# English 'to hight' and its cognates' usage



## Roy776

Hello everybody,

I've long been searching for an English cognate to the German "heißen" (to be called), and yesterday, I've finally found it (an archaic cognate, of course).

For the German cognate 'heißen', I found the following list (Source: Wiktionary):

*Verb*
*heißen* 


(intransitive) to be named; to be called _Wie *heißt* du?_ — “What is your name?”_Ich *heiße* ...._ — “I am called ....”
(transitive) to call (someone something)
(intransitive) to mean _Wie *heißt* „Auto“ auf Englisch?_ — "How do you say ‘Auto’ in English?"
(impersonal) to say; to be said _Es *heißt*, daß ...._ — “It is said that ....” or “They say that ....”

On 'hight' it says:

*Verb*
*hight (third-person singular simple present hights, present participle highting, simple past and past participle hight)*
* 

(archaic, transitive) To call, name.
(archaic, intransitive) To be called or named.

*The word should have cognates in every Germanic languages, or at least might have. I know only of Dutch 'heten' and Swedish 'heta', but I can't be sure that I know all their usages, as, for example, the usage of 'heißen' as meaning "to call someone something" was new even to me as a native speaker. So, if you know the cognate, please write about its usages, as it seems to differ between the different languages.

I'm looking forward to your answers!


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## origumi

I guess you visited this one already: http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=hight


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## fdb

Die wiktionary entry is rubbish. "hight" is a past participle. There is no such thing as "hights" or "highting" or "to hight".


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## francisgranada

The equivalent of the verb "to call" is used in expressions like "what's your name" also in other languages, but rather as a reflexive verb or an active verb in the 3rd pers.pl. Examples:

Spanish. ¿Cómo te llamas? (lit. "How do you call yourself?")
Slovak: Ako sa voláš? (lit. "How do you call yourself?")
Hungarian: Hogy hívnak? (lit. "How do they call you?")

Now, what is the explanation of the German _Wie heißt du_ instead of _*Wie heißt du dich_ ?


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## Roy776

francisgranada said:


> The equivalent of the verb "to call" is used in expressions like "what's your name" also in other languages, but rather as a reflexive verb or an active verb in the 3rd pers.pl. Examples:
> 
> Spanish. ¿Cómo te llamas? (lit. "How do you call yourself?")
> Slovak: Ako sa voláš? (lit. "How do you call yourself?")
> Hungarian: Hogy hívnak? (lit. "How do they call you?")
> 
> Now, what is the explanation of the German _Wie heißt du_ instead of _*Wie heißt du dich_ ?



This way of asking for somebody's name was the whole reason I'm asking this question. I'm just curious about what languages have a cognate of the verb 'heißen' or a verb that functions the same way.


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## CapnPrep

fdb said:


> Die wiktionary entry is rubbish. "hight" is a past participle. There is no such thing as "hights" or "highting" or "to hight".


Yes, _hight_ is a past participle, and probably the only form of the verb that could really be considered "archaic" (as opposed to "totally obsolete"). But the verb was indeed _to hight_ (alongside many variant forms, as usual). Here are some citations from the OED of the "no such thing" forms:


1600    E. Fairfax tr.  Tasso _Godfrey of Bulloigne_  i. Argt. 1 He sends them to the fort that Sion hights. 
1582    R. Stanyhurst tr.  Virgil _First Foure Bookes Æneis_  i. 8  Thee Romans of his owne name, Romulus, highting. 
1674    J. Ray _N. Countrey Words_ in  _Coll. Eng. Words_ 25    _To Hight_ (Cumb.), to promise or vow. 



francisgranada said:


> Now, what is the explanation of the German _Wie heißt du_ instead of _*Wie heißt du dich_ ?


The German verb _heißen _in this context means "to be called", not "to call". The verb corresponding to the relevant sense of Spanish _llamar_, for example, would be _nennen_, and you would say _Wie nennst du dich ? _("How do you name yourself?")


