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If you've ever studied German, you may remember that 'to write' is 'schreiben'. This is pretty similar to 'schrijven' in Dutch, 'skriva' in Swedish, 'skrive' in Norwegian and Danish, and since all those languages are closely related to German, that's not all that surprising...
...(Closely related means they have a common origin). But English, despite undergoing a lot of change in the last millennium, has that same common origin and so is also closely related to German. So how come our word 'write' is so different? Because 'write' is an illuminating...
...relic of a time when writing was not confined to paper, parchment or keyboards. Old English 'writan' (with the 'w' pronounced) was an old Germanic term that meant not only to write but also to incise or engrave. Originally it would have referred to the carving of runes into...
...wood or stone, but when cutting edge parchment and ink technology arrived on these shores the (very) early English extended the word's meaning. However, across Europe at that time, the idea of writing on parchment in all those new-fangled "books" was closely bound up with...
...the idea of writing Latin, which was the language of literature and the Church. So it would have seemed very natural to the Norse and the West Germanic tribes to just half-inch the Latin word 'scribere' to describe this particular activity. So that's how German, Dutch and...
...the Scandinavian languages all ended up with their words for writing and we ended up with ours. Perhaps the use of 'writan' had something to do with the development of a vigorous vernacular literature in England at a time when a lot of our neighbours weren't really...
...very interested in writing down their native languages and still preferred to use Latin most of the time. A relative of 'write' does survive in modern German - it's 'ritzen', meaning 'to scratch'. This is a good example of the way the history of words can illuminate the...
...way our ancestors perceived things when they first encountered them. The punchline here is that 'scribere' also originally meant to scratch or cut, as did the Greek equivalent γρᾰ́φειν (gráphein), which was borrowed into modern English as 'graph'
