words wholly unrelated

ear & hear

when i was just a wee raynorling, i used the verb heye as a synonym for see. if an ear hears, i reasoned, then an eye heyes. my parents (who are raging descriptivists anyway) never bothered to correct me. so imagine my embarrassment when i got to that place in france and asked where the hole in the wall is that the boys can heye it all. needless to say, i was never directed to that hole, i did not get to see it all, nor did i ever use my coinage again.

but it wasn’t until yesterday when a guy that i was chatrouletting with asked me if there was an etymological relationship between ear and hear that i ever questioned that the two words might not be related.

indeed, they are not. ear is traced to the old teutonic auzon. hear comes from the old english heran. both are incredibly ancient and ultimately derive from the proto-indo-european language spoken by the elves of middle earth before the time of man.