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## Roy776

CapnPrep said:


> Yes, _hight_ is a past participle, and  probably the only form of the verb that could really be considered  "archaic" (as opposed to "totally obsolete"). But the verb was indeed _to hight_ (alongside many variant forms, as usual). Here are some citations from the OED of the "no such thing" forms:
> 
> 
> 1600    E. Fairfax tr.  Tasso _Godfrey of Bulloigne_  i. Argt. 1 He sends them to the fort that Sion hights.
> 1582    R. Stanyhurst tr.  Virgil _First Foure Bookes Æneis_  i. 8  Thee Romans of his owne name, Romulus, highting.
> 1674    J. Ray _N. Countrey Words_ in  _Coll. Eng. Words_ 25    _To Hight_ (Cumb.), to promise or vow.




 
Thanks for providing us with some example sentences. I myself had trouble finding even one.



CapnPrep said:


> The German verb _heißen _in this context means "to be called", not "to call". The verb corresponding to the relevant sense of Spanish _llamar_, for example, would be _nennen_, and you would say _Wie nennst du dich ? _("How do you name yourself?")



This is actually quite interesting. Other languages use the phrase "sich nennen" all the time and it sounds normal to them. Germans wouldn't say that or would at least understand it as a question like "What is the nickname you've given to yourself?". We have the options "Ich bin..." (I am...), "Mein Name ist..." (My name is...) and "Ich heiße..." (I hight...).


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## francisgranada

Roy776 said:


> Other languages use the phrase "sich nennen" all the time and it sounds normal to them ...


To be precise, some languages (#4) use rather the phrase "sich rufen". For "nennen" there exist different verbs (e.g. _nombrar _in Spanish). But this may not change the substance of the discussion, of course.


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## Roy776

francisgranada said:


> To be precise, some languages (#4) use rather the phrase "sich rufen". For "nennen" there exist different verbs (e.g. _nombrar _in Spanish). But this may not change the substance of the discussion, of course.



Not really, but I might add now, that "sich rufen" is (as far as I know) absolutely impossible in German and sounds utterly weird.


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## francisgranada

It was intended only as a literal traslation. So it is even more interesting because "sich nennen" is immaginable or at least understandable, but "sich rufen" would be probably even not understood in the sense of _heißen_.


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## berndf

francisgranada said:


> Now, what is the explanation of the German _Wie heißt du_ instead of _*Wie heißt du dich_ ?


No need for the "*". _Wie heißt du dich? _is actually correct; just rare.

The intransitive verb is a passive interpretation, as CapnPrep said. In Middle English, this passive use of _hotan _existed too: _Filius dei he hoteþ_ (c1400; Source: MED, headword _hotan_, meaning 2b).


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## francisgranada

Thank you, Berndf, that's what I wanted to know.


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## fdb

CapnPrep said:


> 1600    E. Fairfax tr.  Tasso _Godfrey of Bulloigne_  i. Argt. 1 He sends them to the fort that Sion hights.
> 1582    R. Stanyhurst tr.  Virgil _First Foure Bookes Æneis_  i. 8  Thee Romans of his owne name, Romulus, highting.
> 1674    J. Ray _N. Countrey Words_ in  _Coll. Eng. Words_ 25    _To Hight_ (Cumb.), to promise or vow.



 
 
I have looked into this now. Old English _heht_ is the preterit of _hātan_ ‘to call’, (from an IE perspective: a perfect with reduplication), but already in Old English the preterit stem spreads by analogy to the present and the past participle, giving forms like p.p. _ihight_ for older _hāten_.


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## berndf

In Chaucer (CT, The Knight's Tale, L.1557) we find the root _hight-_ also in the infinitive and in passive meaning: _But ther as I was wont to highte Arcite... (But whereas I was accustomed to be called Arcite,...)_


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## CapnPrep

The active/passive development in English seems to have been about the same as for German (before the English verb fell out of use):


			
				OED said:
			
		

> In the other Germanic languages the passive _form_ had been lost, or rather blended with that of the active, but the _sense_  remained, as one of the uses of the verb, which was thus both ‘to call’  and ‘to be called’. In Middle English the same fate befell the passive  form, so that here also the active _hoten_, _hight_, came to be both ‘to call’ and ‘to be called’, the latter being the chief use in later times.


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## sotos

Any possibility that those heisst, _heht_ etc, are distant relatives to the various forms of the v. "to be" (es, est,  ει, εστί, ήσθα etc ) ?


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## berndf

No, absolutely not. the initial "h" is important and cannot be neglected. The probably cognates are Greek _κινεῖν_ and Latin _ciere_. The semantic relation is _move _(in the sense of _set into motion_)_ > command > call_.


