Word Stories: cleave

April 13, 2015 10:00

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Steve Taylore-Knowles looks at the stories behind the English language.

As words develop, they like to avoid treading on each other’s toes. After all, since from a structuralist point of view, the only thing that makes pat meaningful is that it isn’t pit, put, pot, or pet, things would soon get a bit messy if words regularly took forms that other words had already laid claim to. It’s common for a word to develop different meanings, but it’s perhaps a little less common for different meanings to develop the same word. Sometimes, though, two different routes do arrive at the same destination, and such is the case with cleave.

Cleave is odd in that it has two distinct meanings which are practically the opposite of each other. Meaning one is ‘to part or divide by a cutting blow, to split’. That’s why the large chopper wielded by butchers is called a cleaver. The second meaning is ‘to stick fast, to adhere’. Thus, the King James Version of the Bible (1611) declares that ‘Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.’ (Gen. 2:24) The two were, in Old English, two different verbs.

Cleave (split) had the Old English form cleofan, with the past tense cleaf (plural clufon) and past participle clofen. In early Middle English, this was cleovan, clef (cluven), cloven and by around 1500 it had become cle(a)ve, clove, cloven. A weak past tense cleaved was also used, which gave rise to cleft (compare leave, left, bereave, bereft). Both cleft and cloven continue to be used with the same adjectival meaning, although they collocate differently (cleft palate, cleft stick, cloven hoof).

Cleave (stick), on the other hand, derives from Old English clifian, with the variant cleofian, leading to the Middle English forms clive or cleve, with, crucially for the fate of the two verbs, this second variant becoming dominant. This was assimilated to the form of cle(a)ve (split), and the inflected forms were generally mixed and used indiscriminately, turning the two verbs into the same form.

Тема: Grammar & Vocabulary Теги: Wordstory, Etymology

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