Un-burning words at the stake: Discovering the true lost origins of "warlock" and "hemlock"

While I'm busy putting together my presentation of the oldest recording of a (Para-)Mongolic language in world history by far, I thought I'd indulge in a little Halloween-time word-wandering. Previously leading up to Halloween, I discovered the Uralic (Mordvinic) origin of "vampire" ("soul-biter") and "vurkalaks" ("wolf-man thing"). I will probably write those up into posts of their own closer to Halloween, with a new Turkic variation on the "vurkolak" theme.

But for now, I'm taking a very rare tour down the history of my own language -- an etymological stay-cation. ^_^

In the process, I will overturn centuries of lazy ham-fisted "just so" stories about where these crucial words come from, what they mean, and how they're still here. As usual with my insights, no one has ever thought of them before. Only half of it is due to being smarter than them -- the other half is not taking any orthodoxy for granted, and looking at the topic with fresh eyes, from first principles. Academics are some of the most wacko people who ever made a living, and if just one Somebody pushes his idee-fixe, it becomes entrenched as the received obsession, or received clever-sillyness. You can't call it wisdom, when a wise person would rule it out as lazy or loony.

Especially in linguistics, from etymologies of particular words, to relationships between languages, there is just so much institutionalized ridiculousness. But that does mean I'll always have plenty to do, heeding my vocation as a truth-teller and secret-passageway-wanderer...

I'll get to "witch" later, for now we're starting with "warlock" since it shares its final morpheme with "hemlock", another macabre word just in time for Halloween.

The standard story is that "warlock" comes from Old English "wǣrloga", meaning "pledge-liar" (usually glossed as "oath-breaker", i.e. pagan religious officials were breaking their oath to Christianize). Here, "wǣr" comes from "pledge, covenant, agreement", and "loga" means "liar", sharing a root with Modern English "lie".

And that's precisely where we can tell this is a bullshit etymology. Old English "g" especially between vowels becomes semi-vowels "w" or "y" or dissolves entirely into its surrounding vowels. It does not remain a stop consonant, like the "k" sound at the end of "warlock". For example, "boga" becomes "bow", and that very root "loga" becomes "lie" and "liar". Conclusion: the OE ancestor of "warlock" must have had a "k" sound, which did not soften into a glide or disappear during Middle and Modern English, as opposed to "g". In OE, the "k" sound was written "c".

For brevity, I'll call Middle English "ME" and Modern English "Eng".

I do think that the first syllable of "warlock" traces back to OE "wǣr", in either of its two distinct senses -- "to watch out for" (leading to "wary", "aware", "beware"), and "true; truth". It probably combined them in a double-entendre -- a warlock was someone who watched out for his community, using his practice in a guardian or protector role, and he was someone who could perceive and speak the truth, that is as a sooth-sayer (which also comes from OE roots meaning "truth-sayer"), or a prophesy-giver. Other lesser people cannot see what events will truly unfold, as opposed to not unfolding or remaining hypothetical -- a sooth-sayer or warlock can tell you what will truly occur.

The next morpheme is OE "lāc", a once highly productive suffix used to derive nouns meaning an activity, process, or state associated with the root it attaches to. The most famous surviving word with this suffix is "wedlock", which is what I first thought of when I tried to figure out what "warlock" meant. Well, it's got some bizarre usage of "lock" in it -- and it's not the "hair" kind of lock, or the "fastening mechanism" kind of lock. What other words have a bizarre opaque suffix "lock"? I know -- "wedlock"!

In "wedlāc", the "wed" root refers to a pledge, and "lāc" is the "activity / process" suffix -- the activity that involves making a pledge. The suffix broadens the scope from the instant of pledging "I do", to the entire indefinite ceremony in which this one finite instance of pledging takes place.

Well then, "wǣrlāc" means the process or activity involving speaking the truth or watching out for things as a guardian. Not a brief finite instance of mouthing the prophesy, or the discrete instant of seeing a vision of evil-doers who are the source of problems. Rather, the broader indefinite habitual occupational activity and process of engaging in those actions. To gloss it with a noun and suffix, it means "truth-ery" and "guardian-ship".

Now all that's missing is the final vowel, since the ME reflexes end in "e", a reduced schwa-like vowel, which eventually disappeared altogether in Eng "warlock". This was the OE masculine agent noun suffix "a". This used to attach to OE "hunt" (meaning the same as in Eng), "hunta" = "hunter". This final "a" from OE regularly weakened to "e" in ME and disappeared in Eng.

