Language: quotes, facts and reflections

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DriveLanguage

Taking a new step, uttering a new word, is what people fear most.

Raskolnikov thinks this at the start of Crime and Punishment, which Fyodor Dostoevsky published in instalments in 1866. A poor former law student in St Petersburg, he slips past his landlady on a stifling July evening to rehearse a crime he has been brooding over. He mocks his own fear, then wonders whether he only talks because he does nothing. “A new word” returns later, in his article claiming that extraordinary people may break moral rules; the novel shows what that idea costs him.

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WonderHistory

Greek scholars from Byzantium were teaching in Italy long before the Ottomans took Constantinople in 1453. The conquest sped up a movement of teachers, manuscripts and ideas that had begun more than half a century earlier.

In 1396 Coluccio Salutati, the chancellor of Florence, invited the Byzantine diplomat and scholar Manuel Chrysoloras to teach Greek in the city. He arrived in 1397 and taught there until 1400. One of his pupils, the historian Leonardo Bruni, remembered it as a rare chance: no one in northern Italy, he wrote, had studied Greek for seven hundred years. Chrysoloras's Erotemata (Questions) became the first Greek grammar widely used in western Europe. In 1438–1439 the Council of Florence, called to reunite the Catholic and Orthodox churches, brought more Byzantine thinkers west. The philosopher Gemistos Plethon lectured on Plato, and Bessarion of Trebizond, today's Trabzon, stayed on in Italy as a cardinal. In 1468 Bessarion gave his library, with 482 Greek manuscripts, to Venice, where it became the core of the Biblioteca Marciana.

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WonderHistory

Latin did not die with the Western Roman Empire in AD 476. Scholars across Europe wrote in it for well over a thousand years, while the everyday Latin of ordinary people slowly turned into Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French and Romanian.

Linguists call the spoken, everyday form “Vulgar Latin”, from vulgus, the common people; Cicero called it “the speech of the masses”. Between the 6th and 9th centuries it drifted apart region by region into the Romance languages, which hundreds of millions of people speak today. Written Latin, meanwhile, stayed Europe's shared language of learning into the early 19th century. Schools taught largely in Latin until around 1700, and Isaac Newton published his laws of motion and gravity in Latin, in the Principia of 1687. Scientific names still follow the Latin system of Carl Linnaeus, which gives every species a two-part name such as Homo sapiens, “wise human”. Latin is also the official language of the Holy See, the central government of the Catholic Church, and law and medicine are full of Latin terms, from habeas corpus, the right of a detained person to be brought before a judge, to vertebra.

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StillnessLiterature

You must not pay too much attention to opinions. The written word is unalterable, and opinions are often only an expression of despair.

Near the end of The Trial, a prison chaplain tells Josef K., a bank official arrested for a crime nobody will name, the parable “Before the Law”: a man from the country waits all his life at an open door to the Law, and the doorkeeper never lets him in. As they argue over its meaning, the priest says this, warning K. not to lean on any single reading. Kafka left the novel unfinished; his friend Max Brod published it in 1925, after Kafka's death.

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StillnessLiterature

Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.

Kipling said this at the annual dinner of the Royal College of Surgeons in London in February 1923, in a speech later printed as ‘Surgeons and the Soul’. Speaking to doctors, he took the idea of a drug seriously: words, he went on, can infect, poison, numb and paralyse, and even colour the tiniest cells of the brain. Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936), born in Bombay, wrote The Jungle Book, Kim and the poem ‘If—’, and in 1907 became the first English-language writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.

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StillnessHistory

The phrase ‘the pen is mightier than the sword’ was coined by the English writer Edward Bulwer-Lytton for his 1839 play Richelieu, where the French cardinal says it. The idea that words beat weapons is far older, but this wording is his, and within a few years it had become a stock saying.

Richelieu; Or the Conspiracy opened at the Covent Garden Theatre in London on 7 March 1839, with the famous actor William Charles Macready as Cardinal Richelieu, chief minister to King Louis XIII of France. In Act 2 the cardinal says that under the rule of truly great men the pen is mightier than the sword: in a master's hand it can stop emperors in their tracks, and a state can be saved without any sword at all. Others had said something similar long before. A copy of the teachings of the Assyrian sage Ahiqar from about 500 BC says that the word is mightier than the sword, and a line in Shakespeare's Hamlet says that many who wear swords are afraid of goose-quill pens. Bulwer-Lytton (1803–1873) also gave English ‘the great unwashed’, a sneering name for the masses, and the novel opening ‘It was a dark and stormy night’.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Richelieu (1839)Read card

WonderHistory

After William of Normandy won the Battle of Hastings in 1066, French became the language of England's kings and nobles for about three centuries. Thousands of French words entered English, which is why it often has two words for one thing, such as ‘begin’ and ‘commence’ or ‘freedom’ and ‘liberty’.

