Bon et beau

Over the years words compund their meanings. The word beautiful is an example of this. It started out 2500 years ago in Latin as the word bonus, which means "good" at its root.

Roman troops carried Latin to England and the language took root there alongside Anglo-Saxon. So the Anglo-Saxons began adopting some of the Latin into their language. Bonus was one of those words, and it took two routes to get to the present. The Angol-Saxon people began pronouncing the o in bonus as oo (but spelled ou) in the Middle Ages. So, the form boun is found as in the word bounty, which has come to mean reward or something good in great quantities. During the early years of the Middle Ages, in French, the o in bonus was pronounced and spelled as eau. So, the root was beaun. But, the n was heard as an l, so there was some confusion with the root bel, which means very pretty. From there it wasn't much longer before the word beauty was born. l and n were both dropped from pronunciation, leaving beau. After the French conquered the English in 1066 ACE, a good number of words took on their French spellings even though many of the Anglo-Saxon words remained unchanged. English adopted beau (but they still kept bou in their native tongue) added the suffix -ty as a suffix carrying the grammatical meaning to indicate the word as a noun. Finally, a second suffix, -ful was added to make the word an adjective.

There were a lot of derivational gymnastics taking place for beautiful to mean what it does today. As for me, I like the fact that bounty and beautiful share the same root. If you bundle the two words together, you get the idea of someone strikingly attractive containing great quantities of goodness.

I know this person. And what a bonus!