So putting it all together, "wǣrlāca" = "wǣr + lāc + a" = "a man whose occupation involves sooth-saying / guardian-ship". That is precisely what a warlock was back in the OE days, before the British were Christianized. He was a religious official, interacting with the supernatural, on behalf of a congregation or audience who he was responsible for helping out.

That word regularly evolved into Eng "warlock" phonetically, unlike "wǣrloga", although the semantics were given a major shaking-up during the Christianization of Britain and the growth of the institution of the Christian church. Namely, it was demoted from a legitimate source of religious authority and practice, to an illegitimate marginalized dabbler in the dark arts, a male "witch". Even after the de-Christianization of Britain and America, "warlock" still retains its heavily Christian connotation of "boo-hiss, pagan religious official".

Rather than merely slander it semantically, the Christian officials also altered it phonetically and orthographically, to "wǣrloga" or "pledge-liar". This is a taboo deformation to rob the word of its power and legitimacy, when the practitioners and their audiences were still thriving, only partially converted to Christianity. But it's also a kind of satirical deformation, where rather than alter the sounds in any ol' deforming way, they chose a replacement that was pejorative -- "pledge-liar". Similar to referring to Ronald Reagan as "Ronnie Ray-Gun", to satirize the "Star Wars" military policy. His critics could have altered his surname in any number of ways, but they did so in a way that was semantically meaningful, just in a pejorative way.

The word "wǣrloga" is rare in the OE corpus, and restricted to Christian religious texts, such as "The Whale" (980 AD), a morality tale in favor of Christianizing rather than being seduced by all manner of demons and such, including the "wǣrloga" -- which every reader of "The Whale" understood to mean "wǣrlāca", with pejorative taboo deformation.

We can tell that "wǣrloga" was not a spoken vernacular word in OE cuz it left 0 descendants in ME or Eng, where it should have been retained as "warlow", but that word has never existed in Eng.

A scribe or two may have copied the word into ME, but it was not spoken then either, and in Eng they didn't even bother copying it in the monasteries anymore. Its rhetorical value had vanished, since pagan religious institutions themselves had vanished. Why keep heaping taboo-deforming abuse upon an official who no longer exists, and why sternly admonish his audience who also no longer exists? It was retired just like "Ronnie Ray-Gun" was, when its relevance had run out.

However, the spoken language of the common people *did* retain a reflex of "wǣrlāca" into the ME and Eng eras, even if scribes -- who were still mostly in Christian institutions -- preferred to quietly delete it and its taboo-deformed variant from their scriptoriums. It is plainly in use today as "warlock", but it erupted during the Early Modern witch trials in Scotland, where the Christian church could no longer keep the word under wraps. They needed a good, pointed word meaning "male witch", so all of a sudden the ancient word "warlock" was written -- in disgust -- once again by the scribal profession. But it had never gone away among the speech of everyday English speakers.

Although my reconstruction of "wǣrlāca" as the ancestor to "warlock" is rock-solid both phonetically and semantically, where every other proposal fails glaringly, I will buttress it further with a parallel coinage from OE. There was in fact a more dark-arts-dabbler kind of word in OE, akin to "sorcerer" -- "scīnlæcca". This is derived in exactly the same morphological way as I derived "wǣrlāca". It has a root "scīn", meaning "phantom, ghost", the activity / process suffix "lāc", and the more archaic agentive suffix "ja" (instead of "a").

The choice of "ja" caused two sound changes to the whole compound, namely "i"-umlaut, where the palatal "j" brought the back "a" to front "æ" in original "lāc", and the "c" before "j" caused it to geminate into "cc". These are both regular sound changes in OE. Because "wǣrlāca" uses "a" rather than "ja" as the agent suffix, it avoids both of those further sound changes.

The key point is that OE was already coining words for "sorcerer" using the morphological template I laid out for "wǣrlāca", including the main fixed morpheme "lāc", and only a subtly different fixed suffix "ja" vs. "a", leaving open only the 1st morpheme to denote what kind of activity the practitioner was engaged in. For "scīnlæcca", he was engaged in "phantom-ery", while the then more respectable "wǣrlāca" was engaged in "truth-ery" and "guardian-ship".

* * *

That made me think -- what other English words survive with this "lock" suffix? The received cluelessness says that "wedlock" is the only one, but I have conclusively proven that "warlock" belongs here as well. It's not counter-intuitive at all -- the "lock" in "warlock" doesn't refer to the "hair" kind of "lock" or the "fastening device" kind of "lock". How many possible usages of the suffix "lock" can there be? Parsimony requires us to assume that every example not relating to hair or fasteners is a survivor of OE activity / process suffix "lāc", and it is up to our insightfulness to discover how it is being used, what the main root is, and so on.

