The word "lord" comes from a term that literally means "person who guards the bread", approximately like "loaf-ward" or "loaf-guard".
The word "lady" comes from a term that means "person who kneads the bread". Damn, girlboss.
In conclusion, old timey Bri'ish people fuckin' loved bread I guess.
oh gosh last year i read this book that was about old english vocabulary and what it revealed about daily life in the early middle ages, it was called the wordhord: daily life in old english
oh sounds neat! in this case i'm guessing that bread-making was a common domestic activity and was used as metonymy for referring to all the domestic duties associated with women at that time, and "lords" were metaphorically protecting the home in general
ya that sounds like a reasonable explanation! i think there was even a whole section on bread in the book hehe
"loaf-ward" or "loaf-guard"
Weren't "ward" and "guard" actually the same word at some point? Cuz like, English imported words from two dialects of French and sometimes we got two versions of the same word? And w-/gu- was one of those regional differences. Same with guarantee/warranty, and also apparent in war vs guerre.
... and now I guant to do A Bit of applying that transformation to more guords.
they were, yeah. I gave both ward and loaf because ward is closer phonetically to the original root in "lord", but i thought more people would recognize "guard" because "ward" could be misinterpreted as "in the direction of"
there's also a bunch of names with the w/gu thing, like Guillermo (cognate to William)
huh wiktionary says "Memo" as a nickname for Guillermo is equivalent to English "Liam", I guess based on the fact that they're both based on the second half of the William-equivalent, but seems like a stretch to me
Yeah I'm gonna join you in disagreement there. Liam has become a full-blown name in its own right, while Bill and Memo are both still seen as informal variants. Like someone named Bill would write "William" on official documents, but someone named Liam would not.
