Learn English – Why do Wh question words in English so consistently map to Q words in Latin

etymologylatin

  • Who, Quis
  • What, Quid
  • When, Quando
  • Where, Quo
  • How, Quomodo
  • Why, Cur

There's one exception on each side, but otherwise this pattern is pretty consistent. Is there a linguistic or etymological reason for this?

Best Answer

Both sets of words come from a Proto-Indo-European root *kʷ(o)- that probably marked an interrogative pronoun. In the Germanic languages, Grimm's Law spirantized this *kʷ into /xw/ or /hw/, which later merged with /w/ in many Germanic languages (Dutch wat, German was, Swedish vad, etc.), though not all: English has what (in some dialects still pronounced with and unvoiced /ʍ/), Icelandic has hvað /kvað ~ xvað/, and Norwegian is probably the silliest, having dialectal and lexical variation between /v ~ kv ~ k ~ Ø/ (the last only before back vowels).

In Latin, *kʷ remained in most words as /kw/ (written ⟨qu⟩), so we have quis, quod, quam, etc. from this root. Cūr is from the same root, but before a high back vowel /u/ the labial element in /kw/ was usually lost in Latin, so early Latin quōr /kwoːr/ (which regularly became quūr /kwuːr/) yielded cūr /kuːr/. Even where Latin kept the labial element in /kw/, though, it usually (though not always) disappeared in the Romance languages, the daughter languages of Latin, leaving just a /k/ as in Spanish que, Italian che, French quand, etc.

 

In the other branches of Indo-European languages, the development was generally as follows:

Greek: in the largest dialect group, Ionic-Attic, PIE /kʷ/ (mostly) became /t/ before front vowels (τίς tis ‘who’, τί ti ‘what’) and /p/ elsewhere (ποῦ ‘where’). In some other dialects, it (at least sometimes) turned into /k/.

Balto-Slavic: In Slavic it generally resulted in /k/ before back vowels and č /tʃ/ before front vowels (Old Church Slavonic čьto ‘what’, kъto ‘who’); in Baltic generally /k/ everywhere (cf. Lithuanian kas ‘who, what’).

Celtic: It became /k/ in Goidelic (Old Irish cia ‘who’, cid ‘what’) and /p/ in Brythonic and Continental Celtic (Old Welsh pwy ‘who’, pa ‘what’).

Indo-Iranian: In Sanskrit it was mostly generalised to /k/ (कः kaḥ ‘who’, किम kim ‘what’), though it should have yielded /c/ before front vowels; in Iranian there was no such generalisation, and it generally became /k/ before back vowels and /tʃ/ before front vowels (Avestan kō ‘who’, čim ‘what’)

Others: In Hittite and Tocharian, it remained /kʷ/ (Tocharian kus, kᵤse /kʷse/ ‘who’, Hittite kui-/kue-/kuu̯a- /kʷi-, kʷe-, kʷa-/). In Armenian it seems to have been irregularly weakened to /h/, which was subsequently lost: the generalized stem հի- hi- became ի- i-, found in words like ինչկ inč’ ‘what’.

[From StoneyB's comment:] Scots English employed /xw/ at least into the 16th century—and spelled it ‹quh›. See this question.

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