Well, "hemlock" is just such another example of a word ending in "lock" that has nothing to do with hair of fastening. And it's also timely as a macabre word for Halloween season. ^_^

The received cluelessness derives Eng "hemlock" from OE "hymlic", which in fact has 3 distinct plant referents -- hemlock, bryony, and convolvulus. The latter two are climbing vines, which are not deadly and not infamous for their use in ritual suicide or execution, only hemlock is.

Every reflex in ME has "o", not "i", in the 2nd syllable, so "hymlic" cannot be the right reconstruction, regardless of what species it refers to. But tellingly, some ME reflexes have the 1st syllable with "e" and some with "o/u". Clearly "hemlock" comes from the "e" form, and one or both of the others come from the "o/u" form.

Even more damningly, there's a ME reflex "hemloke", with a final "e", which cannot pop up out of nowhere for no reason at the end of OE "hymlic". There absolutely must have been a final vowel in the OE form, and it must have specifically been "a", in order to weaken into "e" during ME, and then fall out altogether by Eng "hemlock".

Therefore, the OE ancestor of "hemlock" was "hemlāca", which is the only source that regularly evolves into ME "hemloke" and Eng "hemlock". Breaking it down, "hem + lāc + a", where "a" is the weak masculine agent suffix, "lāc" is the process / activity suffix, and "hem" denotes the specific activity. What ever could "hem" refer to? Why, it's the OE root "hem" meaning "definite border", as in "to hem someone in" by drawing a border close around them, or more to the point, the hem of a garment.

Before a hem is put onto a garment, its ends are raw, unfinished, indefinite, and atelic -- extending out for who-knows-however-long. Not forever, but without a clearly defined end-point. By putting a hem on it, this vague indefinite atelic expanse is given a clean, crisp definite final end-point. It is now finished, completed, done-zo. Even more apropos, hemming a garment shortens its length, by folding over a certain amount of the end.

And so, much like the ancient Greek view of the last Fate cutting the thread of a person's life, so the ancient British viewed hemlock as the plant that, if you ingest it, shortens and finishes off the garment of your life. Good ol' gallows-humor in the Germanic languages, even back in ancient times.

What's the point of the suffix "lāc"? To broaden the scope from the instant of hemming, i.e. termination of life, into the entire ceremony or ritual in which this instantaneous act of hemming takes place, just as with "wedlock". Hemlock is "the agent involved in the activity of hemming", namely putting a hem on the ingester's life.

Much like the taboo deformation of "wǣrlāca", "hemlaca" was deformed in the scribal culture, to dilute its poisonous potency. If you say the pure name, you might as well drink the stuff straight. But deform its pronunciation a little bit, and it goes down just as harmlessly as those non-fatal (if annoying) vine species, "hymlic".

But among everyday speakers of English, "hemlaca" never went away. It evolved naturally into "hemloke" and then "hemlock", un-deformed. This makes me suspect that the taboo deformation was not just due to the poisonous nature of the plant, in which case you might think commoners also would avoid speaking its sounds purely. Probably this was related to the same Christianization effort that deformed "warlock", if hemlock's ritualistic use was tied to the region's pagan past. That would only motivate the religious transformers to taboo-deform it, while laypeople had no reason to single this word out, and kept pronouncing it according to the natural sound laws of their language as a whole.

Its most famous ingester was Socrates -- not a pagan Brit, but a pagan nonetheless. Probably the British scribes wanted to stamp out any and all associations with paganism, whether foreign or domestic, that hemlock used to carry.

By un-torturing the data, the words "warlock" and "hemlock" no longer confess to meaning "pledge-liar" or some homophone with harmless vine species. I have restored them to their fully transparent Old English glory, tripling the number of "lāc" survivors.

Why did only "wedlock" escape the scribes' alterations, and become noticed by standard etymologists for what its origins were? Well, what hatred against "wedlock" could the Christian church have had? Nah, let that one slide. But "warlock" and "hemlock"? Time to whip out the taboo-deforminator 3000... And today's clever-sillies, however atheist they may be, are just propping up the purge launched by the lexical crusaders of Dark Age Christendom.

But here amid the Gothic ruins of the blogosphere, this humble cyber-warlock in search of a congregation will continue to see and speak the truth, and guard the heritage of the language of my ancestors.