Is there an English cognate with German Stick (as in Stickstoff) and Dutch stik (as in stikstof)?
What's the absolutely literal calque of Stickstoff/stikstof meaning nitrogen?
Learn English – What’s the English cognate with German “Stick” and Dutch “stik”
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The reasoning for this etymology is as follows: A Dutch door comes in two equal parts; if you split the check with your boy- or girlfriend (I am fairly sure that originally "going Dutch" was not used for large parties, but only for going out on dates), that also comes out to two equal parts.
As John Lawler remarks in the comments, the real etymology is more likely to be derived from the derogatory epithet where Dutch is used to mean thrifty, cheap.
English has—twice—gone through a phonetic change that has caused some upheaval in these pronouns.
The initial consonant
Originally, all of them (in Proto-Germanic) started with /ʍ/, that is, an unvoiced /w/. This is still found in some English dialects today; in Ireland and Scotland, for example, most people pronounce ‘wile (away the time)’ as [waɪl], but ‘while’ as [ʍaɪl]. This sound is a voiceless labio-velar approximant, meaning it is pronounced with the lips round (labial) and with the back of the tongue moved up towards the the soft palate (velar).
Dissimilation
However, in the earliest stages of English, when this sound came before a rounded high or mid-high back vowel (i.e., [o] or [u]), which are also both labial and velar to a certain extent, it kind of became ‘too much’ for the speakers. Too much labialness, at least. So they dissimilated the sounds: /ʍo/ and /ʍu/ became /ho/ and /hu/.1
At that time, the word that is now ‘how’ was simply /ʍuː/, which of course turned into /huː/. The word that is now ‘who’ was /ʍaː/, and since that had a front vowel, it was not affected and remained as it was.
By the time they started writing down English, this change had already happened, so they wrote ‹hu› (‹hū›) and ‹hwa› (‹hwā›).
Vowel changes
Later on, English went through the Great Vowel Shift, which is basically a lot of the vowels moving about a bit. /uː/ regularly became [au] (like in German), and /aː/ usually became [oː]. Once this had happened, of course, the underlying, phonemic form /huː/ was pronounced [hau] or [haʊ], and there was no longer any clue whatsoever that it had once started with a /ʍ/.
The vowel shift also meant that earlier /ʍaː/ became /ʍoː/, written now ‹who› or ‹hwo›. This form then fell prey to the same dissimilation that had happened centuries earlier to /ʍuː/. /ʍoː/ became [hoː].
Later on, through a somewhat spurious and irregular change, the vowel in [hoː] became raised so that we end up with what we have today, which is pronounced [huː], but still written ‹who›.
And of course, in most dialects of Modern English, the distinction between voiced /w/ and unvoiced /ʍ/ has been lost, just like it was in German and Dutch several hundred years before.2
Several words for why
It is true that German has several words that can all be translated as ‘why’ (you mention wieso, weshalb, and warum). This doesn’t actually mean that English used to have these too, and just lost them—rather the opposite.
All Germanic languages have the possibility of creating compounds from interrogative pronouns by adding one of two things:
- Intensifiers and other pragmatic markers
- Preposition (or noun in the dative case, meaning ‘in the manner of X’)
English makes good use of the first (such words as who(so)ever, where(soe)ver, what(so)ever, why(so)ever), but more limited use of the second (wherefore, whereto, whereby, etc., all of which in addition belong to a somewhat more formal register).
German does it the other way around. I’m no great shakes at German, but apart from wieso I can’t actually think of any examples from the first category. In the second category, however, just about any preposition can be added to an interrogative stem.
Wieso is literally ‘why-so’, just like in English whysoever, except without -ever.
Weshalb contains wes, an old genitive form of was ‘what’ and wer ‘who’ (corresponding to English whose, which is the genitive of ‘who’ and ‘what’) + an old noun Halbe ‘half, side, direction’. So the original meaning was ‘in/on the direction/side/part of what?’.
Warum contains an old interrogative wâr, which has nowadays become wo ‘where’ + the preposition um ‘about, because of’. So the original meaning was ‘because of what’ (identical to ‘wherefore’, just with a different preposition).
By adding prepositions to the basic interrogative, German can create extremely specific wh-words; this is indeed not quite possible in English. For example, wozwischen ‘between what?’ is perfectly fine in German, but wherebetween (or wheretwixt if you want to be a bit Shakespearean) does not work in English.
