have  seemed a rather wild hypothesis to many when it was first proposed.


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## Frank06

Hi,



humvee said:


> My guess is that "thing" is an native word of Anglo-Saxon, which is not borrowed from any other language.
> Am I right?


It's found back in all Germanic languages, all with their specific sound changes, which indicates that it's much older than Old English (or Anglo-Saxon, if you prefer the obselete term).



humvee said:


> I should have asked plainly if there were any rule of sound change to explain the thing/chose connection? As far as I know, it's plausible. Grimm's law, great vowel shift... doesn't work here. To take it a bit further, is it possible to reconstruct them to PIE root?


No, the difference cosa/thing is not due to sound changes, and given our contemporary understanding of PIE and Proto-Germanic, it's not plausible.
Grimm works for PIE > PGm (and it's not even sure that _thing_ can be traced back to PIE). Besides, according to Grimm's Law, PGm *þ-/th- < PIE *t-, and I couldn't find any occasion of PIE *t- > Latin *k-.
The Great Vowel Shift much too late (and limited to English).



> Or chose, thing, when not referred to as the legal meaning, but a concrete object or item, was invented separately by Aglo-Saxonians and people outside them?


Meanings don't get invented.



humvee said:


> Theorectically speaking, there's one and only language spoken by every member before mass diaspora. Let's name it PIE, short for proto-Indo-European language.
> And suppose there were no word for "thing" in this protolanguage
> Later on, some of those Cro-magnon people


PIE: roughly 5th to 4th millennia BC
Cro-Magnons: many, but really many moons earlier than PIE.



humvee said:


> Many Germanic words were borrowed from Sanskrit.


This is absolutely _not_ the case. A lot of Germanic and Sanskrit words are cognates. That a lot of Germanic words come from Sanskrit isn't even a minority view in modern historical linguistics. Where did you get this idea from?



> One can notice the similarities by reading Panini's grammar or other texts.


"Similarities" is a completely empty term. What do you mean by this? 

Groetjes,

Frank


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## berndf

humvee said:


> I could even go so far as to cook up a theory for this weird semantic change
> In short, how the heck did the assembly/meeting meaning evolve into the "item" meaning?
> 
> assambly is an abstract and collective concept, and in assembly there are members in it. That said, it's a whole-for-part semantic change, or metonymy(not Robin Hood) in reverse!
> 
> What an ad hoc explanation! "Everyness" to "eachness". Jeez, too obsessed with word formation. Can't help it!


The traditional explanation is that _thing_ shifted its meaning from _meeting/gathering_ via _object or topic of a meeting_ to _object_. The same semantic shift apparently happend independently with the Latin word _causa_ originally meaning _topic of a meeting or deliberation_ giving rise to modern Romance _cosa_ (Italian) or _chose_ (French) meaning _thing_.


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## Lars H

I read from the Swedish etymologist Elof Hellquist that "thing" could possibly (he is not sure by any means) be connected with the Gothic "þeihs" and Germanic "þenhas", and if so related to the word "time".
Originally "thing" could then have meant "people's gatherings taking place on set times" which would be a good description of the first "things" described in the Norse sagas.
This is really a long shot, but it would give a good explanation why it is so hard to find a common root for "thing" and "causa"...

The word "ting" is used today not only in Iceland but also in the political systems of the three Scandinavian countries. 

There is a Nordic synonym to "ting" as an object, "sak". Also this word has had a similar development in meaning as the word "causa/chose". A Danish lawyer is a "sakförer" and in Swedish the word is used both in the juridical system and to describe a book on the table. It can be found in English words like "rannsacked" (borrowed from the danes?)

To connect to humvee's initial question, perhaps it would be less difficult to try to find a connection between "sak" and "causa"?


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## 0m1

Lars H said:


> This is really a long shot, but it would give a good explanation why it is so hard to find a common root for "thing" and "causa"...



Just pointing out again, as some have already done, that *þengaz and "causa" don't _have_ to have a shared origin; they can easily have separate roots in Proto-Indo-European both of which then developed indepedently to come to signify the same concept in Italic and Germanic (or whatever); and their respective cognates (that is, PIE root of *thengaz in Italic and vice versa) need not survive, and if they do, may not be instantly recognisable in similar meaning due to semantic shift.

I hope I've not made that too unclear; I must admit I have a tendency to trip over my own sentences!


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## Lars H

Hej!



0m1 said:


> *þengaz and "causa" don't _have_ to have a shared origin



There is also another Germanic synonym to "case" that obviously does not share roots with its Latin counterpart.

"Causa/chose" stems from "cadere" meaning "fall". The meaning seems to have shifted - or broadened - over time into "event", "happening" etc. Still today "cadere" means "falling" in Italian.

In Swedish, "fall" is used exactly as in modern English, but it is also used as "case", "event", "outcome" (Law case = rättsfall, in this case = i detta fallet, accident = olycksfall, result = utfall)

The PIE root of "causa" is, I believe, "cad" and for "fall" it is "*phol".

So here we have two different words in Latin and Germanic, with different PIE roots, that both have developed in a similar way from "fall" to "case" and both words have also maintained their original meaning. Isn't that even a bit peculiar?


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## 0m1

Lars H said:


> So here we have two different words in Latin and Germanic, with different PIE roots, that both have developed in a similar way from "fall" to "case" and both words have also maintained their original meaning. Isn't that even a bit peculiar?




Ah, I see your point! It is peculiar that such developments did take place, I must admit; I'm not particularly well informed in this area, so this is mere speculation, but perhaps this can be related in a way to how proverbs work? You'll often find very similar "metaphorical" functions across languages... 

I'm struggling to think of examples, but see for example how English "class" can function in terms of classification (business class) and in terms of  school-classes, which Hungarian imitates in "osztaly"'s identical application to both. Or for example (dialectical) Arabic "ma byinħmil" and English "unbearable", both working in the literal sense (of carrying, *bher-ing, in English's case) as well as meaning someone/thing that's very irritating.

So this sort of transitional morphology (often likely influenced by a language of higher prestige, such as English in the "class" example, but also possibly due to unconscious multilingualism too, where people unwittingly transfer sayings and expressions from one tongue to another without realising that it is "unnatural", and I imagine this sometimes sticks) might explain these examples? Especially with Latin's prestige status and all of that, might have helped along these similar formations (all depends on when they were formed, of course, as Latin might not necessarily have been acknowledged or even in contact with them, necessarily)


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## koniecswiata

The Nordic word "sak" looks like German "Sache" which basically means "thing".  In English there is also the word "sake" that comes from this root, though, it has a different meaning than "thing" now.  I believe at one point (Anglo-Saxon period) in English, "wealth" meant "thing".  This can be seen in the term "commonwealth" which basically translates literally to "res publica" or coincidentally to Polish "rzeczpospolita" (which means commonwealth or republic / "rzecz"=thing "pospolita"=common).  There seems to be one big semantic circle.


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