Good-bye, Good Luck, and Godspeed: On linguistic (de)secularisation

Godspeed
What exactly does someone mean if they wish you Godspeed? Here's one answer, courtesy of comedian Eddie Izzard:

Source: Eddie Izzard, Circle (2000)

In fact, the speed of Godspeed refers to one of speed's other early senses, namely "success" or "(good) luck, fortune, prosperity". The OED's [1] earliest citation for Godspeed is from Tyndale's Bible translation:

[1526] Bible (Tyndale) - 2 John 10   Yf ther come eny vnto you and bringe not this learninge him receave not to housse: neither bid him God spede.
(Roughly: "If anyone comes to you who does not bring this (Christian) learning, don't let him into your house, nor wish him Godspeed.")

In such early uses of Godspeed, it appears that spede is used as a subjunctive verbal form, so that God spede means something like "may God speed (you)", i.e. "may God grant you success/prosperity".

[1597] Shakespeare Richard II i. iv. 31   A brace of draimen bid, God speed him wel.

More familiar is the use of Godspeed as a noun-noun compound, as in:

[1865] J. R. Lowell Polit. Ess. (1888) 229   Every humane and generous heart‥has wished us God-speed.

However, I have reason to suspect that examples like those from Tyndale and Shakespeare represent a later refashioning: in Old English, the verb spēdan does not seemed to have been used a causative (nor does there appear to be any other causative form of it), while the 16th century examples treat it as such (i.e. X speed Y as "may X cause Y to be speedy/to succeed"). 

Rather Old English spēdan meant simply "to speed, to be successful, to have good fortune", in which case, the later Middle/Modern English God spede should have meant something like "may God be successful" (or "may God go really fast"?!). The equivalent of "God causing someone to be successful"  in Old English required a periphrasis of the sort "God gave speed (i.e. success) to someone", as in:

Exodus 153b-4b: þær him mihtig god on ðam spildsiðe spede forgefe
("if Mighty God would grant them success on the destructive quest")

I argue that the origin of Godspeed is in fact as a compound word, formed of good+speed, which was later reanalysed as God+speed, whence back-formations like God spede (ye), with spede being reanalysed as a causative (i.e. "may (he) cause you to be successful").

Before turning to details of the analysis proper, a quick lesson on some Middle and early Modern English sound changes.

First, the Great English Vowel Shift. I won't go into all of the details here, for they don't concern us, but in general the Great English Vowel Shift raised all long vowels (and diphthongised /ī/ to /aɪ̯/ and /ū/ to /aʊ̯/). More relevantly, Old English gōd "good" (noun and adjective) became /gūd/. By other sound changes, Old English gŏd "god" (originally a neuter noun, but a masculine form was innovated in Christian contexts) became /gɔd/, which by later changes became /gɒd/ (British) or /gɑd/ (American). There were yet later changes affecting ū which caused various (and somewhat sporadic) shortenings, sometimes to /ʌ/ (e.g. blood /blʌd/ from OE blōd) and sometimes to /ʊ/, as in the case of good /gʊd/.

Additionally, in Middle English a phonological change occurred which shortened long vowels in closed syllables which preceded another syllable. For example, consider the changes which occurred in vowel of the first member of the compound words shepherd and wisdom, contrasted with the lack of change in the simplex words sheep and wise, as summarised in the Table below.

Old English	Middle English
scēap	sheep [shēp]
scēaphirde	shĕpherd
wīs	wīs
wīsdom	wĭsdom

Here the simplex words wise and sheep thus remained unaffected (and became, by the Great English Vowel Shift, /waɪ̯s/ and /ʃīp/, respectively), but the vowels of first component in shepherd ("sheep-herd(er)") and wisdom were shortened.

With these sound changes in mind, let us consider what would have happened to a hypothetical Old English compound *gōd-spēd ("good fortune, good luck"): by the Middle English closed-syllable-before-another-syllable rule, this would become /godspēd/, which would thus have become Modern English Godspeed: /gɒdspīd/ (British), /gɑdspīd/ (American). 

If this etymology is correct, then the original sense of Godspeed is good speed, in other words good luck---which makes eminent sense as a formula of well-wishing (note above in the above video clip, Izzard in fact glosses "good luck" as "Godspeed").

 In fact, an Old English form gōd-spēd is not entirely hypothetical: the adjectival form gōdspēdig is recorded in the verse "translation" of Genesis A:

Genesis A 1008b-9b: Him þa brego engla, godspedig gast geanþingade, "Hwæt...'

("The Lord of Angels (i.e. God), the "good-speedy" spirit, answered him: 'Listen...'")

[This is God addressing Cain, right after Cain utters his signature "I am not my brother's keeper" line.]

The question is how to translate godspedig (though, as is typical of Old English manuscripts, the vowel quantity is not indicated, it is fairly obvious that it is in fact gōdspēdig and not gŏdspēdig, given that it characterises God himself). If it is an adjectivalised noun-noun compound (as Bosworth and Toller treat it in their dictionary [2]), then perhaps "rich in good(ness)". But it could be based on an adjective-noun compound  gōdsped "good fortune", and thus mean something like "one is good at success, full of good fortune". 

In any case the occurrence of gōdspēdig in Old English strengthens the case for Godspeed as originating from gōdspēd "good luck" with god spēde "may God speed/grant good fortune to (you)" being a later reinterpretation (with reanalysis of spēde as causative).

