It occurred to me to wonder why we use hubris rather than hybris as the anglicization of Greek ὕβρις, so of course I went to the OED. Alas, the entry is from 1933 and doesn’t address the issue, but it does say “compare hybris n.” So it turns out there’s a word hybris (entry also from 1933), whose definition is “=hubris n.”! Why on earth are there two separate entries? For what it’s worth, here are the first citations for each, though I’m sure they can be antedated:
1884 Boys of good family, who have always been toadied, and never been checked, who are full of health and high spirits, develop what Academic slang knows as hubris, a kind of high-flown insolence.
Daily News 28 October (Ware)1920 During one of these the oppressor, possessed of place and power, imagined in his hybris, that he might extend his arm across the ocean.
Public Opinion 27 August 195/2
The etymology of the Greek word has been considered mysterious; a new suggestion by Romain Garnier and Benoît Sagot (in their paper A shared substrate between Greek and Italic) was quoted by PlasticPaddy in this comment:
5.1.2 Gr. ὕβρις ‘arrogance, haughtiness, etc.’
Gr. ὕβρις [f.] ‘arrogance, haughtiness, exorbitance, violence, offence, abuse’, at-
tested from Homer on, is mentioned by Chantraine et al. (2009: 1110) as being
without etymology and by Beekes (2010: 1524–1525) as having “no certain explanation”. Yet Chantraine indicates that “some Hellenists have probably thought of comparing this word with ὑπέρ, which would be semantically satisfactory but remains impossible.”We believe this comparison actually holds. We start from the PIE adverb *(h₁)upér-i ‘above’ (cf. Ved. upári ‘id.’ and Ger. über < Com. Germ. *uβeri ‘id.’). Applying the Verner-like lenition followed by the systematic barytonesis, such an adverb would yield Substr. *úβeri. Once borrowed as Com. Gr. *húberi, this adverb could have served as the basis for the Hom. Gr. present participle ὑβρίζων, -οντος ‘who exhibits an overbearing spirit or demeanour’ after dactylisation, whence Classical Gr. ὑβρίζω ‘to outrage, insult, maltreat’. In turn, this participle could have yielded a derived noun ὑβριστής ‘arrogant person’. Gr. ὑβρίζων, -οντος would also have served as the basis for the back-formed noun ὕβρις.
Not convincing, but worth knowing about — thanks, PP!
The spelling of kudos in English is similar, and the word was apparently introduced in the same milieu.
Ah, a useful comparison — I’ll bet you’re right.
Quoth wikipedia: “Thumos, also spelled Thymos (Greek: θυμός), is the Ancient Greek concept of” blah blah blah. You can look at the google ngram viewer to track the relative prevalence of the y-variant and the u-variant in the relevant corpus over time. But wikipedia is treating the u-variant as normative – if you look for the y-variant it redirects you there.
Yeah, the u-variant is normative for hubris as well; my question was why.
“Not convincing” taken separately or not convincing even in the context of the paper’s broader theory of an IE substrate language with some otherwise unknown or differently commingled sound changes?
Whether “impossible” I couldn’t say, and what some Hellenists previously “probably thought” is vague, but hyper, haughtiness before a fall seems to me stronger than merely “semantically satisfactory.”
“Not convincing” taken separately or not convincing even in the context of the paper’s broader theory of an IE substrate language with some otherwise unknown or differently commingled sound changes?
To my mind, the putative existence of a substrate language does not justify treating it (and the sound changes invented for it) as a convincing source of etymologies. But I am a notorious hard-shell on this matter.
I could certainly solve many of the problems involved in Western Oti-Volta with a nice substrate language. It would have no grammatical gender and either an extremely regular system of aspect flexion or none at all. It would lack contrastively nasalised vowels, with only five basic vowels, and would also lack any palatal stops. On the other hand, it clearly had contrastively glottalised vowels. We can even reconstruct some basic vocabulary, like “water”, “year”, “horse” …
No such language actually exists in the region, but that, of course, is because it was totally submerged by waves of Oti-Volta speakers during the expansion of the Mossi-Dagomba empires. However, we can securely reconstruct all this from the distinctive features of Western Oti-Volta compared with the rest of Oti-Volta …
It’s all so simple …
Similarly, the true explanation of the Atakora linguistic area is that Miyobe was formerly spoken all over northwest Benin … here, we even have the actual substrate language still spoken in the mountain region. Exciting!
Hat: To my mind, the putative existence of a substrate language does not justify treating it (and the sound changes invented for it) as a convincing source of etymologies.
I agree, but it’s also a matter of degree of belief in the substrate and its purported features. It’s not very different from positing borrowing of unattested words from thinly attested languages – Latin from its various neighbors, Italian from Lombard, French from Gaulish, etc.
Yeah, and I don’t put much reliance in those, either.
You need an entry for hybris in the OED so that people who come across the word and don’t associate it with hubris can find an entry.
As to why not hybris or cydus (for kudos), could it be that we took them into English directly from Greek, without them having made a stop in Latin in between, as did (I imagine, without having looked) cycle, myth, cyst, etc?
But we aren’t very consistent with this sort of thing. Cinema but kinetics etc. (But that may be because cinema(tograph) came through French.)
