Gabriel Bertilson writes,

Cognates have always fascinated me. They’re similar because they came from the same original word, yet different because they went through the sound changes of their own languages. In this post I’ll compare the word for cheese in English and German and explore how each came to be.

The English word is, of course, cheese, and the German word Käse. The word they both originate from is the Latin c?seus.

The first thing to note is the difference between the vowel in the English and German and the vowel in the Latin. Why don’t we have chase and Kase, with long a’s?

The answer lies in Germanic philology, in the process of i-mutation. I-mutation is the change of a vowel (back vowels fronted, front vowels raised) because of an i in the following syllable. In Old English (the English language before the Norman Conquest in 1066 and its influence by French), for example, a turned to æ; e turned to i; o turned to e; u turned to y, etc.

The word for cheese in Old English was originally *??si. This changed first to ?éasi through breaking (I don’t completely understand why it happened in this case), and then to ?íese/?ýse through i-mutation.

In Old High German the word was kâsi, kêsi. The same i-mutation that occurred in the Old English word occurred in this word, but is preserved in the orthography of modern German, with ä representing a with i-mutation or umlaut.

The second thing to note is the difference between the first consonant sound of the English word and the first of the German. The English has the ch sound; the German has the k.

The reason for this was a process in Old English called palatalization. By it, an original Proto-Germanic k sound would change to a ch sound. One of the places this happened was before the front vowels (æ, e, i, ea, eo, ie/y). Since the vowel in the Old English word for cheese was one of these, the c before it was palatalized. (In this post palatalized c is indicated by the c with a dot over it: ?. Hopefully it’ll show up properly in the font you’re using.)

A palatal consonant is one pronounced with the middle of the tongue against the hard palate. The only examples of this in American English are our consonantal y, the h in hue, and the lli in million. In English English (well, more specifically, Received Pronunciation), there are more: the t in tune, the d in duke, and the n in new.

The ch sound in English is not technically an example of that sound, but the process by which a sound changes to it is still called palatalization. This isn’t necessarily without reason, though, since the alternative would be postalveolarization. Yuck.

But there’s one question still to be asked: Why do we have Old English ?íese/?ýse and yet not have Modern English chise? The reason is that ?íese/?ýse is from the West Saxon dialect of Old English, but the Modern English word originates from the Anglian dialect’s version of the word, ?ése.

And so is my post brought to a close. Hope you enjoyed it, and, even better, learned something new from it. G’day.