What an Indo-Europeanist
Sees
When Reading
Robert L. Fisher
2017
In 1786 Sir William Jones, an extraordinary polyglot, expert on India and
judge, hypothesized that Old Persian, Sanskrit, Latin, Greek, Germanic and Celtic
exhibit so many similarities in grammar and vocabulary that they must have
“sprung from some common source”. Later, scholars such as Jakob Grimm, of the
Brothers Grimm, the collectors of German folktales, demonstrated regular
correspondences (sound laws or Lautverschiebungen) between the consonants of
the Germanic languages and those of the other Indo-European languages. These
correspondences were iron-clad proof that the Indo-European languages had
gradually evolved over the millennia from a single language (called Proto-IndoEuropean). The homeland of this hypothetic language (proto-homeland or
Urheimat), which existed about 4000 BC, was located north of the Black Sea and
the Caucasus Mountains in Southern Russia. The Indo-Europeans were a nomadic
warrior culture that also engaged in some farming. They lived in the steppe-forest,
had domesticated the horse, invented the chariot, and for unknown reasons first
moved west into the Balkans, and later in waves into all of Europe. Some IndoEuropeans migrated east into the Near East, Iran, India and to Central Asia, in
what is now western China (the Tarim Basin in Xinjiang Province). No doubt
many of the peoples they conquered, who were not related to the IndoEuropeans, nevertheless adopted their languages.
A map showing the dispersion of the IE people and languages
2
Today Indo-European languages are spoken by nearly three billion people
around the globe.
Here is a table of the regular sound correspondences between Germanic
and the other Indo-European languages (Grimm’s Law):
rotoIndoEuropea
n
*pṓds
*trit(y)ós
Meanin
g
"foot"
"third"
Non-Germanic
(unshifted)
cognates
Ancient Greek:
πούς, ποδός (poús,
podós), Latin: pēs,
pedis, Sanskrit: pād
a, Russian: под
(pod) "under; floor",
Lithuanian: pėda,
Latvian pēda
Ancient Greek:
τρίτος (tritos),
Latin: tertius,
Welsh: trydydd,
Sanskrit: treta,
Change
*p > f [ɸ]
*t > þ [θ]
3
ProtoGermani
c
*fōt-
*þridjô
Germanic (shifted)
examples
English: foot, West
Frisian: foet,
German: Fuß,
Gothic: fōtus, Icelandic,
Faroese: fótur,
Danish: fod,
Norwegian,
Swedish: fot
English: third, Old
Frisian: thredda, Old
Saxon: thriddio,
Gothic: þridja,
Icelandic: þriðji,
Russian: третий
(tretij),
Lithuanian: trečias,
Albanian: tretë
*ḱwón- ~
*ḱun-
*kʷód
*dʰewb-
*déḱm̥t
*gel-
"dog"
Ancient Greek:
κύων (kýōn),
Latin: canis,
Welsh: ci (pl. cwn)
"what"
Latin: quod,
Irish: cad,
Sanskrit: kád,
Russian: ко- (ko-),
Lithuanian: kas
"deep"
Lithuanian: dubùs
"ten"
Latin: decem,
Greek: δέκα (déka),
Irish: deich,
Sanskrit: daśan,
Russian: десять
(desyat'),
Lithuanian: dešimt
"cold"
Latin: gelū, Greek:
γελανδρός
(gelandrós),
Lithuanian: gelmeni
s, gelumà
Danish,
Swedish: tredje
*k > h [x]
*kʷ > hw [xʷ]
*b > p [p]
*d > t [t]
*g > k [k]
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*hundaz
English: hound,
Dutch: hond,
German: Hund,
Gothic: hunds,
Icelandic,
Faroese: hundur,
Danish, Norwegian,
Swedish: hund
*hwat
English: what,
Gothic: ƕa ("hwa"),
Icelandic: hvað,
Faroese: hvat,
Danish: hvad,
Norwegian: hva
*deupaz
English: deep, West
Frisian: djip,
Dutch: diep,
Icelandic: djúpur,
Swedish: djup,
Gothic diups
*tehun
English: ten,
Dutch: tien,
Gothic: taíhun,
Icelandic: tíu,
Faroese: tíggju,
Danish, Norwegian: ti,
Swedish: tio
*kaldaz
English: cold, West
Frisian: kâld,
Dutch: koud,
German: kalt,
Icelandic,
Faroese: kaldur,
Danish: kold,
Norwegian: kald,
Swedish: kall
*gʷih₃wó
s
*bʰréh₂tē
r
*médʰu
*steygʰ-
*sengʷʰ-
"alive"
"brother
"
"honey"
Lithuanian: gyvas,
