Secrets of the Words You Know
Blog 3 Introduction 3
The answer to the question posed at the end of Blog 2 is that the country was India.
The insight into origins was the result of the exposure of Europeans with a knowledge of Latin and Ancient Greek to Sanskrit, the language of Hindu liturgy, and the ancestor of Hindi and many other languages of the Indian sub-continent. Parallels not just in words but in structures (for example aspects of the conjugation of verbs) made it increasingly obvious that at least these three languages had to derive from some common ancestor. The most celebrated, though not the earliest, proposition along these lines was made by a British judge and orientalist, Sir William Jones, in an address to the Asiatic Society in Kolkata (‘Calcutta’ to the British) in 1786.
Based on this insight and much further work, by the end of the Eighteenth Century it was accepted among scholars that other language groups such as Germanic (which includes English), Celtic, Slavic (itself linked to the Baltic languages) and Persian (similarly linked to Sanskrit) should also be included in what was now termed ‘Indo-Germanic’ or ‘Indo-European’. Armenian and Albanian were also soon recognised as being in the same super-family, whereas other European languages, such as Basque, Finnish and Hungarian, were clearly not part of it.
Several now extinct languages were subsequently also found to be of Indo-European origin. They included two completely separate groups: Tocharian, two related languages spoken till the Middle Ages in what is now the province of Xinjiang in China; and a group of Anatolian languages, such as Hittite, which died out far earlier. Fragmentary inscriptions shed tantalising light on other extinct but related languages in a number of countries.
One consequence of the number and antiquity of languages which descend from what linguists call ‘Proto-Indo-European’ is that the whole subject of sound and word relationships across this language family often seems arcane and even off-putting to those of us with a general interest in languages but no specialist knowledge.
These blogs will de-mystify the subject by showing how much words that you as a speaker of English know and use can tell you about the links between languages and the deeper history that lies behind them.
I want many more people to enjoy seeing unexpected links between words, and to understand the sometimes surprising changes that have occurred over time in both sounds and meanings of words as the initial single language broke up into its many descendants.
For example, we’ll find that ‘yellow’ and ‘gold’ are much more closely related than I at least had thought, and indeed share an origin with – among other words – the first element of ‘chlorophyll’ and ‘cholera’, from Greek words for ‘green’ and ‘bile’, the Polish currency the ‘zloty’ and the Ukrainian President Zelensky, showing Slavic words for ‘gold’ and ‘green’ respectively, the city of Glasgow (’grey/green hollow’ in the Celtic of Strathclyde), and even ‘arsenic’ (which can be golden in colour), a word that has travelled from Persian through Arabic to Europe.
These links may seem fanciful, but as we progress you will learn the basics of the ‘sound-code’ that underlies them, and leads us backwards to that original speech-community over 5 millennia ago. To keep this manageable, we will concentrate on consonants rather than vowels, and in particular on the first two consonants of words (the ’k’- sound of ‘chlorophyll’ and ‘cholera’ counts as a single sound, so that the second consonant in all the words just mentioned except ‘arsenic’ is ‘l’).
Meanwhile here is a question for you to consider:
How many English words beginning with the sounds ‘g’ and ‘l’, or a hard ‘ch’ and ‘l’ (either together or with an intervening vowel) can you list that might share some overall meaning with gold, green, bile or – quite a big category – shining?
This concludes the Introduction.
Blogs 4-9 will look at how the evolution of English consonants in the past 1,500 years or so makes English distinctive within the family of Germanic languages: for example why we refer to both ‘churches’ and ‘kirks’, and why there is an ‘n’ in ‘gander’ but not in ‘goose’.
Understanding such changes is a first step before we plunge much deeper into language history to find out how consonants in the main Indo-European language groups have evolved over the past 5-6,000 years. For much of this period we do not have any written records: that a coherent story can still be told shows the power of the simple act of comparing words and sounds across related language groups – and that is what we shall be doing.