At your service

Spring has finally arrived here in southern Ontario, and among the many trees bursting into bloom is the serviceberry. I snapped the one above outside my local library a few days ago.

It got me wondering, why is it called a serviceberry? Of service to whom?

Turns out that it has nothing at all to do with the common word "service", which is derived from the Latin servus (slave).

The tree in question, Amelanchier to give it its botanical name, is very common in North America, and when English-speaking settlers arrived, they noticed a similarity between its fruit and the fruit of a tree they knew back home, a relative of the pear.

Way back in Anglo-Saxon times, that tree, Pyrus domestica, and its fruit, had been called a syrfe. By the 1400s, syrfe had morphed into serve and the plural had become servys. But after another century, people, possibly confused by the arrival of the other "service" from French, forgot that servys was already a plural and started to talk about eating "services" and to call the tree a "service tree". A similar evolution happened with the word "quince".

This was just in time for English speakers to migrate to North America and discover the Amelanchier, whose fruit looked like the berries of the service tree. As was the case with much flora and fauna (e.g. "robin", which is a red-breasted wren in England and a much larger red-breasted thrush in North America), it was just easier to apply a name for a similar European species than to think up a new name. So the North American shrub was baptized "serviceberry".

But in Western Canada, Amelanchier goes by a different name altogether: saskatoon.

This name is derived from Cree misâskwatômina. I am grateful to Cree scholar Arok Wolvengrey for the following explanations:

One interpretation of this could be "the tree with many branches", constituted from /mis-/ "big, much, plenty" + /-âskwatw/ "branch". (If you look at my picture of my local serviceberry, this is a very apt description of the tree's growth habit.) 

Another interpretation is that the compound word should be analysed as coming from /mis-/ "big, much, plenty" + /-âskw-/ "wood" + /atw-/ "arrow". The branches of the saskatoon bush were much prized for their suitability for making arrows. It is, therefore, the "shrub/bush that produces a lot of arrow wood".

It's very common in the Prairies to find pies, jams, syrups, and so on made from saskatoons, which look like blueberries and have a somewhat similar taste. I haven't seen any serviceberry products in Ontario, though. Perhaps I should go berry picking later this summer on a visit to my library.


For the stories behind names of other plants you might find in your garden, please click here:
https://katherinebarber.blogspot.com/2016/06/gardening-related-wordlady-posts.html

Herb or Erb?

Are you salivating already at the thought of your Thanksgiving dinner? (For those non-Canadians reading this, we celebrate Thanksgiving on the second Monday in October whereas Americans celebrate it on a Thursday in November). 
How bland our turkey stuffing would taste without herbs, but why do the British pronounce the "h" and the Americans not? (Canadians are pretty evenly split down the middle on this one).  

Many of you may be thinking that this is another dastardly American plot to corrupt the language (for more of these, click here) but in fact it is the British who are responsible for changing the pronunciation,  In Latin, the word was herba, but the "h" disappeared from the pronunciation even before the word migrated into Old French. Being sensible, the French didn't put letters in their words to represent non-existent sounds, so their word was erbe. From about 1200, when it was adopted from French, till about 1500, the word was "erb", with no" h" to pronounce. 

The h was added to the spelling in the Renaissance when people felt that English spellings should reflect Latin word origins, but the British (at least those in whose dialect initial h's are pronounced) did not start pronouncing the "h" till the late 19th century, when compulsory education meant that some pronunciations started to reflect spelling. But Americans retained the older pronunciation, and, since the roots of Canadian English are in American English, about 50% of us do too. 
For the similar story of the word "history", please click here, and for the story of "heir", click here.

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Manure and Magatogas

See the first installment of my brief history of English of particular interest to teachers in the current issue of Professionally Speaking, the magazine of the Ontario College of Teachers.