Cousins German Almain Gennets
19 February 2024
Like most people who've gone through high school, I've read a bit of Shakespeare. I don't mean that I've read a lot of Shakespeare; like most people, I tried to get by while keeping the yawnfest to a minimum. Of course, there were the class readalongs, where disinterested and terribly tongue-tied teens tripped over the troublesome tirades of Titus Andronicus, which made trying to follow along without being driven to the verge of suicide harder than you'd expect. Otherwise, I tended to keep up with the broad strokes and figured the rest out from the movie or the sparknotes.
To cut a long story short, despite my deficiency in bardish soliloquy, there is one passage that's clung to me for the past seven years, from when we read Othello in grade 10:
Zounds, sir, you are one of those that will not serve God if the devil bid you. Because we come to do you service and you think we are ruffians, you'll have your daughter covered with a Barbary horse, you'll have your nephews neigh to you, you'll have coursers for cousins and jennets for germans.
This passage is obviously appealing because of its classic shakespearian crassness, but I was more interested by the linguistic aspect. I'd like to delve a little into the semantics of the joke, and then move on to the etymological root of the word german, and how almain, a synonym, was used in another Shakespeare pun, one employed by prominent politician, among other things, Boris Johnson.
The alliteration in coursers for cousins and jennets for germans
is of course pleasing, but the semantic parallelism between each comparison makes it that much more interesting. The version of the text which we studied in class had glosses for courser, a type of war horse, and jennet, a type of small horse (more or less), and from there it can be inferred that cousin and german have a similar equivalency. In fact, german as a noun means a close relative, or a full brother or sister (OED Online "germane, adj. and n."). You may have already noted that this definition seems to be for "germane", but like most old (read: EModE) words, spellings varied from germeyne
to germain,
iermaine
and yes, german
.
It is a borrowing from the 12th century French adjective germain, denoting a full sibling, and a first degree cousin (germain cosin). The French arrived at that point by means of the latin germānus, itself synthesized from germen + -ānus. Thus, this brotherly german
is ultimately derived for the Latin word for seed.
The origin of the german denoting the people is a bit murkier. According to the OED, it was initially used in the mid-first century B.C. by Julius Caesar, but never by any Germanic peoples until much later. The Reallexikon der germanischen Altertumskunde, a german encyclopedia covering Germanic history and cultures, had the following to say about the name* German:
Scholarly antiquity learned late to separate the Germans from the Celts, who were very similar to them in appearance ... It was only through Caesar that the name Germani became generally used for them - at least among the Romans. ... A much tormented passage from Tacitus deals with the origin of the name Germani, which in any case came to the Romans through Gallic mediation, but from which it emerges with certainty that the name was derived from a small tribe, which had first penetrated across the Rhine onto Gallic soil; these are the Germani cisrhenani of Caesar. Even without this testimony, we would have to conclude from the occurrence of such a small tribe called Germani on the border between the Germans and Celts that a similar process took place here as when the Celts were named Walchen by the Germans, the Germans as Allemands by the French, as Saxar in northern Germany, as Swabians in Hungary and southern Slavs, the Hellenes as Graeci in the Romans.
I would encourage you to read the wiki page on Germani cisrhenani linked above, it goes into much more nuance and detail on the progresson of "German" referring to one particular tribe into the name of an entire nation. For our purposes, however, we need not delve any deeper down this direction.
What this passage suggests is that the two forms of german are not related, because one has latin roots and the other likely has gallic, or at least celtic, roots. This means that it is coincidence that the two words sound the same, which really is not such a big deal at all, since that's how homonyms work... However, I had to make sure for myself, which is why I've been stuck writing this post for the past two months one year. And at the time of writing, there are less than twenty hours until the start of July, marking the start of this essay's third month. It is actually now February 19, 2024 that I am finishing up this post; there wasn't much left to add, but it had been sitting for very long on the backburner, and I've decided enough is enough. Hopefully in future attempts, I will write more quickly.
Now that we can safely disregard the possibility of relationship between the german referring to the people and the one referring to a familial connection, we can look a bit more closely at the uses of the latter, and how it might actually sometimes double up on itself. If we return briefly to the french usage of the word that we looked at earlier, cousin germain, we will also find its corrolaries frère germain and sœur germaine, respectively denoting a full brother or sister. We will overlook the english forms of these because those etymons go back too far in time for us and have no latin influence. Over on the continent, however, it seems that the french frère derives fron latin frater, and sœur from soror, if Le Robert can be trusted. Italian also uses these latin roots for their fratello and sorella. Meanwhile, in Iberia, our good friend germānus is used to denote a sibling, and grammatical gender rules are used to create concord with the subject's actual gender (Spanish: herman{o,a}, Portuguese: irmã(o)). Other kinship terms in Spanish and Portuguese also maintain this structure: hij{o,a}, prim{o,a}, tí{o,a}.