Russian:, живой
(živoj),
Sanskrit jīvá-
Sanskrit: bhrātṛ,
Ancient Greek:
φρατήρ (phrātēr)
("member of a
brotherhood")
Sanskrit: mádhu,
Homeric Greek:
μέθυ (methu)
*gʷ > kw [kʷ]
*bʰ > b [b ~ β]
*dʰ > d [d ~ ð]
*kwi(k)wa
z
English: quick, West
Frisian: kwik, kwyk,
Dutch: kwiek,
German: keck,
Gothic: qius, Icelandic,
Faroese: kvikur,
Danish: kvik,
Swedish: kvick,
Norwegian kvikk
*brōþēr
English: brother, West
Frisian,
Dutch: broeder,
German: Bruder,
Gothic: broþar,
Icelandic,
Faroese: bróðir,
Danish, Swedish,
Norwegian: broder
*meduz
English: mead, East
Frisian: meede,
Dutch: mede,
Danish/Norwegian: mjø
d, Icelandic: mjöður ,
Swedish: mjöd
Old English: stīgan,
Dutch: stijgen,
German: steigen,
Icelandic,
Faroese: stíga, Danish,
Norwegian: stige,
Gothic steigan (all
meaning "ascend,
climb")
"walk,
step"
Sanskrit: stighnoti,
Ancient Greek:
στείχειν (steíkhein)
*gʰ > g [ɡ ~ ɣ]
*stīganą
"sing"
Homeric
Greek: ὀμφή (omph
ē) "voice"
*gʷʰ > gw [ɡʷ]
(After n)
*singwan
ą
5
English: sing, West
Frisian: sjonge,
Dutch: zingen,
German: singen,
Gothic: siggwan, Old
Icelandic: syngva, syng
ja, Icelandic,
Faroese: syngja,
Swedish: sjunga,
Danish: synge/sjunge
*gʷʰermó
s
"warm"
Sanskrit: gharmá-,
Avestan: garəmó,
Old
Prussian: gorme
*gʷʰ > gw > {b,
gw}
(Otherwise
merged with
existing g and
w)
*warmaz
English: warm, West
Frisian: waarm, Dutch,
German: warm,
Swedish: varm,
Icelandic: varmur
This map shows the present-day distribution of the IE languages in Eurasia.
The main branches of the Indo-European language family are: Celtic (Irish,
Welsh, Breton), Italic (Latin and its Romance descendants French, Italian,
Spanish. Portuguese, Rumanian, Catalan), Germanic (English, Dutch, German, the
Scandinavian languages), Baltic (Latvian, Lithuanian), Slavic (Russian, Ukrainian,
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Polish, Czech, Slovene, Serbo-Croatian, Bulgarian), Greek, Armenian, Iranian
(Persian or Farsi, Pushto), Indic (Hindi and Urdu, Bengali, Assamese) and a
number of extinct languages (Hittite, the oldest attested IE language, 16th century
BC; Sanskrit in India, about 1200 BC; Old Persian 500 BC, and Avestan, the Iranian
language of Zoroastrianism, 1000 BC; Old Church Slavonic, 9th century AD, Latin,
620 BC; Ancient Greek, 1300 BC; and Tocharian, once spoken in the Tarim Basin
in Western China, 5th century AD).
To some extent we can reconstruct IE proto-culture, both physical and
abstract, by determining what words can be firmly reconstructed for the protolanguage, for example, “plough”, “wheel”, “horse”, kinship terms, religious terms,
names of divinities, legal and political terms, metals, weapons, and words for
weather (“snow”), environment “lake” (but no word for “sea”), and flora and fauna,
give us some idea of the climate and terrain they lived in. Even some poetic
phrases can be reconstructed, such “as undying fame”, sound-for-sound identical
in Homer and in the oldest Sanskrit (the Vedas). This process of gleaning cultural
information from reconstructed vocabulary is called linguistic palaeontology. It
must be used carefully with archaeology.
The Text
For centuries, the most widely read work in the repertoire was Pilgrim’s
Progress by John Bunyan, son of a tinker, barely schooled, dissenter from Anglican
articles of faith, itinerant preacher, imprisoned for his activities, decried as a witch
and a highwayman. The most commercially successful poet in the 18th century was
Alexander Pope, a four-foot-six Roman Catholic hunchback. The most famous
poet of the 19th century was Lord Byron, a Scottish Calvinist exile from the English
high society that he scorned, that bitched about him, but could not get enough of
him.
