Mind your language
WHY, asks David Taylor of Allington, Lincolnshire, does cleave mean both 'to split' and 'to stick together'? Why, soon found myself asking, do we say cleft stick but cloven hoof'?
Cleaving does not play a large part in our ordinary vocabulary, though we find it natural enough to speak of a meatcleaver. But we would never ask the butcher to cleave a piece of meat.
Cleave is historically a fretted and muddled word, or rather two words, for the first thing to get straight is that we are not talking about a word that has developed two main meanings, but two unrelated words overlapping in their forms. Cleave meaning 'to split' is reckoned to come from a pre-Teutonic form gleubh-, giving Greek gluf'cut' (as in hieroglyph) and Latin glub'peel, flay'. Cleave meaning `to stick' comes from Old Teutonic klib-, and is perhaps related, through the simpler progenitor kli-, to other sticky words in English, climb, clam and clay.
Sticky cleave, after some uncertainty as to form in Old English which had better not detain us, was written dive in the mediaeval period (pronounced cleeye). If things had developed in an orderly manner, we should now say dive (pronounced like Clive of India); but there was an alternative form, cleve, and it was this that predominated, making the present tense identical in sound to the splitty cleave.
Splitty cleave had its present-tense stem written as clevin the high Middle Ages, and the past tense was clef (with a long `e'). with the past participle cloven. But under the influence of cloven the past tense became clove.
Two nice complications with splitty cleave were that instead of the 'irregular' (or 'strong') past tense clove, some people used, for both past and past participle, the weak form cleaved; this developed into cleft, which is still used. The other complication is that under northern influence a different past tense came into use: clove. It was printed in the Authorised Version of the Bible (1611) and so is familiar still (as are similarly archaic past tenses of other verbs, such as brake, spake).
The same version of the Bible also used a past-tense form clave for sticky cleave. In this it was keeping up a fine tradition of mixing up the inflectional forms of sticky cleave and splitty cleave. Some forms everyone is confident of: cloven tongues (of fire); tongues that cleave to the roof of the mouth, but cleft palates. Oh, and by the way clover has nothing to do with either.
Dot Wordsworth
Previous page