After the Norman Conquest, England used three languages: French at court and among the nobility, Latin in the Church and in official records, and English among ordinary people. Every king after the Conquest spoke French as his first language until Henry IV, who took the throne in 1399 and was the first whose mother tongue was English. French borrowing peaked between 1250 and 1400, and about a third of English vocabulary is now estimated to come from French, including crown, justice, parliament and marriage. The famous story that English peasants kept ‘cows’ and ‘pigs’ while Norman lords ate ‘beef’ and ‘pork’ is largely a myth, popularised by Walter Scott's novel Ivanhoe in 1819: for centuries the French words were used for the live animals as well as the meat.

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WonderHistory

On 10 December 1948 the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: 30 articles setting out the rights and freedoms that belong to every person. It has since been translated into more than 500 languages, and Guinness World Records lists it as the most translated document in the world.

The declaration was written just after the Second World War, when the new United Nations wanted a common standard of rights for all peoples and nations. A commission chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt, widow of the American president Franklin D. Roosevelt, prepared it. The Canadian legal scholar John Humphrey drew up the first draft, and the French jurist René Cassin, the Chinese diplomat P. C. Chang and the Lebanese philosopher Charles Malik helped shape the final text. The UN General Assembly adopted it at the Palais de Chaillot in Paris: 48 countries voted in favour, Turkey among them, none voted against and eight abstained. It is not a treaty, so it does not bind countries by law, but many later treaties and national constitutions build on it. The UN's collection of translations passed 500 in 2016, and 10 December is marked every year as Human Rights Day.

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WonderLanguage

'Disaster' comes through French from Italian disastro, made of dis-, 'bad', and astro, 'star'. It originally referred to an unlucky position of a star or planet, which astrologers blamed for misfortune, and soon came to mean any sudden catastrophe.

The word reached English in the 1590s, when many people still believed that the planets shaped human lives, and Shakespeare played on that link. In King Lear, written around 1606, the scheming Edmund mocks people who, when life goes badly, 'make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and stars' instead of blaming their own behaviour. Medieval Latin had a similar phrase, astrum sinistrum, 'unlucky star', and English still calls a doomed plan or couple 'ill-starred'. Another everyday word keeps the same belief: 'influenza' is Italian for 'influence', the power once thought to stream down from the stars. Italians were using it for epidemics by the early 1500s, and English borrowed it in 1743, during an outbreak that began in Italy.

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WonderLanguage

'Clue' comes from 'clew', an old word for a ball of thread. It took on the meaning of a hint because of the Greek myth in which Ariadne gives Theseus a ball of thread to find his way out of the Labyrinth.

In the myth, King Minos of Crete kept the Minotaur, a monster that was half man and half bull, in a maze built by the craftsman Daedalus. Theseus, a prince of Athens, came to kill it. Minos's daughter Ariadne gave him a ball of thread, which he tied at the entrance and unwound as he went in, so he could follow it back out. English writers came to speak of the 'clew' that guides a person through any maze or puzzle, and by the 1620s the word meant anything that points the way. The spelling 'clue' had appeared in the 1400s. Sailors still keep the old spelling: the clew is the lower corner of a sail. Turkish tells the same story in one word: ipucu literally means 'the end of the thread'.

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WonderLanguage

English 'salary' comes from Latin salarium, a word built on sal, 'salt'. The popular story that Roman soldiers were paid in salt has no good evidence behind it: they received a regular wage in coin.

The only ancient writer to connect the two words is Pliny the Elder. In his Natural History, from the AD 70s, he says that salt played a part in public offices and military service and that this is where salarium comes from; he never says soldiers were paid in salt. Roman soldiers received a regular wage in coin, the stipendium, and the Greek historian Polybius records a foot soldier's daily pay in the 2nd century BC. Salt mattered to Rome, as the name of the ancient Via Salaria, the 'salt road', shows, but it was cheap. The 'paid in salt' story seems to have grown out of Latin dictionaries of the 1700s and 1800s, which guessed at a 'salt money' allowance that no ancient text mentions. Nor is 'worth one's salt' Roman: the phrase is first recorded in English in 1830.

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WonderLanguage

'Quarantine' comes from the Venetian quarantena, 'forty days'. In the late Middle Ages Venice made ships arriving from plague-hit ports wait forty days before anyone could come ashore, to see whether the disease broke out on board.

The practice began a little earlier, with a shorter wait. In 1377 the Republic of Ragusa, today's Dubrovnik in Croatia, ordered newcomers from plague areas to spend 30 days in isolation, a trentino. Venice opened a permanent isolation hospital, a lazaretto, on an island in its lagoon in 1423, and the forty-day wait became the rule there; the Venetian Senate is usually said to have fixed it in 1448. No one knows for certain why forty was chosen. It may come from the Greek physician Hippocrates's ideas about acute illnesses, those that strike suddenly, or from the forty days Jesus spent in the desert. The word reached Ottoman Turkish from Venetian: karantina already appears in 1721, in the embassy report of Yirmisekiz Mehmed Çelebi, the Ottoman envoy to Paris.