Justin Bate, English Literature: A Very Short Introduction (OUP, 2010)
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What the Indo-Europeanist Sees
English century is from Latin centuria “group of one hundred”. Both century
and hundred share the same PIE origin, *kṃtóm,1 which seems to have meant “a
large amount”. In Germanic it means 120, and from Greek hecatomb, supposedly
the sacrifice of 100 oxen, we find in the Iliad that only twelve were sacrificed,
which is already quite a sizeable number. PIE2 *kṃ-t- must have been some sort of
counting unit because it shows up in the word *de- kṃ-t- “ten”, where *de-, it is
thought, is a form of the word for “two”, so “two units” or “two hands”.
Unfortunately, this attempt to explain “ten” has phonological problems: why
would *dwéh3(u)- “two” appear as *de-?3
Wide is from IE *wi- apart, and is in many words, including di-vide and widow, the woman set apart from her husband by death. But it also appears in a
remarkable correspondence between ancient Scandinavia and Vedic India: in Old
Norse mythology there is the god Víðarr, whose name literally means “wider”. In
the final battle between the gods and the forces of sterility and death, Ragnarøk
“destined end of the gods” (Wagner’s Götterdämmerung), his task is to put his foot
on the lower jaw of the poisonous serpent that encircles the Earth and pull up at
the same time on its upper jaw, killing it. His equivalent in India is Vishnu
(“wide”), the god who took three enormous strides to expand the habitable
universe.
English work is an exact match of Greek (w)érgon of the same meaning. The
Greek word has give us ergo-nomic, syn-erg-y, energy, erg (unit of work in physics),
orgy, originally “secret rites, worship” (from “service”), organ (“tool, musical
instrument” in Greek), the name George (geo- earth, erg- “work”, hence “farmer”),
liturgy (work of the people, laity), allergy (other-action), and surgery (kheirourgos
“working by hand” kheir “hand, foot” as in chiropractor, chiropodist — many
languages use the same word for foot and hand, even leg and arm as in Russian).
There is another word involving work, and that is robot, a borrowing from
Czech, specifically from Karel Čapek’s play R.U.R. (Russom’s Universal Robots)
(1920). In Slavic robota meant “service” or forced labor (as does the Czech word
robot), which derives from Slavic rabŭ servant, which in turn comes from the IE
An asterisk, *, before a form indicates it is hypothetic, reconstructed, but not attested.
Proto-Indo-European
3 The various h’s with subscript numbers indicate “laryngeals”, the traditional name for sounds
made in the back of the mouth, as are found, for example, in Arabic.
1
2
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word for orphan: *h3 orbh-o-, Arm. orb ‘orphan’, OCS4 rabŭ, ORu. robŭ, SCr. rob m.
‘servant, slave’; Lat orbus adj. ‘deprived of, childless, orphaned’. The root persists
in the common Russian word rebënok “kid, child”. This may indicate that
orphaned children had to supply labor in exchange for membership in the clan
that fed and took care of them. The noun is based on a verb seen in Hittite harpa“change status”. Greek orphanós not only means “orphan”, but also “bereft”, thus
making a connection with the underlying verbs preserved in the most ancient
attested IE language, Hittite. The orphaned child was bereft from his family and
changed his status to servitude, a condition we see in fairly tales such as
Cinderella.
Pilgrim < ME5 pelegrim < OF *pelegrin, later pèlerin < Latin peregrīnum “one
that comes from foreign parts, a stranger”, ultimately from per- “through” + ager“field” (English acre). Note dissimilation6 of r…r to l…r, and final n > m. Acre
meant open land, field (German Acker) and can be seen in the Austrian/Southern
German -egger in Schwarzenegger (black, dark field) Heidegger “uncultivated
land” (Heide is English heath “wild, uncultivated land”, heathen “savage living on
wild land”). English peregrine persists in the meaning of “foreign, outlandish,
strange”, and in the familiar peregrine falcon, so called because its young were
captured in flight (on their passage or “pilgrimage”).
As for the name Bunyan, research over the past two centuries points to the
name being occupational and deriving from the pre-12th century Old French
bunion, a nickname for a maker of small patties or round loaves, related to the
better-known French beignet and English bunion (from its bun shape).
Anglican < Latin (Tacitus) Anglus, -ī “inhabitants of Angul” (ON Ǭngull, a
place in Holstein named for its shape as a fish-hook. English is just the umlauted7
form, cf. older, elder.