But of original, shared, words for ‘why’ between German and English, there is only really one: wie in German (which has now come to mean ‘how’, rather than ‘why’, except in wieso) and why in English. The rest are later innovations in both German and English.
1 This is a very common phenomenon in many languages. Compare how in Latin /kʷo/ and /kʷu/ (written as ‹quo› and ‹quu›, respectively) often become /ko/ and /ku/ if there’s another labial element nearby: coquō ‘I cook’, for example, represents and earlier *quoquō.
2 Similarly, the East Nordic languages (Danish, Swedish, and some dialects in Norway) have lost the distinction, but the West Nordic languages (Icelandic, Faroese, and some western dialects in Norway) have retained it. In Old Norse, /w/ became /v/, though, and the original /ʍ/ has now mostly become [kv] (from an earlier [hv] or [χv]) where it is retained.
Best Answer
Yes, there is a cognate: stick (as in stick out or stick a needle in someone).
The German and Dutch words (as well as Scandinavian equivalents like Danish kvælstof and Swedish kväve) are derived from verbs meaning ‘smother, stifle, strangle’, since nitrogen cannot sustain fire, but ‘smothers’ it. So a literal calque would be ‘smother element’.
The German and Dutch verbs are cognates; I'll just focus on the German one here. The verb in German is ersticken, which is an er- extension to the base verb stecken (not as one might expect sticken, which is a different, though related, verb). Stecken means ‘stick’ in various different senses related to putting something in some place or into a hole (sticking a nail in a wall, etc.) or fastening something (making it stick); it is in origin the causative of stechen, which means ‘be sharp, sting, prick’. So if a nurse injects a needle into your arm, the needle sticht you, the nurse sticht you, and the nurse steckt the needle into your arm.
Etymologically, all these verbs are of course related, in quite complex ways. Stecken in Modern German represents a merger in Middle High German of two verbs that were in Old High German distinct (though very similar), which Duden quotes as stecchen ‘stick/adhere to, fasten to’ and stecchēn ‘stick into, pierce’. Of these, the latter is the original causative (Old High German verbs in -ēn generally come from Proto-Germanic *-janą, which was the standard causative ending in the infinitive). Of course, it’s not really a true causative at all (a true causative of ‘be sharp’ would be ‘make sharp’ or ‘sharpen’), but the causative in Germanic was quite a broad concept, and there are many morphological causatives that aren’t semantical causatives.
I haven’t seen any conclusive explanations on the development from sticking/pricking/sharpness to strangling or suffocating. In fact the DWDS etymology for the verb ersticken pronounces itself uncertain:
My own personal guess would be that it could be connected to the sharp, stinging sensation you experience when you don’t have access to enough oxygen to satisfy your system: when exercising, when out of breath, when diving (without aqualungs) and drowning, at high altitudes, and importantly also when undergoing asphyxiation. In German, this sensation is called Seitenstechen, an exact equivalent to English side stitch (‘stitch’ being also in English closely related to the noun ‘stick’—Scandinavian languages have equivalent expressions as well), so on some level there is a common Germanic connection between stinging/pricking/being sharp and the results of not being able to breathe.
So although English hasn’t developed a verb based on ‘stick’ that means ‘suffocate, etc.’, the most exact etymological cognate of the Dutch/German words is stick, and a purely formal cognate equivalent to Stickstoff is ‘stick stuff’. I wouldn’t recommend that you start referring to nitrogen as ‘stick stuff’, though.
1 I’m not the world’s best translator of German, but something like: “The semantic connection is unclear. Are we to assume that ersticken [suffocate] is from ‘killing through multiple stabs’ (cf. MHG si lāgen ersticket und verdorben ‘they lay stabbed and rotten/ruined’), with subsequent semantic shift to ‘die (from lack of air), kill (through deprivation of air)’ (as ¹DWB 10, 2, 2, 2742 assumes)? Or did ‘stick, plug into’ lead to the notion of ‘taking away someone’s breath through ‘plugging up’ their windpipe’ (cf. MHG ersticken und erworgen begunde er an dem beine), thus ‘getting your breath stuck and giving up the ghost’ with subsequent (and in Early Modern German extended) transitive usage?”