In this brief fantasia on “can,” John McWhorter shows how a single ancient root meaning “to know” has spread across many different words in lots of languages over hundreds of years.
JOHN McWHORTER: For our bonus section this week, I thought I'd give you a little fantasia on where we get the word “can” as in, “can you give me a hammer?” Or “can you give me a hand?” “Can.” A little word. Well, it has a history.
“Can” goes back to the proto-Indo-European word that would have been used in Ukraine, and that word would have been something like “gnō.” Something like “gnō.” So g-n, and then “can” is k-n. And c and g are really the same thing. So people in Ukraine are saying “gnō,” and there's just their one language. Then that language spreads west and east, where it goes west to Germanic speaking territories. It becomes, for example, in English, “can.”
Now we know that “can” has an irregular past form and that's “could.” “I could do it yesterday,” not “I canned do it yesterday.” But if you know that the past is “could,” then maybe it won't be so shocking to you that the verb used to have a past participle which was not “canned” — so not “I can, yesterday I canned, and I have canned” — but it was “couth” because there's “could” (and think about how “could” is spelled) and then there's “couth.” And so “I have couth”: I have been able.
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