I go to a fortnightly U3A group, called Saxlish, or the Saxon Ring, where we talk and learn about all things Saxon, but mainly language. It sounds rather dry but it isn’t, the time flues by s our assumptions about the origins of words and their meanings are challenged. Although our focus is on Anglo-Saxon, our conversation ranges far and wide, to Old English, Latin, and back to the first Indo-European languages of our ancestors. We talk about accent, dialect, spelling,pronunciation… all sorts of things and it is always interesting and enjoyable.
As a bit of fun, our knowledgable leaders set us a little ‘homework’ and last time it was to find the origin of the word ‘sincere’. Before I did any research I guessed it might come from the Latin as I know it is sincère in French and sincero in Spanish… however since are a Saxlish group I also guessed that the truth might be different! I mentioned my ‘homework’ to someone and they said in a very authoritative way that indeed ‘sincere’ did come from the Latin.
According to my friend, in Roman times if potter made a pot that had a slight crack in it, if he was a bit of a dodgy potter he might fill the crack with wax, which is ‘cera’ in Latin, and then paint over it and sell it as a sound pot.An honest potter would advertise his wares ‘without wax’, ‘sine cera’, and this came to mean honest, true, real, genuine, sincere…
This sounds a great story, but that is all it is. Sincere might sound very much like ‘without wax’ in Latin, but that is coincidence. Apparently, as I understand it, the word has a much older origin coming from Proto-Indo-European… which was a language spoken between four and six thousand years ago… Good heavens! Here is a very interesting article about it, but meanwhile I am going to do this week’s Saxlish ‘homework, finding the origins of ‘noon’ and ‘bad’…:
http://www.archaeology.org/exclusives/articles/1302-proto-indo-european-schleichers-fable
Lois Elsden 