Word Nerd Strikes Again
Linguistics for fun and profit
I don’t know how much time you spend thinking about languages, other than perhaps bemoaning the lack of skill in younger generations. As a professional writer, editor, translator, and teacher, I spend an inordinate amount of time fretting and fussing over languages, and I find them absolutely fascinating.
Take, for instance, the simple English word “door,” which is a Germanic word from English’s ancient Teutonic roots. We have a synonym “portal,” a Romance word, which entered English with the Norman invasion of AD 1066.
With the word portal, I want you to focus on the phonemes p and t. Portal comes directly from the French porte. The French word is related to Spanish puerta, Portuguese and Italian porta, and even the Greek πόρτα (porta). All of them come from the Latin porta, meaning “gate” or “door”. The Romanian word ușă comes from the Latin ostium, meaning “entrance” or “opening”.
This is all fairly straightforward—a Latin root that propagates through Romance languages and ends up in English via the Normans. What’s more curious—remember the phonemes p and t—is the Malay/Indonesian word pintu, and Tagalog pinto, meaning “door”. Notice the consonant sounds that carry through both language groups (p-vowel-t-vowel). You might be tempted to think that they all share an Indo-European root through Sanscrit/Hindi propagation, but this is where it gets really fun.
The Sanskrit word for “door” is dvāra, which evolved into the Hindi word dvār, which further evolves into the Russian дверь (dver), the German Tür, and into English as “door”. This lineage includes the Old Greek word thýra, with the same meaning. Notice the phoneme pattern d/t-vowel-r.
Taken together, this implies that the English word “door” comes via Russo-Teutonic languages, out of Sanskrit/Hindi. The synonym “portal,” meanwhile, comes to English via Latin/French and may link to some common proto-Indo-European ancestor, as yet unestablished.
What makes all of this so intriguing is that one can map out human migrations, invasions and trade interactions via language groups, and the vestiges of those ancient relationships still lingering in our modern languages.
If it’s at all possible, this gets even more fun.
Sumer is widely considered to have had the first written human language. This is mystifying for several reasons. The Sumerian language has no known predecessor or descendant, living or dead. That civilization sprung into being out of whole cloth, with advanced farming, industry, art, architecture, legal system, and complex language—and then it vanished almost as suddenly, leaving a few ruins and some clay tablets. The Sumerian word 𒆍 KÁ, meaning door or gate, has no equivalent in any other language.
This is strange because Sumer sat squat in the middle of a major land route between Asia and Europe/Levant. We should be able to detect some vestige of its origins or impacts on other known civilizations, but we don’t. It just POOFed into existence, then POOFed out again. There is no evidence of its complex culture developing from older roots—it sprang fully formed into the world in complete isolation. That’s a remarkable thing to say and raises many profound questions about the origins of human societies and languages.
The mystery deepens when we see that all languages group broadly into three isolated families—Eurasia, Africa, the Americas. Within those broad regions, the languages for the most part have traces of interaction, but none outside of them. It’s almost as if humans developed in three isolated locations, before extensive interactions began.
Studying linguistics quickly becomes an absorbing topic. The complex interactions between languages, cultures and history are broad and deep. The closest relative to English is Frisian in northern Belgium/southern Holland, yet it is unintelligible to most English speakers. English is a Germanic language, but anyone other than a linguist would not perceive the similarities (That is my house/Das ist mein Haus).
English is also one of just a handful of European languages that has lost most of its gendered grammar. Except for 3rd person singular pronouns, there is almost no gender left in the language, thanks to the Norse invasions starting around AD 793. Old English had three genders, like German, up to that point, but then it started using the article “the” for all nouns, rather than gendered articles.
One of the more interesting vestiges of Old Norse in English are our days of the week. We have Saturn-day, Sun-day and Moon-day like Romance languages, but then we switch to Norse gods—Tyr’s day, Woden’s day, Thor’s day, and Freyda’s day. All of our month names, however, come from Latin gods, caesars, or just plain numbers (septem-7, octem-8, novem-9, decem-10).
As you can see, linguistics quickly spirals into a tangled mess of overlapping cultures and events. English is an amalgam of roughly a half-dozen language groups, just as Indonesian is a mish-mash of Malay, Hindi, Arabic, Hokkien, Portuguese, Dutch, and more recently English. Linguistics is as much as study of history, as it is of psychology, philosophy, and genetics.
The more languages I learn, the more fascinated I am by the complexity that we call humanity. It gets even more bizarre when you overlap linguistic maps with genetic relationships. For instance, why do the Incas of Peru share a genetic bond to the Hokkien people of southern China, but no language roots? Why are there ancient Chinese characters scratched onto rocks in California, or Egyptian hieroglyphics in Arizona? The mysteries rapidly proliferate.
So if you’re looking for a hobby or a topic to kill a lazy Sunday afternoon, just type “linguistics” into your friendly neighborhood AI agent and start your own Indiana Jones adventure. Look how far we travelled with just the word “door”. I guarantee it won’t be long before your jaw is hanging slack and your eyes are glued to the screen.
Bonus fun facts: Americans celebrating the 4th of July will be eating wieners from Wien (Vienna), frankfurters from Frankfurt, and hamburgers from Hamburg. That apple pie is very strange, though. The word “pie” appears in English in the 14th century, probably Norman, and may be related to the bird magpie, though no one is sure. The apple part, however, is German—apfel. Bon appétit!
Si mundus vult dicipi, ergo dicipitatur.
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You’re thinking, “There is no way he can come up with an interesting and fun film about linguistics.” Au contraire, mon frère. I point you to a well-made and intelligent film called Arrival (2016). It is well directed with a light touch and the cinematography is lush and atmospheric. The performances are nuanced and enjoyable. The script doesn’t talk down to the audience and has a very interesting nonlinear structure. The story is a sci-fi tale of linguistics being the key to Earth surviving first contact. And it’s a recent film that doesn’t beat you over the head with The Message—a refreshing difference.
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Arrival is accompanied by a stellar score by Jóhann Jóhannsson, sadly deceased. His musical interpretation of the alien linguistics is unforgettable.
Absolutely loved this piece.