Hot and cold and head and chief

Having just updated a fairly recent post about about paths of least resistamce, and specifically what make English "cold" and Italian caldo share an initial (if you want to know why, and what it has to do with paths of least resistance, read that post), I've been thinking more about words that have these two initials.

A few years ago I was writing about other words in Romance languages that share the initial c (as it happens, I was thinking about words that mean "head" and listed only capo, cabo, cabeza, cabeça. But I had the sense to follow the list with an ellipsis – there must be dozens more, including chef ...

<exception>
French took a different path to arrive at a word for "head" – for that read on – but a head in the metaphorical sense still has an initial c, as does the English "chief" 

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I should have said yesterday that in France the Vulgar Latin C became ch before certain vowels, so, for example, Carolus became Charles. (More than    "before certain vowels" I wouldn't like to say, as I studiously [interesting use of "studiously"] avoided the minefield that is French phonology.)

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</exception>

...). The Latin root for all these was caput, which derived, largely unchanged, from a supposed PIE root, *kaput.

Meanwhile, in Germanic languages the preferred initial for such words is h: here's what Etymonline has for "head":

The reason for this (Germanic h initials but Romance c) is the same as (or similar to) the hot vs caldo issue I was writing about here.

But 'What about tête?', I hear from the cheap seats. I said I was coming to that. It is based on a metaphor, dating from the pre-veni, vidi, vici days in Gaul. Back in 2013 I was recounting (here) a visit to a museum in Plymouth; 

<pre-script>
... Plymouth was noted for being a Roundhead stronghold during the English Civil War – and that name for the Puritans' soldiers, was coined with reference to their headgear (I prefer the soldiers' helmet theory to the pudding-basin haircut theory expounded – very briefly – here).

The Roundhead soldiers were by no means the first fighting force to be given a nickname based on what their heads looked like. When Roman soldiers occupied Gaul the locals thought that their helmets looked like cooking pots (Vulgar Latin TESTA(M)). Among all the Romance-language names for head (capo, cabo, cabeza, cabeça ...) where does the French tête come from? Well, here's a hint; the circumflex in French is often a vestige of an s.
<pre-script>

Back then, with a fairly recent history as a language teacher, I left the rest as an Exercise; but now I'll spell it out: tête is derived from that TESTA(M).

But nothing in language development is ever simple: English has both "head and "chief"; German has both haupt and kopf...

<parenthesis>
(it's not that easy, as kopf is not derived from the PIE *kaput; see here if you want the whole story, which rather spoils the neat h/k point.)
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Most languages have more than one word for one idea, and each of the words has its own etymological path. Moreover, sometimes those paths cross.

Which brings me to "kaput", an international word meaning dead/hors de combat/finished... (a word that springs to mind because my Tai Chi teacher, a Czech (speaking English, although there have been some polyglot Zoom classes, with students from Czechia), used it last week (and I use it, written on the  container I use for one of my two laptop batteries: when it is flat, it goes in the bag marked KAPUT)

My first thought involved assassination; I thought that if you wanted to kill someone you would choose a head-shot. A person was kaput if they had been the victim of a head-shot. But the truth was much more interesting (and much less violent). Etymonline again:

kaput (adj.)

"finished, worn out, dead," 1895 as a German word in English, from German kaputt "destroyed, ruined, lost" (1640s), which in this sense probably is a misunderstanding of an expression from card-playing, capot machen, a partial translation into German of French faire capot, a phrase which meant "to win all the tricks (from the other player) in piquet," an obsolete card game.

The French phrase means "to make a bonnet," and perhaps the notion is throwing a hood over the other player, but faire capot also meant in French marine jargon "to overset in a squall when under sail."...

                                                                                               

<tangents>

1. 'throwing a hood over the other player' is not unlike 'pulling the wool over their eyes'. Hmm, wonder where that comes from... 
2. So kaput shares with "in the lurch" the distinction of being derived from a metaphor based on an obscure card game: kaput from faire capot, and "in the lurch" from en lourche.

<meta-tangent>
Thr Internet seems to be convinced that en lourche means "comprehensively beaten", and that the game it comes from is "obscure". but in an update to this post I questioned this: "The game is not so much not known about as not documented  – at least, not in English. Historians of French board games know perfectly well  how to put someone en lourche." And it doesn't necessarily imply a comprehensive defeat, although it often leads to one.
<meta-tangent>

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Hmm. That's enough navel-gazing for now. Interesting though. And in an update I'll have to write about Grimm's Law (which underlies the h/k thing). 

b

Update: 2022.11.02.15:05 – Added <inline-ps />