Word of the Moment: Knight

A former coworker of mine once told me about a night he spent drinking in a downtown park. Maurice and two of his friends were up to no good when a cop on horseback landed in the middle of their party. In his own words:

“Man, I ain't scared of much. But when I see a cop on a @#%&*$ HORSE, I'm gonna run!”

Years later, I was talking with a mounted patrol officer who confirmed the crowd control potential of equestrian patrols. The advantage, he said, was psychological.

Since the domestication of the horse, pedestrians have held an enduring fascination with people on horseback: Roman equestrians, cowboys, and knights in shining armor. I'm not discounting the grace and nobility of these animals, but I'm not tossing out Maurice's theory either. Large animals trigger fear in our primate brains on a level red-and-blue lights still can't.

The mounted soldier's mobility had a transformational impact on warfare, and one of the pieces used in the Indian precursor to chess was the “ashva” or horse. It moved exactly as the knight does in modern chess, leaping one square horizontally and then one square diagonally. It is this piece's unusual pattern of movement, unlikely to have been independently developed, that helps historians track the game's advance from India to Persia, through the Middle East and into Europe.

Despite the piece's antiquity, the term “knight” was not applied to it until relatively late, around the middle of the 1400s. Because of this, there is a great variety of names for the piece in European languages, such as the German “Springer” (jumper), the Dutch “Paard” (horse) and Czech “jezdec” (rider).

The word “knight” has been a part of English for a very long time, although in Old English it was spelled (and probably pronounced) “cniht.” It was a part of West Germanic, the common language we presume was spoken by Germanic tribal people prior to the Angles, Saxons and Frisians all getting their own spin-offs.

Originally, a “cniht” was merely a young boy. Its meaning stayed the same in English's cousin-language, Dutch, where it became “knecht.”  It became mildly pejorative in German, where “Knech” denotes a servant or vassal. In English, however, “cniht” underwent the opposite, improving its meaning. Linguists call this kind of meaning-change melioration.

Although the English hardly invented the culture of knighthood and chivalry, this humble word of theirs was imbued with all of its nobility. The social position that knights held in Europe has left indelible hoof prints on our language. The words “esquire,” “cavalier,” and “bachelor” all have their roots in the language used to describe medieval knights. Even today, the phrase “knight in shining armor” evokes heroic imagery.

There is another oddity of English which this discussion of allows us to explore. The word “knight” is striking because it displays two very odd spelling patterns in English, an initial KN- and the -IGHT. Both are relics of how the word used to be pronounced that remain in its spelling.

As mentioned, “cniht” was pronounced with two sounds (K and N) at the beginning. Early English had several combinations of consonants at the beginning of words that modern speakers would find rather tongue twisting: HR, HL, HN and KN. Over time, these complex clusters simplified, causing “not” and “knot” to become homophones by the time of Shakespere. Another complex cluster, HW, is almost gone. As spelling changes slower than pronunciation, the K at the beginning of “knot,” “knife,” and “knight” remains as a linguistic appendix, not useful, but not (or “knot”) causing too much trouble.

As for “-ight,” that's a story for another word, so stay tuned.

Culture is reflected in the games we play and the way we speak. However, like spelling, these reflections linger long after the first impression is made. The presence of mounted soldiers on a chessboard tell us little about modern warfare, and a superficial examination of the word “knight” would obscure the Continental, French contributions to the meaning of this old Germanic word. The KN spelling reminds us that culture and language only look two dimensional because there are squashed by the weight of the present day on our minds.