As noted, Gothic must have had a word for the taste of honey, but by chance it has not been recorded. Before and after the familiar when in the session of sweet silent thought (Sonnet 30), the word occurs again and again. But sweet is probably the most frequent epithet in the sonnets. We all remember that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet. This broadening is especially noticeable in Shakespeare. In English, the adjective sweet broadened its meaning and became a vague synonym for “pleasant, lovable, enjoyable.” Whatever you may say, a rose smells sweeter when it is called a rose. Some languages lost w in the root, as seen in Modern Dutch zoot, German süß, and Icelandic sætur.
The original Germanic form must have sounded approximately as swōti. The Old English for sweet was swēte (with a long vowel in the root, as, for instance, in Modern German P eter). Yet it surely existed in the language of the Goths. The word is Common Germanic, though it does not occur in the fourth-century translation of the Gospels from Greek into Gothic (the reason is clear: sweet and sweetness are very rare words in the Bible). I would like to begin with the adjective sweet.
(It has always amused me that to beat a willing horse and to beat a dead horse mean the same. Anyone can look them up in a good dictionary, and nowadays the Internet provides lots of reliable information, so that there is no need to beat a willing horse. In principle, I tend to avoid the words whose origin is known and noncontroversial. The future will show to what extent see, hear, feel, touch, and a few other verbs belonging to this sphere are worthy of our attention. If they arouse enough interest, I may continue in the same vein. On the wave of this unexpected popularity, I decided to write an essay or two on related themes. The post on the origin of the word smell ( August 21, 2019) has been read by more people than any other in recent months.
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