Sirrah, What's Thy Name?”

Sirrah, as a form of address aimed at inferiors, is fairly frequent in Shakespeare's plays and those of the seventeenth century, but its etymology has, surprisingly, never been convincingly identified. To date, the only explanation available is that sirrah was a composition of sir and the interjection ah or ha. This hypothesis, often uncritically quoted, even by the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), goes back to John Minsheu, a lexicographer of the early seventeenth century. But this paper tries to show that Minsheu's opinion, based on word formation, is far-fetched and that sirrah is merely a phonetic variant of sir. Both words have the same Old French etymological origin, namely sire. Sirrah is, in fact, an ironical and mimicking pronunciation of sire. Sir, for its part, though generally an honourable title, was also not entirely free of derogatory connotations in Late Middle and Early Modern English. The evidence for the close proximity of sir and sirrah will be taken from historical English phonology, semantics, pragmatics and sociolinguistics. The retrieval of the key data is based on Open Source Shakespeare and, for Late Middle English, on both the Middle English Dictionary and the OED, as well as the Innsbruck Middle English Prose Corpus

Ancient history · Art · Early Modern English · Etymology · Historical linguistics · Lexeme · Lexicography · Linguistics · Literature · Middle Ages · Middle English · Pronunciation · Relation (database · Computer Science · Lexicography and Language Studies · Linguistics and language evolution · Swearing, Euphemism, Multilingualism · Classics · History · Philosophy

• John Minsheu

  Open Access•Jürgen Schäfer•Renaissance Quarterly•1973

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• The nature and use of proto-languages

  Open Access•Ernst Pulgram•Lingua•1961

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