I have been to the zoo. I didn’t make the animals that live there. I didn’t capture and cage them. I didn’t design the grounds and the systems that support the zoo. I didn’t even drive the little train that travels throughout the zoo and holds up pedestrians trying to get from bear canyon to the monkey pavilion. I just went there. And now, I want to tell you what I saw. In this case, the animals are made of letters and sounds and their native habitat is the mother tongue of a hundred languages. I saw words.
I owe 99.9% of the credit for this work to Calvert Watkins, a brilliant man who traveled to the remotest swamps, darkest jungles, driest deserts, and steepest mountain sides of language and captured word-species that reveal an ancient genetic code that still flows in the life-blood of words that we see roaming about us daily. That ancient font of genes flowed from a people group called the Indo-Europeans. From that root-stock DNA of all living words, most of the languages from India to Ireland were formed.
One of the hardest things to understand about words is primarily that they are only sounds representing ideas. Only in the last 600 years has the printed word prevailed over language. Since then, the evolution, or better, the mutation of language has been slowed because when a word is in print, we have a reference point for the correct spelling, pronunciation, and meaning of that word. (The first English dictionary was published in 1604.) Prior to the printing press – a veritable verbal corral – words were free to roam. In the same way that Atlantic salmon taste different from Pacific salmon, words picked up new “tastes” as they wandered about. As they roamed, they picked up the characteristics of their habitat – they often changed sounds, they often changed spelling, and they usually gained new shades of meaning (and sometimes the genetic mutation was so profound, words changed their meaning entirely - that's "pretty" "terrific").
By way of example: It is said that Eskimos have several dozen words for snow. In English, most of those words have become extinct – we didn’t feed them through our use of them. Conversely, not many aboriginal peoples have the word “byte” which in technological language means 8 bits, each bit being a 0 or a 1 that magically means something when it’s electrified. But many languages have a word for “bit” which simply means a small amount of something – data, money, food, rain, etc. But an electronic “bit” doesn’t derive from that small amount “bit” – it’s a contraction of binary digit – b+it, bit. “Byte” is a word which was invented (by IBM) to distinguish it from “bit”. We don’t know where these two words may go from here into future languages, but their meaning, and their spelling, has been created in our presence and shall usher forth from here. We have in our language today, what in the future may be a considered a missing link– we have seen in our time an evolutionary step in language. Ain’t it cool!
Consider the difference between the sounds of a single common word when spoken in English or Spanish. In English, we pronounce “j” as a soft “g” sound – as in juice. The Spanish-speakers pronounce “j” as an “h” as in house. English say juice, Spanish say jugos (who-goes). Our word for liquid from fruit also sounds almost exactly like our word for the Semitic people – Jews. I wonder if this suggests to Spaniards that we think Jews are the source, or the personification, of delightful nectar? Such is the nature of migration and evolution of words in language. For 5000 or more years, words had free range to wander almost aimlessly, picking up new characteristics and meanings as they roamed.
As you scan the contents of this work, please also bear in mind that while consonants changed frequently in the evolution of words, vowels are complete wildcards. An “a” in one word in one language at one time has absolutely no obligation to be an “a” in the next appearance of that word. Sometimes vowels hitch a ride with the original consonants, sometimes they take a permanent vacation. That leaves the consonants to fend for themselves and make new words that barely resemble their grandpas and great, great uncles. As I have worked through source materials, I have had to repeatedly chastise myself for expecting that “a” stay an “a”, “b” stay “b” and so on. (Here is a helpful table that reveals, in part, how a consonant in one language is represented by a far different consonant in another.)
Another way to think of the sounds that comprise words is to consider colors. Blue can refer to everything from a baby’s eyes to a turquoise stone, from the deep sea to the sky at twilight. I have seen “blue” cows that were nothing but white cows speckled with gray hairs. Blue even refers to a feeling which has nothing to do with color. There is no rule that blue has to be a finite portion of the color spectrum. Similarly, the “b” sound in one language can readily become a “p” or even “f” / “ph” sound in another. If you mumble the word “bush”, someone may think that you said “push” – excluding context. As the BackWords blog progresses, we’ll discover the sense of the relationship between “buckle” and “pucker”, between “beacon” and “phantom” / “fantastic”.
Consider how different the words “curl” and “circle” sound alike (especially the consonant sounds – k-l, s-k-l). The words mean virtually the same, but the sounds that represent them have begun to diverge. It doesn’t take a Roget scientist (that’s a pun) to see how the words relate in origin to one another, but we can also see that they are evolving in different directions – another missing link before our eyes. Darwin should be so lucky!
I’m fascinated with the word-part “chester”. Consider for a moment one of our favorite condiments – Worchestershire sauce. How do the folks in your household pronounce that mouthful of sounds? Heaven forbid that you tackle each syllable out loud. Knock off the “-shire” for a moment, the folks in England pronounce Worchestireshire as “Wooster”. The folks up in Massachusetts dropped “shire” and threw away the “h” and spell it “Worcester”, but still pronounce it “Wooster”. Finally, our sober Ohioans gave up on the whole deal and just spell it like it sounds, “Wooster”. Thank you. We’ve come a long way from Worchestershire to Wooster. There it is, in sounds and letters, the evolution of language unfolding before our eyes… and ears.
By way of another example: When my brother and I were in elementary school, I was probing him about an alleged girlfriend. I had a friend whose last name was Kimball. He reminded me of that name and said his friend’s name was like that, but with three letters different (and those different letters were all together). Aha!, my suspicions were confirmed, he did love what’s-her-name Kendall – so similar, but three letters different from Kimball. In print, the difference is clear – Kimball / Kendall. To the ear, the difference is very subtle. If I speak French and you speak Russian, I don’t understand most of what you say anyway. If you say your name is “Kendall”, I’ll go home and tell my wife I met a guy named Kimball or Kendall or something like that. I could call you “Kimball” to your face, but since you don’t understand most of what I am saying, you’ll never know that I am mispronouncing your name. And so, for generations, my kin will call you by a name that is not your name, until, to us, that is your name.
Calvert Watkins looked at meanings, not letters. By considering the symbols that represent those words, he reconstructed the grammatical history of the words and the letters that may have been at the heart of these words we see around us today. That’s when he (and fellow linguo-anthropologists) discovered the common threads that link together a strand of pearls that make a glorious necklace of words (is anyone keeping count of all these metaphors??).
To sum it all up, words played The Gossip Game for over 5000 years. One sentence, whispered in relay through twenty different people, will usually wind up with a far different meaning than it had at the beginning. Gutenberg fouled the whole thing up. If you write down a sentence and pass it on a piece of paper through twenty people, the sentence is exactly the same at the end as it was at the beginning. Well, Gutenberg made the world more sensible and accessible, but let’s go BackWords, before the printed word fenced in our wild word species and see who is related to whom.
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