tongue

The story

1. Proto-Indo-European · inherited from*dn̥ǵʰwéh₂s“tongue”
2. Proto-Germanic · inherited from*tungǭ“tongue”
3. Proto-West Germanic · inherited from*tungā“tongue”
4. Old English · inherited fromtunge
5. Middle English · inherited fromtongue
6. English todaytongue

From Middle English tongue, a late spelling of tong(e), tung(e), from Old English tunge, from Proto-West Germanic *tungā (“tongue”), from Proto-Germanic *tungǭ (“tongue”), from Proto-Indo-European *dn̥ǵʰwéh₂s (“tongue”). Doublet of langue and lingua. Cognates * Germanic: West Frisian tonge, Dutch tong, Luxembourgish Zong, German Zunge, Danish, Norwegian Bokmål, and Norwegian Nynorsk tunge, Faroese, Icelandic, and Swedish tunga, Gothic 𐍄𐌿𐌲𐌲𐍉 (tuggō). * Italic: Asturian and Catalan llengua, Aragonese luenga, French langue, Galician, Italian, and Latin lingua, Leonese llingua, Mirandese lhéngua, Portuguese língua, Spanish lengua. * Celtic: Irish teanga. * Slavic: Belarusian and Russian язык (jazyk), Bulgarian ези́к (ezík), Czech and Slovak jazyk, Macedonian јазик (jazik), Polish język, Serbo-Croatian jèzik (“tongue”), Slovene jézik, Ukrainian язи́к (jazýk). * Indo-Iranic: Persian زبان (zabân), Sanskrit जि॒ह्वा (jihvā́). Notes * The expected modern spelling, both phonetically and etymologically, would be tung. Using ⟨on⟩ for ⟨un⟩ was fairly common in Middle English; compare e.g. yong (“young”). The final ⟨gue⟩ arose to prevent tonge being misread with a soft /dʒ/. However, this spelling only became common at a time when the final ⟨e⟩ was already largely silent, so it is not clear why it was not simply dropped instead. Perhaps the spelling was influenced directly by Middle French langue (“tongue”). * Noun sense 4 (“a language”) is an ancient metonym, already in use more than one thousand years ago in Old English, going back all the way to Proto-Germanic (the oldest-possible form of English and other tongues), and common across Indo-European languages (cf. Armenian լեզու (lezu), Irish teanga, Latin lingua, Persian زبان (zabān) and Russian язык (jazyk)). Its persistent modern usage, which prevented it from becoming fully archaic or obsolete in favor of the Gallicism language, is likely due to its natural metonymicity and to steady historical reinforcement by Anglo-Norman langue (which had both meanings too) and by, to a lesser extent, native poetic imitation of Latin lingua during the Renaissance.

Words from the same roots