Marry Nuncle. Prithee!
Sep 12th, 2007 by lisa
In the book Wyrd Sisters, there is a whole lot of this sort of thing, spoken by the King of Lancre’s jester. I often wondered if ‘nuncle’ was a version of ‘uncle’ and if so, what happened to the ‘n’?
Well, now I have my answer.
In etymology, there is a process called false splitting. It works like this. Let’s take the word ‘orange’. The original word for orange was Sanskrit naranga. During it’s migration to English, the initial letter ‘n’ had joined the article ‘a’, resulting in ‘an orange’. (The word for orange is still narangi in Hindi, naranja in Spanish, and naranj in Arabic). So in English, it seems we have lost the ‘n’, when in fact it simply moved next-door to live with the ‘a’ to make the article ‘an’. False splitting has also give us ‘apron’ for ‘a napron’, and ‘adder’ for ‘a nadder’.
Being a wordgeek, I find this fascinating. I’m also happy to finally have an answer about ‘nuncle’.
It came about because sometimes the ‘n’ moved the other way. Over time and use, “mine uncle” became “my nuncle” resulting in a synonym nuncle for uncle. Hah! See? I knew it.
I still have no idea about the ‘prithee’, however.
Words have changed throughout history because their migration mainly took place more through speech than writing. Things have changed now, especially with the rise of the internet, text messaging and email. So it’s not as likely for words to continue to change because of things like a wandering ‘n’. But it’s certainly not impossible.
A grateful hat tip to Paul, who received this information from wordsmith.org in an email.
Talk about migration. 
Oh I LOVE this sort of thing. Thank you for adding to my education. Er, prithee or something.
Hmm I was just wondering about such things. It may not be completely related but I’ve always wondered about the word “prithee”. It’s evidently an archaic term denoting a polite request, formed as a corruption of (I) pray thee. Now what I ponder about is whether the term “pretty please” came about as a corruption of “prithee, please”. In that case, I’d be pressed to think that “please” in “prithee, please” sounds redundant, and therefore “pretty please” seems an unlikely relative. I just wonder.
Yo,
So i’ve just been reading this book too and wondering about these words. I just read somewhere that prithee is from prey thee, as in a polite request.
Awesomes