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## Roy776

CapnPrep said:


> The active/passive development in English seems to have been about the same as for German (before the English verb fell out of use):



So my question remains; do all Germanic languages have this word? Did it change from passive to active meaning in all of them? What are their usages? It might be interesting to know how the verb developed in the other languages.


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## berndf

Roy776 said:


> So my question remains; do all Germanic languages have this word? Did it change from passive to active meaning in all of them? What are their usages? It might be interesting to know how the verb developed in the other languages.


It did not change from passive to active meaning. If it did, then the other way round. The OED quote in #15 means that there was no change in meaning but a merger of passive and active forms though it doesn't hint _how_ this supposedly happened.

The verb is attested in Gothic (_haitan_), in many old West Germanic languages and in Old Norse (_heita, haita, hæita_). It exists in modern Swedish (_heta_) and Danish (_hedde_). The modern Danish _hedde and Swedish heta _have passive meaning. Icelandic _heita_ has the usual passive meaning (_to be called_) but also has an active meaning (_to promise_). Old Norse had the active meaning _to call _and the passive meaning_ to be called_.


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## Kevin Beach

Chaucer used the form *heet* to mean "called", as in "_heet Chauntecleare_" in the Nun's Priest's Tale.


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## berndf

Kevin Beach said:


> Chaucer used the form *heet* to mean "called", as in "_heet Chauntecleare_" in the Nun's Priest's Tale.


You probably mean "Chaucer *also *used...". You find various past tense forms, among them _highte _(or _hiȜte, hiht,_ depending on manuscript):_Of whiche two Arcita highte that oon,
And that oother knyght highte Palamon._​_Knight's tale, Lines 1013 & 1014 (Riverside Chaucer; fetched here)_​


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## Lugubert

berndf said:


> The modern Danish _hedde and Swedish heta _have passive meaning. Icelandic _heita_ has the usual passive meaning (_to be called_) but also has an active meaning (_to promise_). Old Norse had the active meaning _to call _and the passive meaning_ to be called_.



I don't follow you here. Why do you think that Sw _heta_ is passive? True, it is fairly synonymous with _kallas_: _Jag heter Kurt_ (My name is Kurt) vs. _Jag kallas Kurt (I'm called Kurt). _Both verbs take predicatives. But the difference is that _kallas _can be constructed with an agent: _Jag kallas Kurt av mina vänner_: "I'm called Kurt by my friends". You can't add an agent to _heter_. You can say _Han kallar mig Kurt_ (He calls me Kurt), but there's no way that you can use the verb _heta_ with the subject _Han_ to refer to somebody else's name.

Grammar-wise, I see no obvious gap between _Jag heter Kurt_ and _Jag är svensk _(I am Swedish). I don't think you'd label "am" a passive in any way.


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## berndf

Lugubert said:


> I don't follow you here. Why do you think that Sw _heta_ is passive?


This word exists in various Germanic languages and can have one or both of these two meaning:
1. _to call, to command_
2. _to be called
_As CapnPrep pointed out, these meaning originated from a merger of originally active and passive forms which have long disappeared. This is why I call meaning 1. _active_ and meaning 2. _passive_. This has nothing to do with the syntactical status in any modern language.


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## francisgranada

Lugubert said:


> ... Why do you think that Sw _heta_ is passive? ...


I don't speak Swedish, but as far as I understand, Berndf speaks about the passive _meaning/sense _of the verb_ heta_ and not about a (grammatical) passive _form. 

_P.S. Sorry ... I didn't notice Berndf's answer while writing my post.


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## Lugubert

berndf said:


> This word exists in various Germanic languages and can have one or both of these two meaning:
> 1. _to call, to command_
> 2. _to be called
> _As CapnPrep pointed out, these meaning originated from a merger of originally active and passive forms which have long disappeared. This is why I call meaning 1. _active_ and meaning 2. _passive_. This has nothing to do with the syntactical status in any modern language.


I'm discussing contemporary Swedish, in which I know of no meaning 1 for _heta_. If I tell you my name, I don't have any passive feeling about it. And


Lugubert said:


> I see no obvious gap between _Jag heter Kurt_ and _Jag är svensk _(I am Swedish). I don't think you'd label "am" a passive in any way.


Or would you?

Another example: Somebody asks, "Who among you is Kurt?" Answer: _Jag är Kurt_. Active enough in all meanings, in my book, like if I had used _heter_.


