What do words that start with the letter "p" tell us about English

Languages change over time.

Here is the Lord's Prayer from the King Jame's Bible

Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread.
And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.
And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil: For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever. Amen.

The biggest different between this and modern English is that we no longer use the pronoun "thou" and its other forms "thy", and "thine"

Here is the start of the prologue to the Canterbury Tales by Chaucer, written in 1387

Whan that aprill with his shoures soote
The droghte of march hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
Whan zephirus eek with his sweete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
Tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the ram his halve cours yronne,
And smale foweles maken melodye,
That slepen al the nyght with open ye
(so priketh hem nature in hir corages);
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages,
And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes,
To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes;
And specially from every shires ende
Of engelond to caunterbury they wende,
The hooly blisful martir for to seke,
That hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke.

This is a bit hard to understand. What does "swich", "licour" and "engendred" mean?

Here is Beowulf. We don't know when exactly it was written but probably around 800 AD

Hwæt. We Gardena in geardagum,
þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon,
hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon.
Oft Scyld Scefing sceaþena þreatum,
monegum mægþum, meodosetla ofteah,
egsode eorlas. Syððan ærest wearð
feasceaft funden, he þæs frofre gebad,
weox under wolcnum, weorðmyndum þah,
oðþæt him æghwylc þara ymbsittendra
ofer hronrade hyran scolde,
gomban gyldan. þæt wæs god cyning.

This is basically another language

I wrote this all to give you an idea of how language changes over time. Even in Beowulf though, we can still see some parts that are connected with modern English. The "þ" in "þæt wæs god cyning" is pronounced like "th" and the line means "that was a good king". Very similar to Modern English. "funden" means "found". "we" means "we", "he" means "he", "under" means "under" and "him" means "him".

So language changes but it does not change completely. It carries parts of the past with it and those parts either change a little or a lot. We can see that in our own lives. Some part of our daily experience is similar to how it was years ago, and other things have changed almost beyond recognition.

By looking at older germanic languages linguists can make educated guesses as to what the ancestor language of the Germanic languages looked like. The language that all modern Germanic languages are descended from linguists call Proto Germanic.

Proto Germanic is itself descended from a yet older language called Proto Indo European

Let's look at the word "father"

It comes from Old English "fæder", Proto Germanic *fadēr and Proto Indo European *ph₂tḗr (h₂ is type of consonant pronounced at the back of the throat but linguists don't exactly know what sound it is so it just gets a number).

Latin is part of the Italic group of languages. Languages like Spanish, French and Italian are called Romance languages because they descend from the Romans who spoke Latin. These languages are usually called the Romance languages, but you can also say that they are part of the Italic family of languages which includes languages more distantly related to Spanish and Italian like Oscan and Umbrian.

The word for father in Latin is pater. Here you can see that the h₂ became an "a" but otherwise the word is pretty much unchanged. Why then does English have the word "father" with an "f" at the beginning? This is an example of something called a sound shift. At some point in the evolution of the Germanic language's ancestor, the Germanic tribes who spoke this off shoot of the original Proto Indo European language started pronouncing "p" as "f".

There are theories as to why people start pronouncing things differently. One of them is to make words easier to pronounce. Other times though these things just happen. It is a bit like fashion. People start pronouncing things one way and for some reason that change becomes popular.

Now all words that had a p at the beginning are now pronounced with an f at the beginning. Compare the following

English fish and Latin piscis
English foot and Latin pēs
English food and Latin pānis

So if all words in English come from an older form of the language that changed all P's to F's, why are there even any words in English that start with P? Because of borrowing and also because some words started with another letter that then changed into a P, but we will get to that

Let's look at the word "paternal". It looks a lot like Latin "pater". That's because it is descended from a form of that word. In Old French "paternal" meant "of the father" and it got borrowed into English. So we have father from Proto Germanic and paternal from Old French.

The word "pen", as in an animal pen, comes from Proto Germanic *pennō (the start indicates that we haven't found any texts that were written in Proto Germanic that contain that word but we can guess what the word would have looked like) from Proto Indo European *bend- (because PIE is so much older and reconstructed from other reconstructions we can only be sure about the first part of the word and the dash means that we don't know what the whole word looked like).

So here "b" in PIE became a "p"

So if we see a "p" in English we know it has taken quite a journey to get here. Either it is from a borrowing or from a word that had a different pronunciation in PIE.

The word "pen" as in "implement to write something with" comes from Old French penne from Latin penna which means "feather"

Let's look at a few more so you can see some these how words that start with P in English ended up in the modern language

"picture" comes from Old French "picture" from Latin "pictūra" which meant "painting"

"porcelain" comes from Middle French "porcelaine"

"pain" comes from Old French "peine" from Latin "poena" meaning "punishment" or "pain"

And just to prove that languages like being messy
"path" comes from Proto Germanic *paþaz from Proto Indo European *pent-

The "p" did not shift in pronunciation and did not change to an "f". As I said before sometimes things change because of the whims of the speakers. The same is true of when something doesn't change. Why did the "p" in "path" remain unchanged? Sometimes these things just happen.

I have wanted to write this article for a while but I did because I knew that this letter P connects so many things together and I was only going to write it when I could bring all those threads together.

Languages are messy and this is just one of the very many ways that languages can change over time. I thought looking at this one letter was a good way to give an overview of this. Thanks for reading :)