Albeit

Semantic satiation is at it again!

This time, it’s the word albeit. Let’s have a little fun with this word today.

My first observation is that albeit is made up of three words, not the usual two you find in compounds that make new words. “All be it” doesn’t really make a lot of sense at first glance, but if you consider the way we use albeit today, context tells you the all at the beginning is used in the same way we’d use although today.

Technically, albeit isn’t a contraction from although, really—but that’s what all really means in this context. You might say something like although that may be the case in the same way you’d say albeit, and I’m personally grateful for conjunctions like these, especially when they cram words together and leave little fossil crumbs.

Here, the original words are fossilized into their Middle English mishmash, where the order of the subject (it) and verb (be) had not yet inverted. You can hear this linguistic quirk in any period piece that strives to remind you that this was a time when English was a very different language than it is today.

Pirate-speak is the most obvious and ready example of this reminder, albeit inverting the subject and verb is a mere pittance as to sounding like actual Middle English.

Although be it is really clumsy to say, so Middle English folk would have gradually started combining these common words into one quick word. This is especially common in Germanic languages—think about Einstein’s newly coined gedankenexperiment (thought experiment).

Albeit eventually stuck, and I’m really grateful to have the word, although it be a bit imprecise and clumsy at times.