If someone tells a funny joke, do you chuckle? Do you giggle? Do you yuk it up? (I won’t ask whether you yuck it up, because that spelling can also refer to something… unpleasant.)
What if I told you that all those words – joke, giggle, chuckle, yuk – are related etymologically?
They’re not. Sorry. But it’s not implausible, phonologically. And they are all imitative in origin, so, in a way, if you want to trace the etymology back to nonlinguistic utterances, you could say they are related.
First, though, let’s address a ticklish little issue: the -le on giggle and chuckle. That’s a frequentative suffix, meaning that it indicates repeated action. You can see that clearly on words like crackle and sniffle and snuggle, though -le also shows up on a lot of words that don’t have versions without -le – at least not anymore: cuddle, fumble, sizzle, tickle…
Anyway, chuckle is from chuck plus -le and giggle is probably from gig plus -le. Which doesn’t help much, because this chuck is not the chuck we think of when we think of chuck, and this gig is equally a different gig than gig.
Chuck, in this case, is imitative of a sound such as the one chickens make, and can also mean ‘cluck’. Fair enough, since a certain kind of laugh is often described as a cackle. Oh, yeah, cackle: another imitative sound, cack, plus the -le.
And gig is supposedly imitative of a creaking sound, although there are cognates with giggle throughout the Germanic languages, such as Dutch giechelen (which uses a pair of those deep velar fricatives characteristic of Dutch – a sound like horking a chicken bone out of your throat), and all of them mean ‘giggle’, not ‘creak’.
Anyway, getting back to the plausibility of their being related, you will see in chuck and cack and gig a velar stop (“g” or “k”) at the end, the same as in the plainly imitative yuk. And while the initial sounds are different, they are all capable of being phonologically related with vowel shifts: a dorsal stop “k” can assimilate forward towards a front vowel, giving an affricate /tʃ/ “ch” or a fricative /x/ “kh,” and at the back or in the front it can be voiced, /g/ “g” or /dʒ/ “j” or /j/ “y” – this is how the Dutch word for ‘goat’, geit, sounds sort of like a vehement utterance of “hate,” and the Swedish word for ‘goat’, get, sounds like “yate.”
So. Do you get it? (Or do you hate it?) The laughter sound we represent as yuk (or yuck) can also be the etymological origin of chuckle and giggle and even cackle, and while there’s no known common root for them between then and now, there could be, and anyway they’re all imitating the same thing.
But here’s the punch line: joke traces through Latin iocus (‘joke, jest, pastime’) back to Proto-Indo-European *yek- ‘speak, utter’. Yep, yek. That is the sound of people making sounds – talking or, yeah, laughing. That’s right, the prototypical utterance may well have been yukking it up. Yikes!
Sesquiotica 