The sun, as seen by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory
8 February 2023
[12 February 2023: Details of Indo-European roots added]
It is no surprise that the English word for the brightest star in our sky, the sun, traces back to Old English. It can, for example, be found in the poem Beowulf. Here it is in a passage where the titular hero is boasting about how he intends to kill the monster Grendel:
Ac ic him Geata sceal
eafoð & ellen ungeara nu
guþe gebeodan. Gæþ eft, se þe mot
to medo modig siþþan morgenleoht
ofer ylda bearn oþres dogores
sunne sweglwered suþan scíneð.(But I shall soon offer him the strength and courage of the Geats in battle. A brave man will be able to return to his mead when the morning light, the bright-clad sun, of another day shines in the south.)
Sun has cognates throughout the Indo-European languages and traces back to the Proto-Indo-European root *sāwel, whose zero-grade form was *suwel. The *-el is a suffix, which alternated with *-en, so *suwen was reduced to sun. Interestingly, the Old English sunne and its Germanic cognates take the feminine gender. This is in contrast to Latin or Greek, where the corresponding words are masculine. (Although the Greek ήλιος (helios) does not on the surface appear to be related, the suffixed form *sawelyo eventually morphed into helios.) English lost most of its grammatical genders in the transition to Middle English, and by the Early Modern period, personifications of the sun had become masculine, following the example set by Latin.
The verb, to sun, meaning to be exposed to or bask in solar radiation, appears in the mid fifteenth century. Here is an example from a Middle English translation of Palladius’s De Re Rustica (Of Rustic Things) in a recipe for making vinegar during the month of July:
And in this mone is maad aysel squyllyne.
Of squyllis whyte, alraw, taak of the hardis
And al the rynde is for this no thyng fyne,
Thenne oonly take the tender myddilwardis;
I[n] sestris xii of aysel that sour hard is,
A pound and vncis sixe yshrad be do,
And xl dayes sonnyng stond it so.
After this xl dayis cloos in sonne,
Cast out the squylle & clense feetly wel,
And into vessel picched be hit ronne.
Another xxx galons of aysel
With dragmes viii of squylle in oon vessel,
Pepur an vnce, of case & mynte asmal,
Wol do, and vse in tyme as medycynal.(And during this moon squilline vinegar is made.
Of white squills, all raw, take off the shell
And all the rind, this is nothing fine.
Then take only the tender middle parts;
Into 7 sesters of vinegar, that sour bitterness,
let a pound and six ounces [of the middle parts], chopped, be added,
And let it stand sunning for 40 days.
After this 40 days confined in the sun,
Throw out the squill & and clean thoroughly,
And pour into a sealed vessel
Another 30 gallons of vinegar
With 8 drams of squill in one vessel,
An ounce of pepper, a pinch cassia and mint,
will do, and use in time as a medicinal.)
Sources:
American Heritage Dictionary Indo-European Roots Appendix, 2022, s.v. sāwel-.
Kiernan, Kevin, ed. Electronic Beowulf, fourth edition, 2015, 600b–05. London, British Library, Cotton Vitellius MS A.xv.
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, January 2018, s.v. sun, n.1., sun, v.
Palladius. De Re Rustica (Of Rustic Things). Mark Liddell, ed. Berlin: E. Ebering, 1896, 194, lines 8.134–40. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Image credit: NASA, 2010. Public Domain Image.