John's Linguistics blog

English thank and think are cognate and come from the same Proto-Germanic root: Proto-Germanic: þank- = thought, gratitude, mental consideration Old English: þencan = to think þanc = thought, goodwill, gratitude Originally, “thanks” was essentially “good thoughts” or “favourable remembrance”. So when you thanked someone, the underlying idea was roughly: “I will think well of you” or “I hold your deed in grateful thought” My intuition: “I recognise you thought of me” And so, the vowel alternation is related to the same Germanic ablaut patterns seen in: sing / sang drink / drank think / thought Though thank is not literally the past tense of think , they are historically sibling forms produced by the same root-and-vowel-change system in Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Germanic. Related words: German Dank = thanks German denken = think Dutch danken / denken So the cognitive link between thought and gratitude is ancient and deeply embedded...

Why is it 'spider' in english, not 'spinner' like in other Germanic languages? English spider comes from Old English spīþra / spīdre (forms vary by dialect/manuscript), from a Proto-Germanic root related to spinning/thread-making. Cognates include: German: Spinne Dutch: spin Icelandic: spiða / related forms Old Norse: spinnari (“spinner”) So the semantic origin is “spinner”. The interesting part is the intrusive or epenthetic consonant — the d in spider . English does this fairly often historically: thunder ← Proto-Germanic þunraz (cf. German Donner ) spindle ← related to spin sound shifts involving n+r , ð+r , or l+r clusters often developed stop consonants in English In spider , linguists generally think the d developed between consonants as a phonetic transition sound, something like: spi-r → spid-r → spider Similar to how: Old English thunor became thunder empty gained a /p/ sound from earlier forms without it