Latin iter, itin(er)is “road” is a very archaic type of noun in IE, called a
heteroclite, that is, a noun that has a nominative/accusative in -r and all the other
cases with an -n- suffix. The root is *héi- “go” as in Latin eo “I go”. Such nouns are
relics of the very oldest stage of PIE, but it is unclear what their history is. The
root *wegh- “move” gives us English way and Latin via and Latvian veža “track”.
OCS, Old Church Slavonic; ORu., Old Russian; SCr., Serbo-Croatian: Lat., Latin.
ME, Middle English; OF, Old French.
6 Confusion of r and l is common in the languages of the world, especially when they occur in the
same word, for example, Lat.arbor “tree” became Italian albero.
7 A kind of vowel assimilation, as in foot ; feet, caused by the vowel in the following syllable (now
lost), *fōt-iz.
4
5
9
Even more exotic is the word path, German Pfad, which is a borrowing from some
Iranian language, most likely Scythian, the nomadic warrior people that
Herodotus described in such detail. Their modern descendants are Alans (or
Ossetians) in the Caucasus Mountains, whose name comes from Iranian *aryan-.
The ultimate root is *pent- “find one’s way”, which forms the nouns Latin pons
“bridge” and Greek póntos “sea (that is, “path through the sea”, something like the
ON and OE kenning “swan-road” for “sea”).
Witch OE wicca [wikka] man practicing witchcraft or magic (feminine
wicce [wittʃə]8). (At Chapters bookstore, wicca is actually a subject heading on the
bookshelves.) The Indo-European root is *weik- “consecrate” (perhaps from an
older meaning “to separate out”, Sanskrit vi(ná)k-ti), seen in Latin victima
“sacrificial victim” and English witch. But others see in this word the IE root *weg“be strong, lively”, which gives us Latin vegēo “enliven, stir up” (English vegetable),
Sanskrit Vajra “Indra’s thunderbolt”. Some ancient peoples believed that lightning
fertilized the soil, and this is why Thor’s hammer, which shoots lightning bolts,
was said to be waved over newlywed couples, to enhance their fertility. In this
analysis OE9 wicca is from Germanic *wik-ja- “to make lively”, that is, a witch that
wakes the dead. In fact, English wake is from this same root.
Poet is from the Greek verb poiḗō “pile up, make” (PIE *kwei-). There is no
reconstructible PIE word for “poet”, each daughter language having created its
own word, for example Old Irish bard, literally, “praise-put”, an expression also
found in the oldest Indo-Iranian.
Alexander is an ancient Greek warrior’s name, “protecting men”, from
alekséō “ward off, turn aside”. In Greek, anēr, andrós means “man as warrior”, as
opposed to the more general term ánthrōpos. Greek anēr occurs in most of the
ancient IE languages. It is the name Nero in Latin, and is in Sanskrit names like
Nar-ayan. The names Andrew and Andrea ultimately come from Greek and mean
“manly”.
Hunchback is based on the verb hunch in the sense of to thrust up and out
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(OED ). Another word of the same meaning is crouchback, of uncertain origin,
but may have some connection with other Germanic words for “hook” (cf. crookback). Crouchback brings to mind Guy Crouchback, the protagonist of Evelyn
Waugh’s war trilogy, Sword of Honour. Another word of similar meaning is
[tʃ] designates the sound ch as in church; [ə] is the sound of the final vowel in sofa.
OE, Old English.
10 OED, Oxford English Dictionary.
8
9
10
gibbous, “convex; phase of the Moon in which the illuminated part is greater than
a semicircle, but less than a circle” (OED). The Russian name Gorbachëv is based
on gorbún “hunchback” (gorb- ‘hump”).
Calvinist < Latin calvāria “skull” < Aramaic golguþō, related to the surname
Calvino and Calvin, Italian calvo, French chauve “bald”.
Bitch has only one possible cognate: ON bikkja. Of a man = dog: Joyce
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man “Is your lazy bitch of a brother gone yet?”
Enough is a compound word whose first element is e-, from OE ge(pronounced [jə]11) which derives from IE *kom-, in this case used as an intensive
prefix. This Latin com- as in commūnis < Old Latin commoenis, is sound for sound
the same as Gothic gamains, Modern German gemein ‘common’ (Gemeinschaft
“community”). The second element is *nek- “to reach, attain, suffice”. In OE genōg
the final -g was pronounced [x] like in Bach, but for some reason, in the languages
of the world, sounds at the back of the mouth alternate with sounds at the front of
the mouth. That is how the [x] became [f]. You can see this same development in
English “cough”, “trough”, “tough” and so on, where -gh is a spelling for the [x] in
Bach. Another development of the OE word is enow, this time with [x] > [w], both
velar sounds, that is, both pronounced in the back of the mouth (where [k] is
produced).
