SEEK

King Arthur and his knights of the Round Table, on the feast of Pentecost, were seated for the festive dinner. With them, for the first time ever, was a pure and noble young man named Galahad, the illegitimate son of Lancelot, begotten when the daughter of the Fisher King tricked him into believing he was with Guenevere. Not that that excused Lancelot, since Guenevere was the wife of his lord, his benefactor, and his dearest friend, Arthur. Suddenly, however, the doors are all shut as by a blast of wind, and the Holy Grail appears to them, a cup and a platter, providing to each of the twelve at the Table the food he most desires. Then the Grail disappears, and Sir Gawain — who in this story is a worldly fellow, loyal to Arthur, but not terribly concerned with the spiritual life — declares that he will spend the next year and a day seeking — and there you have our Word of the Week — the mysteries of the Grail. Poor King Arthur predicts that the quest will end in disaster for the Round Table, because many of his knights will never return.

I’m beginning with this glance at the Quest of the Holy Grail, because I happen to be teaching an on-line course on the medieval Cistercian romance, written originally in Old French. The course is for the Institute for Catholic Culture, and everybody is welcome to join. Our first class of three is tomorrow evening.

The English word seek is interesting to me for three reasons. The first has to do with our wealth of words. What makes English difficult for non-native speakers to learn is not our grammar, which is quite elementary as compared with Greek, Russian, German, Latin, or even Latin’s daughters in Italian and the other Romance languages. It isn’t the spelling, either, once you get used to certain odd combinations. It’s how to choose the right word. English has got words from its own Germanic stock, from the Norman French invaders, and from Latin directly, borrowed into the language by Renaissance authors and schoolmen. Think of the different meanings or colorings you get from these words that seem to mean the same thing: stubborn, tenacious, obdurate, mulish, bullheaded, intransigent, resolute. You praise somebody’s firm resolve; you look with scorn on his mulishness. You may call Elsie a big woman on the committee, but if you call her a large woman on the committee, you are thinking of how much room she takes up in her seat. You may say you love peanut butter; if you say you adore it, you’ve probably got a screw loose in your works.

In German, the verb that corresponds to our word seek is suchen, and you may apply it to all kinds of objects of your search. If you’re looking for your keys, you say, “Ich suche meine Schlüssel.” If you’re on a quest for the Holy Grail, you say, “Ich suche den heiligen Gral.” But in English, if you say, “I’m seeking my keys,” people will look at you oddly, and if you say, “I’m looking for the Holy Grail,” they will think you’ve hidden it in the barn somewhere and have forgotten the place. In English, then, we don’t commonly apply the word seek for physical objects, or for everyday things. There’s a sense that if you are a seeker, you are on a quest for what is high, noble, rare, holy, divine. You are not just a rummager or an investigator or a querier or somebody just poking around. “Seek, and you shall find,” says Jesus. We can’t translate the Greek word there as “look around” or “rummage” or “snoop.”

The other two things that interest me about the word seek have to do with the history of English. The word comes from the Old English verb secan, to search for, to seek; pronounce it as SEH-chahn. But long before Old English was ever written down, the ancestor of secan was *socjan; and that j, pronounced like a hard y, tended to push the previous vowel to the front of the mouth. Say O, and while you’re doing it, uncurl your tongue and move it to the front — you’re not saying O anymore, are you? Now, here’s the thing. For a couple of verbs like socjan (seek), the past tense didn’t have that j in it, so the vowel in that form never changed, was never pushed to the front. That’s why we have seek, but not seeked; it’s sought. Other verbs in this group, where that vowel in the past did not change: tell, told; sell, sold; bring, brought; think, thought; buy, bought; and a few others. Notice that all those verbs do add the -d or -t for the past tense, so they are what the linguists call “weak” verbs, taking a dental suffix for the past, just like walk, walked; lay, laid; breathe, breathed; feel, felt.

The third thing is that the form should be seech, not seek — after all, we have beseech, right, which means that you’re seeking something from somebody. But people from Norway and Denmark settled in the east and northeast of England in the tenth century and later. You may know that when William of Normandy invaded England in 1066 to claim the crown of his uncle Edward the Confessor, he had two Harolds to deal with, who also wanted to be king, the English Harold Godwinson, and the Norse Harald Hardrada, meaning Harald the Relentless. Neither one of those Haralds made it to 1067; and English would never be the same, not after all those French-speaking descendants of the Vikings settled in. Anyway, the Norse language did not suffer the change of the c sound to ch, as English had, when the c was in the vicinity of a vowel in the front of the mouth, such as ae, e, i, and y. So, because of that Norse influence, sometimes we end up with a k instead of a ch, and sometimes we have both, but they came to mean something a little different, like break and breach. Anyway, if we were consistent, we’d have seek and beseek, or seech and beseech, but instead we have one of one kind and another of the other, and that’s likely to drive somebody learning English to go berserk — which comes from Norse, and means a warrior wearing a bear-sark, that is, a bearskin shirt. Don’t give it up, all you learning English!

Illumination of the French prose Lancelot, by the artist Evrard d’Espinques, 1470. The Grail is in the center of the table.

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