 Welcome to the Endless Knot, today a meta episode in which we look at what the etymology of the word etymology tells us about how etymology works. Words have a past, and like all of us, they can change as they grow, so it's often important to consider their etymology or history. Words are, in a sense, the fossil remains of culture, the traces left behind by years of cultural change, so by examining these potchards of language, we gain insight into the history of culture, by looking at what semantic frame has been connected to a given word throughout its history. However, we must remember that the meanings of words do change over time, and what a word means now is not necessarily determined by what it used to mean, as is the case for instance with the word decimated, which used to mean reduced by a tenth, but now is commonly used to mean reduced by a non-specific extreme amount. And yes, whatever the pedants say, literally can be meant figuratively and just be used as an intensifier. If we forget this and think that a word must always mean what its roots once meant, we are committing the etymological fallacy. Besides, what's really fascinating is the way words change over time. So, the etym part of the word etymology comes from a Greek root meaning true, so etymology originally meant the study of the truth behind words, the logy part meaning the study of, from Greek logos meaning word, thought, or explanation. Greek etymos may be related to sooth as in soothsayer, a teller of truths, and foresooth meaning one might say, for reals. In fact, in classical and medieval times, scholars often believed that by finding the true roots and meanings of words, they could learn about the true nature of reality and even God's plan itself. Perhaps the most famous example of this was Isidore of Seville's great work, the etymologii, which sought to explain the world by finding the true names of everything in it. Nowadays, of course, we use the term etymology to refer to the origins and history of words as opposed to their current meanings and uses. Actually, Isidore's etymologii is more than just a work of etymology. It's an encyclopedic collection of all the knowledge that Isidore, a 5th to 6th century bishop with feet planted both in the classical and medieval worlds, thought important. It's full of information about the classical world that would have been lost otherwise and came to be a standard textbook of medieval education in the Seven Liberal Arts, made up of the subjects of the Trivium, Grammar, Logic, and Rhetoric, and the Quadrivium, Arithmetic, Geometry, Music, and Astronomy. In fact, that's sort of what encyclopedia means. It comes from the Greek phrase in Kuklios paideia, literally the circle of education, referring to the educational curriculum, and initially that's what the word meant in English too. And Kuklios comes from a root that means to revolve and is related to the words cycle and wheel, and paideia literally means childrearing, coming from Greek pice, meaning child, and ultimately from a Proto-Indo-European root meaning little or few. In this, in the child sense, we get words such as pediatrician, and in the education sense, words such as pedagogy and pedant, a word too often connected with lovers of language. Isidore drew on other earlier encyclopedic general knowledge books like Pliny's Natural History, and there have since been other such works. However, one of the first modern encyclopedias, as we would recognize it today, was the Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, compiled by Enlightenment thinker Denis Diderot. Today of course, print encyclopedias have all but disappeared, largely replaced by online resources such as Wikipedia, from the Hawaiian word wiki meaning quick, so literally then a portmanteau meaning quick education, fitting no? So it is perhaps appropriate that Isidore Seville has been suggested as the patron saint of the internet. Beginning back to etymology, while we often trace words back to their immediate source before coming into modern English, such as Old English, French, Latin, or Greek, we can sometimes go back to English's most distant traceable ancestor, Proto-Indo-European, so it's time for a word about that. Languages are like families with parent, child, and cousin languages. English for instance is one member of the Indo-European family of languages, and counts among its relatives languages such as Latin, French, German, Greek, and Hindi, and a long list of others. The ultimate parent of all these languages is thus said to be Proto-Indo-European, a hypothetical reconstructed language. That's what a proto-language is, a hypothetical reconstructed language from which other known languages descend, from Greek proton meaning first. So Proto-Indo-European is the first Indo-European language. And for completeness, Indo and India come through Latin, Greek, and Persian from a Sanskrit word meaning river, possibly from an Indo-European root which means to drive or go away. Indo-European and Europe come from a figure in Greek myth named Europa, who is ravished by the god Zeus. But the name is of uncertain ultimate origin, possibly meaning broad face from Eurus meaning wide and Ops meaning literally eye, or ironically possibly from a non-Indo-European source such as Akkadian Arabu to go down or set as in sunset, or Phoenician Arab meaning evening, either way suggesting the west. We don't know for sure when or where the original speakers of Proto-Indo-European lived, but it was probably in or before the fourth millennium BCE. One theory, called the Kurgan hypothesis, is that they lived in the stepland north of the Black Sea, the Caucasus Mountains, and the Caspian Sea, where the horse was first domesticated, and it was this technological advance which allowed them to herd more efficiently and expanded to new areas. Another theory, the Anatolian hypothesis, is that they originally lived in the area around modern-day Turkey, and instead were an agricultural society. Either way, these original Indo-Europeans did spread into new areas bringing their culture, and most importantly for our purposes, their language with them. When we talk about reconstructing Proto-languages like Proto-Indo-European or Proto-Germanic, it's like doing genealogical research to find a long-lost ancestor, only without any actual physical evidence. Proto-languages existed in a time before writing was available, so no written record survives, but by looking at a number of child languages that we believe are related, we can make some good guesses as to what their parent must have been like. So English father corresponds to Latin Pater, Greek Pater, and Sanskrit Peter, and we can therefore posit the Proto-Indo-European Pater. The asterisk written in front of it means it's a hypothetical