Cheapside and Eastcheap are two streets in the City of London. Cheap is an adjective these days, but originally, in Old English, cheap was a noun. It meant 'bargaining, barter, or exchange of commodities', and could also refer to the place of buying or selling, or the market, which is why the streets have these names. Cheap is a cognate of the German kaufen, to buy.
The adjective cheap is not found before the 16th century, says the OED. It is, in fact, a short form of the earlier good cheap; better cheap and best cheap were common, too. So something that was good cheap in the 14th century was a bargain. The original meaning of the verb to cheapen (16th century) was 'to bargain' or 'ask the price of'. Chapman is mostly known as a surname now, but it is related to cheap its original meaning was 'dealer' or 'tradesman'.
The development from noun to adjеctive parallels French: marché c1080 = bargained agreement, pact; -> bon marché = good deal -> not costly.
Marchand and marchandise are further 12th C. developments that were adopted into English (the former evidently driving ‘chapman’ into restricted use as surname). The verb marchander, however, on English soil, seems not to have gained lasting favor, losing out to a rival (already established?) French term, bargaignier, and its noun bargaigne, which, fallen together as ‘bargain,’ has had stunning success in English to the present day.
In French, on the other hand, bargaignier, become barguigner and its meaning reduced to a synonym of hesitate, has all but disappeared. Littré labels it 'vieilli' with mention that it occurrs primarily in the set expression sans barguigner, and gives a sentence featuring that expression from La petite Fadette, one of G. Sand’s pastoral novels, where she was particularly concerned to endow her rural characters with authentic, and often archaic, ‘peasant’ speech.)
Meawhile, 20th C. (American?) English has given rise to the bizspeak items ‘markets’ and ‘marketing’—purely English derivations from the same Latin mercatus as marché. And as a business term, ‘marketing’ has now become a widely accepted foreign borrowing in a number of other languages, including Russian and French.
Posted by: Gaylord | June 24, 2012 at 10:53 PM
Thank you for that information, Gaylord. Fascinating!
Posted by: Virtual Linguist | June 25, 2012 at 08:16 PM