Today’s word of the day, courtesy of Merriam-Webster, is convalesce. To convalesce means “to recover health and strength gradually after sickness, injury, or weakness.” I don’t think we hear that verb very often. We more often hear the adjective form in the phrase “a convalescent home,” meaning a place where someone goes who is recovering.

The verb, according to www.etymonline.com, entered the language in the 15^th century from “Latin convalescere “thrive, regain health, begin to grow strong or well,” from assimilated form of com-, here perhaps an intensive prefix (see com-), + valescere “to begin to grow strong,” inchoative of valere “to be strong” (from PIE root *wal– “to be strong”).” Then the website says that the word appears only in the publications of William Caxton, the first printer in England, and Scottish writers until other writers began to use the word in the 19^th century.

Since it has been a while since I posted a word of the day, I feel the need to provide a little refresher. PIE stands for proto-Indo-European, the reconstructed language that is the parent language of the Germanic languages (German, English, the Scandinavian languages, Gothic, et al.), the Romance languages (Latin, French, Italian, et al.), the Slavic languages (Russian, Czech, et al.), the languages of India (Urdu, Hindi, et al.) and more. We call it a reconstructed language because there are no extant documents of the language; what we know of it is based upon the work of linguists who have worked backwards from the modern languages. It’s a long and complicated story, and a fascinating one; one of the principal characters was Jakob Grimm, who gave us Grimm’s Law (also known as the First Germanic Sound Shift) as well as Grimms’ Fairy Tales. And the reason the PIE root *wal– has an asterisk in front of it is to indicate that the root is reconstructed.

An “assimilated form” is a form that has undergone the sound change called assimilation. Assimilation in phonology (the study of sounds) is a change in a sound to make that sound more like a nearby sound. For instance, the com- prefix keeps the /m/ sound in the word compare because the /p/ sound is a bilabial plosive (you close your lips, stop the breath momentarily, and then let the air explode out), and the /m/ sound is a bilabial nasal (you close your lips and force the air out through the nasal cavity). But the root of our word of the day begins with the /v/ sound, which is a labio-dental fricative (you put your bottom lip against your upper teeth and force the sound out without completely stopping the sound, so you do not close your lips completely). So for the ease of pronunciation, we change the prefix from com- to con- because the latter ends with the /n/ sound, which is an alveolar nasal (you put the tip of your tongue against the alveolar ridge, at the top of the upper teeth, force the air out through the nasal cavity, again keeping your lips open). The vowel sound in the middle of the prefix also does not require the closing of the lips, which is why it is easier to not close your lips when moving from the prefix to the root word.

William Caxton, one of the 100 most important people in English history, according to a BBC poll taken in 2002, was a merchant who lived in Bruges, Belgium, and traveled to Cologne in Germany, where he saw a printing press. He, with a partner, set up a printing press of his own in Bruges, and there he produced the first English book from a movable-type printing press, entitled The Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye, a collection of stories associated with Homer’s Iliad, translated from French by Caxton himself. It was published in 1473. Just three years later, after he had moved back to England, he published his first work in England, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.

Well, that’s enough for this first Word of the Day in a very, very long time. I guess you could say that I’ve been convalescing, getting my strength back from some difficult times.

Today’s image is an etching of William Caxton from the Grainger Collection in New York.