Mao Zedong said, “Sorry that the Qin Emperor or the Han Wu Emperor
lacks a sense for literacy; while the founders of the Tang and Song dynasties came
short in style. The great man, Genghis Khan, only knew how to shoot eagles with
an arrow. The past is past. To see real heroes, look around you,” and more
infamously, “To read too many books is harmful.” He solved that problem by using
all the printing and distribution resources of the state to ensure that every
Chinese had a copy of his “Little Red Book”. In a way, similar to the First
Emperor’s burning of the books in 213 BC: no so much burning competing books,
as crowding them out. Mao did not think people should dwell on history prior to,
say, 1890, but should only know enough to see how and why China had declined
under the Manchu Dynasty. In both the Burning of Books and the swamping of
publication with The Little Red Book, history and traditional education were
being effectively erased.
From the Renaissance to the early decades of the last century, a Classical
education, based on the languages, literature and philosophy of the Greeks and
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[jə] as in “See ya (you)”.
11
Romans was common. By mid-twentieth century the value of studying the roots of
our Western civilization and the value, indeed, of studying history was
abandoned. Sigmund Freud (1856 – 1939) drew upon his Classical education to
invent psychological terms such as Oedipal complex, and refer to Sisyphus,
Tantalus, Ixion, and to Lucretius’s De Rerum Naturae, as did Carl Jung (1975 –
1961). A writer could reasonably expect that the educated reader would know who
the mythological characters were and what were the general ideas of Greek and
Roman philosophy.
The poetry of T.S. Eliot (1888 – 1965) abounds with references, oblique and
direct, to the works of Dante, French literature, Walter Pater and poets such as
Tennyson and Yeats. This was not viewed as plagiarism, but rather as building
upon the finest works of Western literature in such a way that his poetry
resonates with the past, forming a continuous chain with other great writers.
Someone who has received a traditional Chinese education based on the
Classics (The Book of Songs, The Classic of History, The Analects of Confucius,
Mencius, and the outstanding poets of every dynasty, but particularly Li Po, Du
Fu, Bo Juyi, Wang Wei and numerous others), can recognize and appreciate at
once the references in books and poems to these classical works.
Both in China and the West this sort of traditional education and the rich
world of references to it have largely vanished. In the West, our culture has
changed, and is changing at an ever more rapid, by now dizzying pace. Young
people, including, say, Millennials (born in the 1980s, coming of age in 2000),
prefer to refer not to literature, which they almost never read, but to pop culture
— scenes and characters from movies and TV shows. They most often express
themselves briefly in text messages which are limited to 160 characters at a time.
Just at the twilight of education based on literature and the Classics I
undertook my studies, when we were all endlessly reminded of George
Santayana’s warning that “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned
to repeat it” (Life of Reason, 1905). My education in Indo-European Studies created
the mother of all déformations professionelles: words on a page jump out at me,
throbbing with associations and connections to other languages and works of
literature and mythology. It is as if certain words on the page were printed in bold
type. I suppose those who are close readers of serious literature have a similar
experience: they know they have seen this theme of plot situation or turn of
phrase before in such-and-such work of literature. The difference is that, whereas
the lover of literature can share these connections with others who, with a like
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love of literature, will enjoy them, in my case practically no one cares about
etymology. In fact, a good way to bring a conversation to dead halt is to make an
etymological observation. No one knows what to say or where to go with this
nugget of information.
I remember reading with such glee the scene in Proust’s À la recherche du
temps perdu Vol. IV: Sodom et Gomorrhe, in which Brichot on “the little train” to
the Verdurins, explains the etymologies of the various villages and towns along
the route.
We are born into this world, gradually become conscious of ourselves, and
endeavor to find a way to fill our lives with some activity, to fit into society, to feel
useful, or at least occupied. Some becomes surgeons and save lives, others take up
gardening, still others cooking, yet others dog-breeding or model railroads. But for
those of you who do not choose one of these well-known and practical métiers,
remember that etymology is for the lonely.
Bibliography and Illustration Sources
Anthony, David W. The Horse, the Wheel and Language: How Bronze Age Riders
From the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World. (2007). Princeton, NJ
and Oxford: Princeton University Press.
Mallory, J.P., Adams, D.Q. Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture. (1997). London
and Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers.
Mallory, J.P., Adams, D.Q. The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the
Proto-Indo-European World. (2006). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Oxford English Dictionary (OED).
Watkins, C. The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots. (1985).
Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Wikipedia. Grimm’s Law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grimm%27s_law; IndoEuropean Languages: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IndoEuropean_languages.
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