Cinema
I’ve always pronounced this “kye-NEE-mah” in order to annoy my wife and children.
I think it was Nancy Mitford who rightly pointed out that “SINNamah” is the name of some nasty vegetable. “Now eat up all your nice cinema, chidren, or you won’t be allowed any pudding.”
Does the representation of υ by English <u> come merely from their visual similarity?
I’ve always pronounced this “kye-NEE-mah” in order to annoy my wife and children.
As I said back in 2013:
That was apparently pre-Eddyshaw; at least, you didn’t weigh in at the time.
Well, I would have weighed in in 1920, but I wasn’t talking to Shaw at that point because of his disrespectful portrait of me in The Doctor’s Dilemma. We did eventually become reconciled after his very belated apology. I am not one who holds a grudge, at least not for more than a couple of decades, tops. Life is too short.
@Y: I think it comes from a phase where people were overeager to return to an imagined pure classicism. In fairness the English u = /ju:/ isn’t the worst adaptation of the old upsilon, although this fails in kudos which is usually pronounced yodless. (And of course the traditional alternative /aɪ/ would have no discernible relation to the Greek phonetics, but it doesn’t really try to justify itself on those grounds.)
“Hubris” reminds me of what have been called “Grotesque” transcriptions of Greek, but it sounds like George’s floruit was too early
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Grote
and he was anyway more a historian than a literature guy.
I’m not sure how far his approach caught on, though I certainly have encountered 19th and early 20th century works in English that scrupulously avoided the traditional Latinising transcriptions.
Surely I once happened to see a bit of a black-and-white Alec Guinness comedy, less surely The Lavender Hill Mob, where a fussy RP-speaking character says “kinema”.
Sounds like Miss Lopsided herself (from The Ladykillers.)
Must watch that again …
Hey, I just learned that hybrid is a hybrid!
Well, “calque” is a loanword, but “loanword” is a calque.
“why we use hubris rather than hybris” — I was going to suggest that spelling hybris might invite confusion with hybrid. Trond’s info suggests the 1884 Daily News was trying to undo the same 2000yo mistake.
The use of k is pretty common in later scholarly borrowings from Ancient Greek as in koine, krater, kylix, and Nike, none of which seems to predate the nineteenth century. (This is of course a separate issue from the rare cases where Latin itself used k as in Kyrie.)
But the use of u for original upsilon seems to be much rarer – for example, we have kylix instead of *kulix. Scanning for other examples apart from hubris and kudos, I found doru, hupaithric/upaithric, and muron, which seem to be rarer variants of dory, hypaethral, and myron respectively.
That said, you can sometimes see u for upsilon in some earlier borrowings of Ancient Greek into Latin, so for example Sibulla is a variant in Latin for Sibylla.
It goes without saying that you’re not including words that had diphthongs in Greek, such as “euphemism” and “utopia”. Other words with “u” are the names of the letters mu, nu, and of course upsilon. Wikipedia mentions “kubernetes”, which apparently is only the name of popular software.
Other words with “u” are the names of the letters mu, nu, and of course upsilon.
Or are the spellings with upsilon modern?
languagehat: Alas, the entry is from 1933
First entered in 1933, but what you see online is from Burchfield’s 1976 Supplement, as you can tell by the quotations up to the 1960s and 70s. In fact, the 1933 entries gave more of an indication of why they’re separate entries: they have slightly different definitions, etymologies, and usage labels.
I guess by the 1970s “hubris” wasn’t limited to student slang and there was no longer any difference in shades of meaning, if there ever was, but Burchfield shouldn’t have removed the usage label — he should have just changed “chiefly” to “originally”. (I had no idea it was that recent in English; I would’ve guessed it was a Renaissance borrowing.)
Nevertheless, since the different spellings have different pronunciations — HYOO-briss vs. HIGH-briss — I think that’s at least some reason for separate entries. Burchfield also put the tramlines indicating “alien or not fully naturalized” on “hubris” only, not “hybris”, if that means anything.
As far as I can tell, the ‘arrogance’ meaning in English became popular in the mid-late 19th century.
The etymology of the Greek word has been considered mysterious
Merriam-Webster calls Greek hýbris “of uncertain origin” but adds an extended note on a proposal from 2004 connecting it with hḗbē ‘youth, vigor of youth, sexual maturity’:
You need an entry for hybris in the OED so that people who come across the word and don’t associate it with hubris can find an entry.
No, for that you only need a cross-reference line (in the print version) or an entry in the forms list (automatically searched in the online version). Languagehat was wondering why there are two separate *full* entries, each with its own pronunciation and list of quotations.
With the case of Gaulish or Lombardic, the case seems a bit different, and (despite LH’s misgivings) on considerably better footing. Mostly because while those languages themselves are only marginally attested (extremely so, in the case of Lombardic), they’re closely related to languages we do know very well. Especially for Gaulish, it’s not terribly hard to reconstruct unattested words on the basis of Insular cognates, since we have a pretty good understanding of what the phonological correspondences are. Lombardic is a bit vaguer, since usually the best we can say is “probably pretty similar to general Upper German”, but we’re still a lot better off than with hypothetical contact languages that are posited solely on the basis of their supposed influences on attested languages.