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## LilianaB

"Jag heter X" is active, "jag kallas" is passive. "jag heter" may have an impersonal meaning (impersonal active). "jag kallas" presupposes an agent who would perform the calling (either personal or impersonal).


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## berndf

Lugubert said:


> I'm discussing contemporary Swedish, in which I know of no meaning 1 for _heta_.


Yes, that's what I wrote: Swedish has only meaning 2, the one I call "passive" for the purpose of this discussion.


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## Lugubert

berndf said:


> Swedish has only meaning 2, the one I call "passive" for the purpose of this discussion.



I must have missed your definition of "passive". To me, _heta_ is active, grammatically as well as semantically.


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## berndf

I stated in #23 how and why I used the terms _active meaning_ and _passive meaning_. To me this seemed straight forward in the context of this discussion. If this leads to misunderstanding I am more than happy to use a different word pair to tag these two meanings.


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## myšlenka

The terms active and passive are well-established terms in grammatical theory and refer to whether the agent is realized as the syntactic subject or not. Instead you should use the terms transitive and intransitive (as in the Wiktionary entry you cited).

 I am not sure I understand the fundamental meaning difference between meaning 1 (_Wie heißt du?_) and meaning 3 (_Wie heißt„Auto“ auf Englisch?_). The verb _hei__ßen_ in its most basic meaning connects an entity or a concept with its name.¨

The Norwegian cognate _hete/heite_ has the same meanings as the German one:
1a) _Jeg heter Lars_ (intransitive; my name is Lars)
1b) _Hva heter "bil" på engelsk?_ (intransitive; how do you say "bil" in English?)
2) _Det heter (seg) at_.... (impersonal; it is said that...)

A transitive use of hete/heite, meaning to call someone something or command somone, does not exist in Norwegian.


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## CapnPrep

myšlenka said:


> The terms active and passive are well-established terms in grammatical theory and refer to whether the agent is realized as the syntactic subject or not. Instead you should use the terms transitive and intransitive (as in the Wiktionary entry you cited).


Within the context of the OED entry I quoted in #15, the use of "active" and "passive" (both in reference to form, and in reference to sense) is fully justified by the historical/comparative perspective, and since we adopt the same perspective in this forum/thread, I don't see any problem in continuing to use these terms. But if you can't accept the idea of "active" vs. "passive meaning", you can substitute something like "agentive" vs. "non-agentive meaning". So, for example, Norwegian _heta_ has an active form (i.e. no passive morphology), but non-agentive meaning (= "to be called, to have the name ___"), whereas in earlier stages of Germanic, the active form of the verb expressed an agentive meaning (= "to call, to command") while the non-agentive meaning was expressed by a (medio-)passive form of the same verb. The fact that this canonical alignment of form and meaning was disrupted in the same way in all of the Germanic languages is curious.

"Transitive" vs. "intransitive" refer to syntactic properties, so they are inappropriate for talking about meanings (although they are obviously correlated with the semantic distinction in question).


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## seitt

From the grave of Stephen Perse, founder of Cambridge’s The Perse School:

Christian surnamde Stephan Perse I hight

Sole life with God alone, my crowne my light

With living God eternall life I live

This now my song: to sole God praise I give

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Perse


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## Walshie79

There seems to have been two competing past participles in OE: "(ge)hatan" and "heht"- the latter taken from the preterite. As others have said it's a reduplicated past (Gothic had "haihait"). The first died out in Middle English, being much rarer than the second by the 1300s.

"Hight" as a verb in its own right seems to have been a late development, started in early modern English by writers who didn't seem aware that it was merely an old past participle in e.g. Chaucer, not a verb stem. There was a striking amount of misunderstanding of Chaucer by writers of the 16th century, considering it was only 150-200 years earlier. The line "egre as is a tygre yond in Ynde" for example, which most modern speakers could probably decipher (eager as is a tiger yonder in India) spawned a nonexistent word "yond" meaning "ferocious" for the likes of Spenser.


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## berndf

Walshie79 said:


> "Hight" as a verb in its own right seems to have been a late development, started in early modern English by writers who didn't seem aware that it was merely an old past participle in e.g. Chaucer, not a verb stem.


The MED entry quoted in #11 lists _hiȝt as_ a variant infinitive and prensent stem as well.


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