Tonge

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. An archaic spelling of tongue, the muscular organ in the mouth used for tasting and swallowing ; the language or manner of speech a person uses
2. An old form of the word for the fleshy muscle inside the mouth that aids taste and speech ; a way of speaking or the words spoken in a particular language
3. Archaic spelling meaning the movable fleshy organ in the mouth used for tasting, swallowing and talking ; the speech or language of a people

Etymology: The spelling "tonge" is simply an older form of "tongue," and the word's surprising twist is that its ancient sense of the body part is only half the story. The Old English "tunge" is about 1,000 years old in English and reaches back to a Proto-Germanic root, *tungǭ, that also gave German "Zunge" and Dutch "tong." Its common Indo-European relatives are equally old, which means the organ has been called by a similar name across a huge swath of languages for thousands of years. The most striking sense is one that has nothing to do with anatomy at all. "Tongue" has long meant "a language," a metonym in which the speech organ stands in for the speech it produces. This use was already established in Old English, more than a thousand years ago. It is also what kept the word alive alongside the French-derived "language," which might otherwise have pushed it into obsolescence. The spelling itself is a small puzzle. The expected modern form would be "tung," following the Old English vowel and the pattern of Middle English spellings like "yong" for "young." The final "-gue" seems to have been added to stop "tonge" being read with a soft "j" sound, though it appeared just as the final "e" was falling silent, so the reason it was kept rather than dropped remains unclear.