Word Diggers and Poachers

tracking some history of etymology

Trees are poems that the earth writes upon the sky.

We cut them down and turn them into paper that we may record our emptiness.

〰 Khalil Gibran 〰

ENTRANCE INTO THE WILD WORD WOODS ~ background photo © Seema Miah; photo of sign © Annie Spratt both on Unsplash

Digging for Wordroots

All our knowledge has its origin in our perception

〰 Leonardo da Vinci 〰

It may sound obscure, but studying words is not an uncommon hobby among wordnerds and philologists [from Greek philein = to love + logos = word – literally lovers of words]. (Not to be confused with logophiles = lovers of logos).

Some even make a career of it. Such outliers are called etymologists [from Greek etumos = true, genuine, factual, certain + logos = word]. They spend the best part of their days excavating and analysing the history of words to find their true origins.

Etymologists study the histories of words for all sorts of reasons. Mostly it’s about unearthing the protowords. To find the urform of a language-byte we use today, and second guess what they meant in their foregone ur-contexts.

Etymology is quite similar to archeology in many ways. Archeologists find and examine artefacts in historical sites. Etymologists find and examine verbal facts in the landscape of our languagehistory.

Both dig up fragments of past civilisations, scrutinise them, explore, probe, investigate, dissect, and interpret. Both can teach us something about how people lived ~ or communicated ~ in bygone eras.

In the case of etymology, those lingo-fragments of our ancestors can also tell us something about what they thought, how they felt, what they believed, etc. After all, words are expressions of what’s going on within the human inner world.

That’s the theory. It’s the reason why someone coined the word etymology = the discipline of identifying the (alleged) true origins of words.

Words are everywhere. They sprout in every field on earth touched by human feet and senses. Words drop freely out of human mouths, and once escaped from their speakers, they develop lives of their own.

Words come into being, intentionally or not, with specific meanings. As soon as they touch down in the eardrums of another human, the fragile link between word and meaning is at risk. The same word, caught in the sensory web of receptive human minds, may be filled with a new meaning.

Words are compositions of letters, carriers of meaning. They are hollow spiralling shells, which can be stuffed according to the whims, wishes, experiences and preconceptions of human speakers and receivers.

Etymology was invented to track the meanings of words back to their origins, when the human auricular helix was first filled with a sensible sound.

Words are like plants. Those that have been around for a long time may have grown into trees or shrubs, meadows or grasslands, covering large areas of our verbal toposphere.

Once you start digging up wordroots, you’ll often find wildly entangled rootwebs. Imagine trying to follow the tracks of one specific word all the way back to the original prototype…

~ but that’s not what etymologists always did either ~

In his book Word Origins and How We Know them, etymologist Anatoly Liberman reveals: “Medieval philosophers did not search for the origin of words the way we do. For them etymology existed to support—and as they thought prove—preconceived beliefs.”

In other words, they studied the origins of words to prove the point of their own opinions, assumptions, superstitions, thoughts ~ presumably representing the viewpoints of the ruling zeitgeist.

In other words, etymologists believed it was their job to confirm that the ancestral prototype of a word said exactly what they wanted it to say, to confirm the ‘truth’ of a point they wanted to make.

You see, now I’ve already written over five hundred words about one word ~ etymology. This is a good illustration of what etymology (as an activity) really means: thinking, reading, and writing about words. All the time.

Jeremy Bishop on Unsplash

Feeding the PIE-language-tree

Who knows what weevils lurk in the hearts of men?

〰 Margaret Atwood 〰

William Jones (1746 - 1794) was a distinguished scholar of oriental and indoeuropean languages. His father, William Jones senior, was a Welsh mathematician, noted for introducing the use of the Pi symbol π.

In addition to his native English and Welsh, Jones junior learned about 28 languages, starting at the age of seven at the prestigious Harrow School in London. His impressive CV includes an appointment as a judge at the Supreme Court of Calcutta, translations commissioned by King Christian of Denmark, and a knighthood in 1783.

Having written a number of books and articles, Jones became best known for his suggestions about the relationships between Indo-European Languages. In 1786 he proposed what is known today as the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) language. His suggestions were not entirely ‘true or original’.

Nevertheless, his name became synonymous for “introducing the PIE-language system.” (a shady 'historical fact' – also neither true nor original)

The PIE system is a constructed language, now used in contemporary English etymological dictionaries as the “hypothetical source of all English words”.

Rafael Otaki on Unsplash

A Symbiocentric Etymology

Nothing is easier than to admit in words the truth

of the universal struggle for life,

or more difficult.

〰 Charles Darwin 〰

In the Symbiocene, words are free from having to make a point. No word needs to be wasted on banging nails in the coffins of false prophet.

