An anemometer is an instrument which is used for measuring wind speed. The word comes from ánemos, the Greek word for “wind”, plus metro “measure”.
Our flower name anemone comes from Greek anemóni which originally meant, rather delightfully, “daughter of the wind”. The flowers are also
sometimes known as “wind flowers” in English, because they appear to be blown open by the breezes.
The colourful marine invertebrates, sea anemones, are so called because they are thought to resemble the flowers. As a child I visited the nearby
North Sea coast often and enjoyed playing in the rock pools, so I was much more familiar with the sea anemones than I was with the flowers.
But I must have been more than 10 years old when, during a family holiday at one of the north Norfolk beach resorts, I suddenly realised that the sea creatures that I had hitherto been calling sea aneNOMes were actually named sea aneMONes – I had been getting it wrong for years without anybody noticing, including myself.
This kind of transposition of sounds – in my case, getting the two consonants m and n the wrong way round – is technically known in linguistics as metathesis (pronounced with the stress on the second syllable, me-TATH-esis). This term comes from Greek meta “beyond, across” plus thésis “position”, and signifies change of position or ‘transposition’.
There are very many well-known examples of metathesis in the world’s
languages. The Latin word miraculum “miracle” has become miracolo in modern Italian, miracle in French and Catalan, and miracol in Rumanian, as
any philologist would expect.
But in Spanish it has come down as milagro and in Portuguese it is milagre, with the l and the r having changed places.
The same thing has happened in the case of Latin periculum “danger”, which
is peligro in Spanish, and parabola “word” which in Spanish has become palabra. “Crocodile” in Spanish is cocodrilo.
These kinds of transpositions no doubt result originally from some kind of individual error, perhaps a childish error of the kind I initially made myself
with anemone. Sometimes, though, these errors can become institutionalised and so turn into a permanent part of the language, as with Spanish cocodrilo.
We have a number of such institutionalised cases of metathesis in today’s English. Modern English “bird” and “horse” came from Old English “bridd” and “hros” respectively; “bright” was originally “beorht”.
In modern French the word fromage “cheese” comes from Latin formaticus
“formed [in a mould]” (see here on words for cheese).
Metathesis can be a very unpredictable phenomenon. The Norwegian and Danish word for “cross” is kors and in Swedish it is korsa. But in the closely related languages Icelandic and Faroese the word is krossur.
English “third” and “thirteen” are obviously originally derived from three, but the vowel and the r have changed places – third was originally “thridda”, and thirteen was originally “threotene”. The same thing has happened in Dutch, where “thirteen” and “thirty” are dertien and dertig respectively, although they are both derived from drie “three”. However, this has not happened in German, where drei “three” has produced dreizehn and dreissig, with no metathesis.
Predictably, there are quite a lot of wags around who enjoy referring to the process as “methatesis”.
CROCODILE
Crocodile comes from Greek kroki “pebble” plus drilos “worm”, so “worm of the stones”. It first came into western Europe via Latin crocodilus. It did appear in English quite early on in the metathesised form “cocrodille”, but
by the 1500s the unmetathesised form crocodile had become restored, under
the influence of Latin, as the usual version.
