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StillnessWord origin

'Nice' comes, through French, from Latin nescius, 'not knowing'. When it entered English around 1300 it meant foolish or ignorant, and it passed through senses such as timid, fussy and precise before 'pleasant' became established in the 18th century.

Merriam-Webster

LanguagePhilosophy

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Dictionaries date the steps roughly like this: foolish and timid by about 1300, fussy in the late 1300s, delicate around 1400, precise in the 1500s (still heard in 'a nice distinction'), agreeable from 1769 and kind from about 1830. Old senses lingered beside new ones, and the Oxford English Dictionary notes that in many 16th- and 17th-century texts it is hard to tell which one a writer meant. Linguists call a rise from a bad meaning to a good one amelioration; the reverse, pejoration, happened to 'silly', which in Old English meant happy or blessed. Jane Austen caught the new 'nice' spreading. In Northanger Abbey, published in 1817, Henry Tilney teases Catherine Morland for calling a Gothic novel 'the nicest book in the world', remarking that the word now 'does for everything'.

Türkçe oku
İngilizcedeki “nice” sözcüğü, Latincede “bilmeyen” demek olan nescius'tan Fransızca yoluyla gelir. 1300 dolaylarında İngilizceye girdiğinde “aptal, cahil” anlamındaydı; sonra “çekingen”, “titiz” ve “kesin” gibi anlamlardan geçti, “hoş” anlamı ancak 18. yüzyılda yerleşti.

Sözlüklere göre değişim kabaca şöyle ilerledi: 1300 dolaylarında “aptal” ve “çekingen”, 14. yüzyılın sonunda “titiz, zor beğenen”, 1400 dolaylarında “narin”, 16. yüzyılda “kesin, özenli”. Bu son anlam, “a nice distinction” (ince bir ayrım) deyiminde hâlâ yaşar. “Hoş, keyifli” anlamı 1769'dan, “nazik, düşünceli” anlamı 1830 dolaylarından itibaren kayıtlara geçti. Eski anlamlar yenileriyle bir süre yan yana yaşadı; Oxford İngilizce Sözlüğü, 16. ve 17. yüzyıl metinlerinde sözcüğün hangi anlamda kullanıldığını kestirmenin çoğu zaman zor olduğunu belirtir. Dilbilimciler, olumsuz bir anlamın olumluya dönmesine anlam iyileşmesi der; tersine, yani anlam kötüleşmesine bir örnek “silly”dir: Eski İngilizcede “mutlu, kutsanmış” demekti. Jane Austen yeni anlamın yayılışını romanına taşıdı. 1817'de yayımlanan Northanger Manastırı'nda genç Catherine Morland okuduğu gotik romana “the nicest book in the world” (dünyanın en güzel kitabı) deyince Henry Tilney onunla tatlı tatlı alay eder ve bu sözcüğün artık “her şeye uyduğunu” söyler.

Sources and further reading

Background reading: Semantic change
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