Word Diggers and Poachers

 
Digging for Wordroots

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 lingofragments 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 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.


Feeding the PIE-language-tree

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”.


Kurgan, the Language Poacher

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 Northwestern 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 Anthropocene paradise 〰 has been subplanting, hybridising, and genetically modifying the fruit and offshoots or 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.