No – other than preclassical Latin, they’re limited to English.
Well, it would be a lot simpler than this “Crotonian” is. Garnier & Sagot postulate that their hypothetical language family was IE, so it’s anchored to reality on both ends – on one side the borrowings into Greek, Latin (mostly but not always Classical) and Slavic, on the other side the textbook reconstructions of PIE. This allowed them to postulate a whole ordered series of conditioned sound changes (a lot more than Holzer did for his “Temematic”, which tried to explain a few of the same words in pretty much the same way); and that, in turn, makes it hard to impossible for them to just attribute any unclear Greek or Latin word to Crotonian, because some of those simply can’t be derived from PIE through that sequence.
The authors themselves contrast this to the abovementioned Beekes’s “Pre-Greek”, which Beekes claimed to be 1) the source of every even mildly mysterious Greek word, 2) neither IE nor anything else known to science, and 3) endowed with a huge sound system that you can pick cherries from to explain every variation between Greek dialects (or of course within them).
Well, define “convincing”. To me it’s a matter of degrees, and much of Crotonian seems to me more parsimonious than any alternative proposal yet made.
Or are the spellings with upsilon modern?
No – other than preclassical Latin, they’re limited to English.
To clarify, Wikipedia says the letter names were spelled with upsilon in ancient times, e.g., “The name of the letter is written νῦ in Ancient Greek and traditional Modern Greek polytonic orthography, while in Modern Greek it is written νι [ni].” If that’s right, “mu” and “nu” are words that were written with upsilon in ancient times and with u, not y, in English. And of course “upsilon” is another.
Learned hybris vs. slang hubris reminds me of nous /nuːs/ vs. /naʊs/
According to OED, the usual pronunciation of nous in BrE rhymes with mouse, but the AmE pronunciation sounds like noose.
I’m a Yank, and I rhyme it with mouse. But I wouldn’t have thought it was a natural part of any American’s vocabulary.
I’d intuitively say it like noose, but my exposure to the word is rare and written-only. A word that comes to me for that meaning is seichel, although I’d basically only use that with my mother (who isn’t Jewish, but likes to use a lot of Yiddishisms from my late father).
and, similarly to ὕβρις, שׂכל opens up a worm-can of transliteration variation, from germanizing “seichel” to YIVO “seykhl” (and note the diacritic on the first letter, which refoyl includes in his dictionary – where i checked the spelling – but is rather unusual to see in yiddish in the wild).
I would (as a Yank) guess sounds-like-noose over rhymes-with-mouse for a moderately Anglicized pronunciation but I don’t know that I’ve ever heard or said it out loud. Although I’ve heard the derived adjective “noetic” probably more than most, because there are Byzantine hymns in my parish choir’s repertoire originally written in such “thick” theological-register Greek that there’s no less-fancy word that’s plausible to use in translation.
I knew it in Greek (where I pronounce it “noose”, naturally) before I ever realised that my father’s nous-rhymes-with-mouse was actually the same word. I only connected them when I saw it written down in an English context. (I was a slow child …)
I don’t think it’s all that rare in UK English, at least in my father’s generation. (The only Greek he knows is modern Greek.)
I think the rhymes-with-mouse thing reflects the regular old public school pronunciation of classical Greek, but I haven’t got my copy of Vox Graeca with me at present to check.
I think the rhymes-with-mouse thing reflects the regular old public school pronunciation of classical Greek
It definitely does, and therefore I use it. None of your modern “correct” pronunciations for me!
Mind you, I say “noos” when actually reading Greek; we’re talking about the word as adopted into English.
I regret that by the time I was taught Latin and Greek in the decadent 1980’s the teachers had all switched over to some “correct” conjectural reconstruction of old-timey supposedly-authentic pronunciation rather than sticking with the 19th-century UK “public school” pronunciation that didn’t give a fig what the old-timey dead pagans might have actually sounded like because goshdarnit it was a living language.
The blog/newsletter, The Daily Nous, recommends a pronunciation close to “noose”:
> Daily Nous began on Friday, March 7, 2014. The name of the blog includes an ancient Greek word, nous, meaning “intellect” or “understanding,” that is sort of pronounced like “news,” and so “Daily Nous” sounds a bit like “daily news.”
The author is American, so there’s no yod in “news.”
From `An old-fashioned bird christmas’ [Galaxy, Dec 1961], linked at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_St._Clair. :
But if Nous . . . but if Nous . . . but if Nous, that enormous and some-how enigmatic power that operated from the far side of 3,000 A.D. … if Nous had decided to stretch out its arm against her and Clem, there wasn’t a chance in the world that she and the Reverend would continue to live…
[We learn later that {\it Nous, Infinite} is `responsible for maintaining the difference in potential between the earth and the ionosphere . …’,
If we were still collecting English words with <u> for Ancient Greek upsilon, I’d mention “bruxism”. Etymonline says, ‘”grinding the teeth unconsciously,” 1932, from Greek ebryxa, aorist root of brykein “to gnash the teeth,” which is of uncertain origin.’