A commentary on Ana Bueno's posting

MONEY, MONEDA, MINT

I would like to expand a little on Ana Bueno’s posting on the English (Eng) and Spanish (Sp) cognate words money and moneda. First, here is a quote from Wikipedia about Juno: “As the patron goddess of Rome and the Roman empire she was called Regina ("queen") and, together with Jupiter and Minerva, was worshipped as a triad on the Capitol (Juno Capitolina) in Rome. As the Juno moneta (which either means "the one who warns" or "the one unique" or "union unique") she guarded over the finances of the empire and had a temple on the Arx (one of two Capitoline hills), close to the Royal Mint.” (Wikipedia s.v. Juno. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juno_(mythology) [03/12/2008]). For this reason, she often appeared on coins (see photo, downloaded from Wikipedia, but ultimately from http://www.wildwinds.com/). Second, English borrowed the word money, not from Latin but from French, in Middle English (ME). According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), s.v. money (http://dictionary.oed.com [04/12/2008]), English took the word from Anglo-Norman monai, moné, monee, moneie, monoie, munee, munei and Old French monoie, monnoie, moneie, monee, monae, monaye. The French words, of course, like the Sp moneda, descend from Latin (Lat) monēta, the feminine past participle of the verb monēo “to warn”, as Ana Bueno wrote. The first citation given in the OED belongs to 1325: “þei iyef him. þrythi plates of god mone”. However, English had already borrowed the same word straight from Latin in Anglo-Saxon times and this word survives in Modern English (ModE): mint. One obvious question is why Eng money, Sp moneda, French (Fr) monnaie have the same vowel, (“o”) while mint has a different vowel (“i”), if all of them derive from Lat monēta. The answer lies in a assimilatory sound change called Palatal Umlaut, whereby a velar vowel is fronted or palatalized by an /i/ or /j/ in the following syllable. Since monēta, at the time it was borrowed by the Germanic tribes, was pronounced /munita/, the /i/ of the second syllable caused the /u/ of the first syllable to become /ü/: Lat /munita/ > OE mynt / mynet. Later, in ME, this /ü/ further palatized to /i/, whence today’s spelling and pronunciation mint /mint/. When one word -monēta- is borrowed twice (in Anglo-Saxon times -mynt- and in the 14th c. -money-), the loans constitute a doublet. Normally doublets end up meaning different, though semantically related, things. In the 15th c. mint expanded its meaning to “an establishment where money is coined, usually under the authority and direction of the state” (OED, s.v. mint 2.a http://dictionary.oed.com [04/12/2008]). This is the usual meaning it has today. The older meaning that mint had had since OE was “coin”, but this meaning was lost in the 16th c. Why should the meaning of mint change, anyway? Probably because English already possessed other words for the concept “coin”: coin (14th c.) and, yes, money, which for several centuries was also a countable noun meaning “coin” (OED, s.v. money 4 http://dictionary.oed.com [04/12/2008]). (Another similar doublet is bench and bank, but this is matter for another blog posting.)