Alas, we are not so fortunate that hermano hermano ("brother-german") exist in Spanish; the world is not so perfect. However, it could definitely work, if only people could understand that the two words spelt in exactly the same way were actually a noun-adjective pair, if only people could be so intelligent...
Let's not lose hope, and instead remember that cousin-german was also a word that used this meaning of german. Indeed, Spanish has the word primo hermano, which has the exact meaning we are after, a germane cousin, a cousin-german. Unfortunately, I cannot find a dictionary like OED or Le Robert for Spanish, that states dates of apparition of words and terms, but Wiktionary seems to think that primo is an inheritance from latin cōnsobrīnus prīmus ("first cousin"), cōnsobrīnus being, of course, the latin for cousin. Now, what I suspect is that the spanish form was introduced from the french, but like I mentioned, I have no idea on the dates of Spanish words, because the Diccionario de la lengua española is very poorly documented...
To go back to Latin, we can see a happy merger of the root words for brother that the neighbouring nations use, in frāter germānus, and here is perhaps where there is the closest to a doubling up in meaning, if only by a couple degrees of separation. I actually heard this phrase first in a historical linguistics course, back in late March, and I was immediately reminded of this very subject, which had been on my mind for a while at that point. And although it still only refers to a full brother, in my heart I read it as brother brother.
Truth be told, this whole "essay", if I may be so bold as to call it by that name, was originally started so that I may get my thoughts in order about the different uses of the derivatives of germānus in the various romance languages. I wanted to wrap my head around how it was used mostly as an adjective in French and English (via Norman), and in Spanish and Portuguese more as a noun, although its adjectival form does exist. I wanted to see how this word that I had previously only thought of as relating to the country Germany was actually used for much more. I think I have figured this part out now. However, when researching this portion of my inquiries, and searching an online Shakespearian bibliography for other occurences of german, I came across something interesting.
There is another reference to Germans in Othello, and incidentally, if I'm right, these two references are the only ones Shakespeare ever made to this nation. This second reference is made again by Iago:
IAGO. I learned it in England, where indeed they are most potent in potting. Your Dane, your German, and your swag-bellied Hollander--drink, ho!--are nothing to your English CASSIO. Is your Englishman so exquisite in his drinking? IAGO. Why, he drinks you with facility your Dane dead drunk. He sweats not to overthrow your Almain. He gives your Hollander a vomit ere the next pottle can be filled.
Here, Iago refers once more to the Germans using first the word "German", and then, to take advantage of the beer pun, "Almain" (Aleman). I think the only textual clue that the pun was deliberate would probably be that he didn't use any alternate names for the other nationalities.
What's interesting about this bit of dialogue is that it was used in a 2005 article by Boris Johnson for The Telegraph, in which he remarks with posh disdain how the rubes in Britain's streets get too rowdy off the booze for his taste. He also lamented "the new species of pissed ladettes" who are very attractive and whose boyfriends want to punch him. But really, the article itself isn't very important.
Truthfully, I have no real idea how or when I came across this article, but I saw it on Google, read it and saw the quote (along with a reference to a piece I didn't recognize about Maenads and Pentheus), and immediately thought of the cousins german line we've already covered. It's really not even a good piece of opinion. So much for that private education, Boris...
Although, now that I think about it, I was also interested because it was strange to me seeing that people really reference things like obtuse Shakespeare quotes in modern writing, if not in a day-to-day setting, even if you have to have gone to Eton to do it. It reminded me of another quote from Johnson, which for the life of me I can't find anymore; it was him in bed, with a camera crew on him with the reporter asking him what he does to fall asleep, and I think he answered something like doing sudokus. You know, fault him for his policies and getting people sick at his private parties or whatever but he's a really funny guy sometimes.
I just think it's a little neat that I noticed the relation between these two generally unexciting things. Words often have multiple meanings, but I guess it's nice that these particular words have such long histories. Shakespeare is surely one of the most cited writers, but being able to spot a quote in the wild, made by a big name (to a degree), is was eventually made me want to put my thoughts on this into words, and to delve deeper into the etymology of these words.
This was the first of hopefully many more longer-format writings I want to continue doing on this weblog. The framework I'm using is pretty simple, so tags or directories aren't implemented, but I want to try to add that functionality myself. And structure it in a fashion similar to Justin Hall's page directory structure. I feel like I could keep this up for a good few years.