Gospel

Another word which has a similar history is gospel. The original form in Old English was gōdspel "good news", glossing Latin ēvangelium, (from Greek ευαγγελιον (evangelion), from eu- "good" and angelion "message"; but which in classical Greek meant only "a reward for bringing good news," and in the plural "a sacrifice offered on receiving good news"). Now, by the Middle English shortening rule described above, gōdspel would have become gŏdspel, and thus Modern English gospel /gɒspɛl/  (ignoring the loss of the d).

However, in this case, the word was in fact actually reanalysed much earlier, at some point in Old English, as gŏdspel "news about God", apparently based on the written form (which would not have usually indicated vowel quantity), as evidenced by the forms in other Germanic language (the other Germanic peoples were evangelised by Anglo-Saxons): Old Saxon godspell, Old High German gotspell, Old Norse guð-, goðspiall.

Good-bye
Assuming the above proposed etymology for Godspeed is correct: that the original was good speed "good luck" and thus secular in nature, it is interesting to note that exactly the opposite change occurred in the case of Good-bye: an originally religious formula was secularised. Good-bye is a shortening of God be with you(/ye). Here God has been substituted by Good, presumably by analogy with/contamination by other leave-taking formulae like Good Day, Good Night, Good Morning etc.

Summary
Godspeed likely originated as a secular formula "good speed" (i.e. "good luck"), but due to a phonological change in Middle English affecting long vowels in close syllables followed by one or more syllables the vowel of the first word was shorten, becoming homophonous with God, thus giving rise to a reinterpretation of spede as a causative verb meaning "cause to succeed" and resulting in formations like God spede "God prosper (you)". While Good-bye originally had religious connotations, being a shortened form of "God be with you/ye", but by analogy to other leave-taking formula like Good Night, God was substituted by Good. 

One secular formula, go(o)d-speed, was thus reinterpreted as religious in nature, and the other, originally religious formula, go(o)d-bye, took on a secular nature.  

[Updates (04-Feb-2011):

Some new information gleaned from the comments at languagehat's blog:

I. MMcM points out that:
(1) Webster (ca. 1830) glosses godspeed as "good speed" [link to Google Books page here].
(2) Tyndale's Bible translation (whence the first citation of godspeed, see above), also includes good speed [link to Google Books page here]: "LORde God of my maſter Abrahã, ſend me good ſpede this daye, & ſhewe mercy vnto my maſter Abraham".

II. Goodspeed also appears as a surname, e.g. Ben Zimmer's maternal line [hattip Ben Zimmer], the author of the 1923 American Translation of the New Testament, Edgar J. Goodspeed [hattip John Cowan].

]

References:
[1]The Oxford English Dictionary, September 2009 rev. ed.

[2]Bosworth, Joseph and T. Northcote Toller. 1898. An Anglo-Saxon dictionary. London: Oxford University Press.

On analogy: Octopuses, Octopi, Octopodes, Emacsen

From a post on boingboing.net, Merriam Webster editor Kory Stamper discusses the "correct" plural of octopus:

Octopus:octopi is a standard example illustrating ("false") analogy that I've used in class before. The story I've told goes like this: Octopus sounds like a Latin word, and so by analogy to Latin borrowings like syllabus:syllabi, alumnus:alumni, people often form its plural as octopi. But, so the standard story goes, it's not a borrowing from Latin, but rather from Greek, so octopi is technically incorrect. The proper Greek plural is rather octopodes.

[More technically, it is a borrowing from Latin, but the Latin word itself is a borrowing/coinage from Greek, and the Greek word would be (in nominative singular) ὀκτώπους (oktṓpous), whose (nominative) plural would be ὀκτώποδες (oktṓpodes). Given that it's a scientific name, it will in fact be a Latin word (albeit one of Greek origins). By modern Latin rules for Greek borrowings, it should be a third declension noun, and form its plural with -es. Thus the Latin forms are octopus:octopodes.]

In the video, however, Stamper makes the following arguments: (1) octopodes sounds rather pedantic (I think a good compromise here though is to pronounce it to rhyme with nodes), and (2) once a word is borrowed into English, it becomes an English word and so should form its plural according to the standard English rules for pluralisation, i.e. it should be octopuses.

In fact, though it is true that -s is the dominant plural ending in English, and thus the one usually used for borrowings and new coinages, it is not the only possibility. Even coinages don't always form plural with -s. For example, there is a powerful text-editing program called Emacs. Different varieties of this program have arisen, and thus a plural form is sometimes called for. And the standard plural used is Emacsen (by analogy to ox:oxen; cf. boxen and VAXen). The point being simply that  if even coinages don't always use the -s plural, then we needn't expect that borrowings should either. And therefore, nothing forces us to accept octopuses as the "correct" plural. [Caveat: of course there is no real "correct" plural for any word, aside from whatever people accept/use.]

But, as it stands, it would seem that the "correct" pluralshould be either octopuses, since that conforms to the dominant pluralisation rule for English, or else octopodes, since octopus is a coinage made from Greek components.

As one of the commenters to the boingboing post (Anon #80) points out though, there is in fact a case to be made for octopi as the "historically correct plural". The case is as follows: Linnaeus may have coined octopus ("eight foot (creature)") by analogy to the old Latin word for "octopus", namely polypus ("many foot (creature)"). Now polypus is obviously also a borrowing from Greek, but in Latin the normal plural of polypus was in fact polypi! (And, likewise, the plural of the modern scientific term polypus is also polypi). 

[The commenter goes on to add that even the Greeks sometimes treated πολύπους (polúpous) as a second declension noun (which would give it a nominative plural of πολύποι (polúpoi). So even the Romans might have had a precedent for their -i plural of polypus.]

So if octopus is seen as a modern "updating" of the original Latin word for "octopus" (polypus), then there is an interesting case to be made for octopi as the (historically) "correct" plural.

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