The year is new and young. Everything else is old

The year is new and young. Everything else is old

Happy New Year and welcome back! First of all, I wish to thank those who commented on the last post of 2024 and those who sent me emails about the words jolly and Yule. I still think that the first sounds of jolly and Yule are incompatible. I have not read Alexander Hislop’s book The Two Babylons (many thanks for the reference), but I will do so before 2025 becomes old. This is my first New Year resolution. On the face of it, the Chaldee etymology of Yule has moderate appeal. For the fun of it, I would like to refer to a letter of a Dutch correspondent that appeared in Notes and Queries in May 1868. He mentioned the Dutch verb jolen (at that time, it was spelled differently), pronounced with the vowel of English Yule. He glossed the verb with “to revel, make merry.” Dutch jolen is a sound-imitative word, like English yell, yawl, and a few others. It would be nice to suggest that Yule was a time of jubilation, yelling ~ yawling for joy, and so forth, but this “suggestion” is hopeless. Finally, in my post, I mentioned Greek epsía as a word of unknown origin. Its root (psía) is related to the root of psyche “breath, spirit,” and it is this root that is of dubious origin.

And now to business. 2024 is gone. It is an old year. Why then (I am asking it tongue in cheek) is 2025 new, rather than young? For example, a newborn baby is of course a newcomer, but its main feature is its tender youth, rather than newness. Obviously, language views every next year as a replacement for the old one. Isn’t it puzzling? 2025, for example, was not substituted for 2024. Incidentally, “old” is also a complex notion. For instance, Latin vetus (its root is discernible in English veteran) referred to things that have succumbed to age (that is, things decrepit, dilapidated). When this epithet was applied to living creatures, it had the sense “feeble, infirm.” By contrast, senex (related to English senile) served as a stylistically neutral antonym of the word juvenis “young.” English juvenile will be mentioned below, and old too will be discussed. Naturally, both veteran and senile reached English via French.

As always, we would like to know why an ancient root like vet-, from wet-, made people think of old age. And as always, once we leave the area of sound-imitative and sound-symbolic words, we receive no answer. Yet we can sometimes notice curious associations. For example, in this case, we observe that the complex (or root) wet– regularly occurs in the names of animals. English wether, which occasionally turns up in this blog but is familiar to few modern speakers (unless they know the tongue twister “I wonder whether the wether will weather the weather or whether the weather the wether will kill”) means “a gelded ram,” apparently, “yearling,” because animals were gelded at the end of their first year. Latin vitilus “calf” (and unexpectedly, “heifer”) belongs with English wether.

Did the history of words sharing the root vet– (or wet-) begin with domestic cattle or with watching the calendar? We don’t know. In any case, let us repeat: no sound imitation or sound symbolism is detectable in the root, and we are left with a bunch of related words, a familiar handful of etymological dust. It would be nice if a time machine could carry us tens of thousands of years back and allow us to witness a farmer calling his young animals wet-wet-wet. Then everything would have become clear and we could have asked the man (naturally, in Proto-Proto-Indo-European) why wet-wet-wet had been chosen as a call to his grazing heifers and calves. Such a time machine is not yet available, and this is a blessing in disguise, because if it existed, the few etymologists who are still employed would have lost their jobs, and there would have been no need for this blog (the latter event would have been a catastrophe of global dimensions).

Curiously, on a more serious note, speakers avoided the connection, so obvious to etymologists. In the languages in which words like vetus referred to old age, they never referred to “year.” The opposite is also true. English offers a good example: the root of the word year (about which I’ll write a detailed essay next week) has nothing to do with old.

Let us now turnto old. As behooves such a venerable word, it has been known in English and Germanic for millennia. If we disregard the phonetic differences, we’ll see (or rather, hear) that it sounded the same in medieval Scandinavian, Old High German, and elsewhere. There is no need to cite the forms. The Gothic word was also very close, but it had some peculiarities that are of no importance in the present context. The German for “old” is alt, and the root of our adjective was al-, as in Gothic alan “to grow.” Even better matches are Old Icelandic ala “to beget” and Old English alan “to nourish.” Old emerges as “grown, fed properly.”

The opposites of old are new and young. Our year is new, and for the moment, this will be our point of departure. The adjective new, like old, goes back to hoary antiquity. Once, the adverb nu existed, and English now is its descendant. It sounds like an interjection for encouragement (nu-nu! “go ahead!”), but whether such is the origin of now remains unknown. Yet the link between new and now is certain. This link makes perfect sense: that is new which we now see before our eyes.

And now a few remarks about the adjective young, the aforementioned synonym of new. (Don’t forget: this essay has been inspired by the celebration of the New Year.) Young, like old, is another ancient adjective. Its Latin cognate is iuvencus, partly recognizable in English from juvenile and juvenilia (the second word means “works produced in one’s youth”). The origin of young has been a matter of debate for a very long time. Since new has its source in the adverb nu, perhaps young (from the older form iung) goes back to the ancient adverb iu “already.” But why already? Who waits for youth? Or perhaps young is akin to the root of Latin aevum “age, life” (think of English medieval ~ mediaeval “pertaining to the Middle Ages”). If so, then young should be understood (from an etymological point of view) as “full of stamina, endurance, vitality.” The other suggestions known to me are not worth mentioning. Young, unlike old, is a word of “contested origin.”

As we can see, the New Year will again be full of riddles and will not allow lovers of etymology to feel bored. New, young, old! And as promised, next Wednesday, we’ll look at the history of the word year and leave all the celebrations behind, regardless of whether you use the Julian or the Gregorian calendar.

_{Featured image by Matheus Bertelli via Pexels.}

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