An etymology for the Symbiocene is not about identifying the ‘true original meaning of a word’. Now we can recognise this as a dodgy goal. Destined to fail all along. An impossible mission. Possessed by an Anthropocene spirit, which is ultimately destructive.

Yet the twisted concept is easy to recognise by its (more or less) hidden agendas. It is encoded with three alarmbells:

~ striving to be the fittest, truest, better, or best
~ a compulsive urge to have the first and last word
~ a pathological fear called imperfectiophobia

Ancient Greek 'etymologists' were not concerned with identifying the ‘true origins’ of words. They knew their words like the inside of their tunics. They were philosophers, with a focus on making sense of the world and creating a cosmology from scratch.

Their followers ~ the ones we now refer to as the ‘early linguists’ and predecessors of the champions of PIE ~ used the Bible as a major source of inspiration. Anatoly Liberman reminds us that “they traced as many words as possible to Hebrew (the language allegedly spoken in Paradise).”

Incidentally, some contemporary etymologists share this conviction ~ in relation to Arabic (allegedly the only language received directly from God).

In the Symbiocene we are not interested in proving petty points about who said what first, or who has a monopoly on a divine hotline. We want to learn more about the relationships between words in their functions as symbionts. Which can teach us loads about the relationships between words and ourselves, our words and our world etc.

If we want to help call forth the Symbiocene, we need to begin to understand those verbionts:

~ How do they interact?
~ What world do they generate and nurture in the space between them?
~ What is their indigenous spirit?

The etymons of the English ‘word’ and ‘earth’ are good candidates for such an exploration.

The English /word/ and /wort/, German /Wort/, /Wurz/, and /werden/, Norse /orð/, Gothic /waurd/ – all cousins in the PIE-tree of the language forests have cousins in the Protosemitic specimen too, as discovered in the last post The Wild Motherword.

Examples are the ancient Akkadian /wardum 𒀵/, Proto-semitic /w-r-d/, and the living Arabic and Persian /w-r-d – وَردَ/ (= rose, flower).

The eastern copse of our language forest opens up glimpses into another wordscape. The Akkadian wardum turns out to have a twin – /ardum/, Arabic /آرد‎ /.

The semitic root /a-r-d/ found its way into the Latin /ardeo = to burn/ and /arduus = steep, difficult/, Romanian /ard = burn/ Norwegian /ard = plough/, Arabic /a-r-d آرد‎ = flour/, English /ardent/ and /arduous/; and from there into the Dutch /aarde = earth/, German /Erde = earth + erden = to ground/, and English /earth/.

Arabic has more than one letter for the sound |d= Dalet|. The English word ‘earth’ also translates back into /ard/ in Arabic although the writing is different /أرض /. And this contemporary Arabic word for ‘earth’ covers pretty much the same ground as its English cousin: land, ground, territory, soil, floor, the planet. 

Yosuke Ota on Unsplash

Kurgan, the Language Poacher

Don't gobblefunk around with words.

〰 Roald Dahl 〰

When W.J. jr. and his fellow PIE-hypothesis-cultivators dug out the PIE-tree and planted it away from her semitic sisters and mothertree, they severed the relationship between our verbionts /word/ and /earth/.

They ripped the Indoeuropean languagetree out of its indigenous soil, where it had grown for millenia, entwined with the ancient semitic rootsystem. They destroyed the mycelium that helps later generations (like us) make sense of the world, and plonked their new PIE-cultivar into some godforsaken stretch of land in the Ponto-Caspian steppe.

They declared that “people of a Kurgan culture in the Pontic steppe north of the Black Sea were the most likely speakers of the Proto-Indo-European language.”

Why have we never heard about them? Why are these ‘most likely speakers’ of our ancestral language never mentioned in school?

That’s how the mysterious ‘Kurgan people’ ~ or rather a powerful (= euphemism for ‘brutal’) immortal warrior called ‘Kurgan’ (3500 to 2500 BC) ~ infamous for scaring the living daylights out of some tribes in Eastern Europe and Northwest Asia, became our linguistic ancestor.

Ever since ‘embracing Kurgan’ as our ancestor, the crop of ‘our’ PIE-language-family-tree ~ an entirely hypothetical, manmade transplant in anthropocentric paradise ~ has been subplanting, hybridising, and genetically modifying the fruit and offshoots of our indigenous Earthwordwoods.

In other words, some ‘immortal warrior’ we've never heard of is infiltrating our indigenous wordrootsystem with artificial PIE-roots.

The magnificent tree of the Motherword has lost her hold. Once thriving all over the ancient world ~ her radicles intimately entwined with the rootball of the Motherearthtree ~ we can now only find her vestigial rootlets in the European languages.

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