Don Quixote, dwelling in his fantastical dream-world, promised his faithful squire, Sancho Panza, that someday he’d be the governor of an island, and sure enough, that does actually happen! Leave it to Cervantes to do an ironic double reverse like that. Not a plain, not a valley, not the piedmont somewhere, but an island, and why not? The island has a strange attraction for us. It’s like another world, happy in itself, letting all the earth go about its noisy business, and if you’re alone on the island, you can sing, or build a fire to cook your supper, or take a swim in the pond, and all will be quiet, except for the rackety kingfisher circling for his own supper, or the bees in the wild apple blossoms. Sure, you wouldn’t want to live there forever. You couldn’t. But sometimes, eh?
And the word itself is odd. Now then, there are two really delightful things you learn pretty soon when you study the history of words. One is that words that don’t at all look similar may be close cousins. That’s the case with English cow and Latin bos (think of bovine), English five and Latin quinque (and throw in Welsh pump for good measure), and English do and Latin facere (and throw in Greek tithemi besides). The other is that words that do look similar and even mean the same exact things may not be related at all. So English day and Spanish dia are perfect strangers, running into each other at a bus stop, knitting their brows, and saying, “Wait a second here,” or “Espera un segundo,” and holding on to their luggage with a tighter grip.
And so it is with our Word of the Week: island, and what looks like his kid brother, isle, but these two are also perfect strangers, utterly unrelated. Not only is isle not short for island; they have no parents or grandparents in common all the way back through time immemorial. But before I explain all of that, I have a bit of a story to tell about my own family.
If you ever meet anybody with my name, Esolen, you can be sure that he’s a relation of mine. That’s because my father’s father and his brothers and sisters came over the water together from Italy, and when they got to Ellis Island and they were asked their names, they said, Isolano, or maybe, with the truncation of the final vowel that’s typical of their Neapolitan dialect, Isolan’. So the recorder at the immigration post wrote it down as Esolen, and since that’s what was on their papers, that’s what stuck. The towns where I grew up were full of Italians and Poles whose names aren’t what their names used to be: Touch (from Torchia), Rapoch (from Rapoccio), Scoblick (from Scopelletti). But where did my name come from? The story I’ve heard is that my father’s paternal grandfather was an orphan and a loner, not well liked, and that people tagged him with the nickname Isolano, meaning someone who lives on an island (Italian isola, from Latin insula), an islander, in his case somebody who isolates himself to be insulated from everybody else. Isolano, isolate, and insulate are all closely related, and they’ve got cousins such as Irish innis, Welsh ynys, and Greek nesi, Spanish isla, and French île, which is just our French-derived word isle before the French stopped spelling it with the silent s. What they’re not related to is English island.
Here’s what happened. The Old English word for island was ieg, pronounced ee-ey, That’s actually a cousin of Latin aqua, water. Such a short word, really just a diphthong, came to be felt as ambiguous, so people started to tack the word lond onto it, and that’s how we get late Old English igland, pronounced eey-lahnd. Then came William the Conqueror, conquering, and with him his shiploads of French-speaking Vikings and all their words. That’s when isle entered our language. But people who wrote the words down began to assume that isle and island were the same, and being used to writing what came to be a silent s to spell isle, they stuck a silent s into a word that never had it before. It happened by analogy. We like patterns. We don’t stick each and every word on its own verbal island. We assume kinship. The same kind of thing happened with our words limb and numb, when people stuck a silent b at the end of the word after m, by analogy with words like comb, where the b really had been there all the time: see the p in unkempt, which really means that your hair is a mess because it’s not met a comb in a while.
Islands, islands — I’m on one of those right now as I write these words! But people are a lot more sociable here than anywhere else I’ve ever lived. Thank you, denizens of the Isle Madame!
