The heredity of royal words
I should start by saying I’m more loyal to the English language than I am to anyone living in Buckingham Palace, but with the Queen’s passing being so present in the news, we’ve all been surrounded by a family of words with an interesting heredity.
As ‘His Majesty Charles the Third, by the Grace of God, King of Australia and His other Realms and Territories, Head of the Commonwealth’ (official title) was named the Queen’s successor, it was the title of ‘King’ and the presence of the word ‘kin’ within it, which first caught my eye.
Around the 12th century in Old English, a word cynn appeared, which meant ‘family, race’. Its derivative, ‘king’, is understood to mean a leader of a clan, or a group of linked people. Within the word itself, ‘kin’ appears not only a reference to noble birth and lineage (through family), but also to the people who the king has dominion over (as an extended family).
Equally the word ‘kind’ in the sense of being ‘of a kind’ derives from the same Old English root. As British ships sailed to establish colonies around the world, they brought with them their language and their fealty to the Royal family.
So many words within this royal cluster pay homage to the idea of lineage and perpetuity. The word ‘royal’ itself comes from the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) root of ‘reg–’ which means ‘to carry on in a straight line’. It’s from this root that we get the adjective ‘regal’, as well as an authoritative lexicon of words like ‘reign’, ‘region’, ‘regiment’, ‘regular’ and ‘regulation’.
As is often the case with PIE root words, they have grown and developed to suit the conditions of different cultures. Based on the ‘reg–’ root, we get the Sanskrit word for ‘ruler’, raja. In combination with the PIE root for ‘great’, ‘meg–’ which in Sanskrit is maha, this gives us the word maharaja, or ‘great ruler’. The term ‘majesty’, how we abbreviate our reference to Head of State in Australia, stems from this same root.
The only King I’ve known in my lifetime has been the ‘King of Spin’ Shane Warne, though from a purely sonic point of view, I always preferred the name ‘Sheik of Tweak’.
‘Sheik’ initially meant ‘the head of an Arabic family’, but by the 16th century it had evolved to denote a general term of respect reserved for a chief or a leader of people. Apparently, the 1921 movie The Sheik, based on a book of the same title, gave the word a culturally specific meaning to English-speaking audiences with a penchant for Orientalism. The term came to mean a ‘strong, romantic lover’, in the mould of the film’s eponymous character, played by Rudolph Valentino. There’s a link to be drawn there with Warney, but perhaps this isn’t the place.