reconstructed form. Nor is it just a question of finding a number of similar sounding words with similar meanings in a number of different languages. After all, words can travel or be snatched directly from one language to another, so that's not enough proof. Furthermore, words from different languages might be coincidentally similar. Therefore, historical linguists look for regular, systematic, and predictable correspondences between sounds in those sets of similar words. So for instance, the Germanic F in English words such as father, foot, and fish corresponds predictably with P in other Indo-European languages, such as Latin Pater, Pays Pettis, and Piscis, and also with Greek Pater and Pus Potos for that matter. This is particularly noticeable in English. Originally a Germanic language, over time it borrowed many words from other Indo-European languages, such as from Latin because that was the language of the Church and of scholarship during the Middle Ages and Renaissance, from French because of the Norman conquest in 1066, and from Greek because it was often used as the language of scientific terminology after the rediscovery of the writings of the ancient Greeks. So, English ended up with sets of related words such as star and astrology, or fatherhood and paternity, which linguists call cognates, sort of like cousins. Cognatus means born together or related by birth in Latin. And knowing this tells you that hemp comes from the same plant as cannabis, sends your hound to a kennel, or gets you doing your cardio exercise to improve the health of your heart. The last set of examples gives you another sound correspondence, Germanic H for Latin or Greek C or K. These particular correspondences between certain consonants in Germanic languages and other Indo-European languages to follow yet another strand in the etymological web is called Grimsla after Jakob Grimm. Yes, that Jakob Grimm of the brothers Grimm. In addition to collecting folktales, Grimm was one of the early pioneers in the field of comparative philology, comparing different languages to work at which ones were related and how. Basically, Grimsla describes a sound change that happened to Proto-Indo-European consonants as they passed into Proto-Germanic. So, the voiceless stops in Proto-Indo-European became the voiceless fricatives in Proto-Germanic. That is, P, T, K, and Q became F, F, H, and H with H and H, eventually becoming H and H. The voiced stops B, D, G, and G, lost their voicing, that is the vibration of the vocal chords, and filled the gap left by the voiceless stops becoming P, T, K, and Q. The voiced aspirated stops lost their aspiration, a little extra breath of air, and became those regular unaspirated voiced stops. The word philology, by the way, referring to historical linguistics, or more broadly the study of language in written texts, literally means love of words, which I suppose you must have, as I do, if you're interested in knowing how all these sound changes work. By the way, Grimm wasn't exactly the first to come up with the idea. Friedrich Schlegel was the first to note the P, F correspondence, and Rasmus Rask suggested further sound correspondences. But since Grimm was the first to clearly explain the idea as a regular sound change, at least initially crediting Rask, we now generally refer to this as Grimm's law, though some people have suggested Rask's rule as an alternate name. However, it was really one of Grimm's predecessors who kicked the whole thing off. In a way, we have trade monopolies and British imperialism to thank for his discovery. During the time of the great European empires from the 17th through 19th centuries, many countries set up what became known as East India Companies, with trade monopolies in the East. Britain's East India Company eventually came to have so much power and control in India that it became a kind of quasi-government, with its own currency, armed forces, and legal system. Eventually the British government decided it would be a good idea to take more of an active interest in the activities of the company, and appointed a Governor General in Bengal, one Warren Hastings, who by the way was an admirer of our encyclopedist Denis Diderot, and read his writings on the way to India. Hastings also became a big fan of India's ancient culture and texts, and it became policy to run the administration and legal system in the area based on existing customs. Problem was, the ancient laws were written in the equally ancient language Sanskrit, so British judges had to rely on local knowledge, which they didn't entirely trust. They were dependent on the interpretation of the pandits, scholars of Sanskrit. That's where we get the word pundit, and fittingly too, given the potential for mistrust in both the original and contemporary senses of the word. It was into this situation that language genius William Jones arrived. Jones already had a reputation as a gifted philologist, with knowledge of dozens of languages, and after receiving a judicial appointment in Bengal, he took up the study of Sanskrit in order to translate those legal codes, and in his spare time founded the Asiatic Society with Hastings to pursue serious linguistic studies. And though there were others who had noticed similarities between languages and suggested relationships, Jones was the first to really formulate the idea of a proto-language, from which many other languages descend, what we now call proto-Indo-European. Jones' interest in Indo-European comparative philology kicked off a whole cottage industry in comparative studies in Indo-European and other cultures, such as comparative mythology and folklore, which included Grimm's other great work, the collection of folktales and fairy tales he compiled with his brother Wilhelm. That same father example from before gives us a clue as to how this works. Many Indo-European cultures seem to have had Skyfather gods, so we can posit proto-Indo-European Dieu Pater, as meaning literally shining father, which becomes Jupiter in Latin. Dieu also leads to Jove, another name for Jupiter. Deus, the Latin word for god, the Greek god Zeus, and the Germanic god Tyr in Old Norse and Tu in Old English, who is the namesake of Tuesday. So we started by digging up the past to try to find the ancestral truth about language by looking at its fossils. What we found was that, like all living things, language evolves, changes over time. And so, while we fill in the family portraits of our genealogy, we also have the fun of looking forward to snapshots of the next generations of our ever-evolving English language. Thanks for watching. If you've enjoyed these etymological explorations and cultural connections, please subscribe to this channel or share it. 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