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WonderLanguage

The Latin verb scire, 'to know', sits behind a surprising family of English words: science, conscience, omniscient, prescient. The odd relative is nice. It comes from nescius, 'not knowing', and when it entered English in the late 1200s it meant foolish or ignorant.

Science first meant simply knowledge of any kind, from Latin scientia. The narrower sense, the study of nature by observation and experiment, came later, and the word 'scientist' was coined only in 1833, by the English scholar William Whewell. Conscience comes from conscientia, 'knowing with', which could mean knowledge shared with others or knowledge held within oneself. Omniscient adds omnis, 'all', and prescient adds prae, 'before'. Nescius is simply ne-, 'not', joined to the same verb, so 'nice' began life as the opposite of 'science'. Turkish has a similar family built on its own verb for knowing, bil-: bilgi (knowledge) and bilge (wise) are old words, while bilim (science) and bilinç (consciousness) were coined during the language reform of the 1930s.

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StillnessLanguage

'Nice' comes, through French, from Latin nescius, 'not knowing'. When it entered English around 1300 it meant foolish or ignorant, and it passed through senses such as timid, fussy and precise before 'pleasant' became established in the 18th century.

Dictionaries date the steps roughly like this: foolish and timid by about 1300, fussy in the late 1300s, delicate around 1400, precise in the 1500s (still heard in 'a nice distinction'), agreeable from 1769 and kind from about 1830. Old senses lingered beside new ones, and the Oxford English Dictionary notes that in many 16th- and 17th-century texts it is hard to tell which one a writer meant. Linguists call a rise from a bad meaning to a good one amelioration; the reverse, pejoration, happened to 'silly', which in Old English meant happy or blessed. Jane Austen caught the new 'nice' spreading. In Northanger Abbey, published in 1817, Henry Tilney teases Catherine Morland for calling a Gothic novel 'the nicest book in the world', remarking that the word now 'does for everything'.

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WonderScience

The English word ‘disaster’ comes from the Italian for ‘ill-starred’, from a time when misfortune was blamed on the stars. Other everyday words keep old history too: ‘quarantine’ comes from the Italian for forty days, and ‘robot’ from a Czech word for forced labour.

Disaster reached English in the 1590s through French désastre, from Italian disastro: dis-, meaning bad, and astro, star. In astrology a planet in the wrong position was thought to bring calamity, and English still says ‘ill-starred’. Quarantine goes back to plague-era ports. In 1377 the city of Ragusa, now Dubrovnik in Croatia, made new arrivals wait 30 days in isolation, and in 1448 Venice extended the wait to 40 days, quaranta giorni in Italian. Robot first appeared in Karel Čapek's 1920 play R.U.R., about artificial workers. Čapek said his brother Josef suggested the word, based on the Czech robota, the unpaid labour serfs owed their lords. The American writer Ralph Waldo Emerson put the idea neatly in 1844: ‘Language is fossil poetry.’

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WonderLanguage

'Companion' comes from Late Latin companio, built from com, 'with', and panis, 'bread'. Literally, a companion is someone you share your bread with.

The Late Latin word first appears in the Lex Salica, a law code of the Franks written down in the 6th century, and was probably modelled on a Germanic word: Gothic had gahlaiba, 'messmate', built on hlaifs, 'bread', a relative of English 'loaf'. It passed through Old French compagnon into English around 1300, and 'company', 'accompany' and French copain, 'pal', belong to the same family. Many cultures still treat shared bread as a bond. In Slavic countries honoured guests are welcomed with bread and salt, and Turkish has tuz ekmek hakkı, 'the right of salt and bread': the moral claim a person has on someone they have fed and treated kindly.

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WonderLanguage

'Calculate' comes from Latin calculus, 'small pebble'. Romans did their sums by moving pebbles across a counting board marked with lines for units, fives, tens and so on, and the pebbles gave their name to the reckoning itself.

Calculus is a diminutive of calx, 'limestone', the same Latin word behind English 'chalk' and the element calcium. As pebbles on the counting board came to stand for reckoning itself, Latin called a person who kept accounts or taught arithmetic a calculator. From the 17th century 'calculus' also became the name of branches of mathematics, most famously the calculus developed by Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz for working out rates of change and areas. Medicine kept the stone: doctors still use 'calculus' for hard deposits that form in the body, so a kidney stone is a renal calculus and the hardened tartar on teeth is dental calculus.

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WonderLanguage

The 'mare' in 'nightmare' has nothing to do with horses. It comes from Old English mære, a spirit believed to sit on people's chests as they slept, leaving them with a feeling of being crushed and unable to breathe.

'Nightmare' is recorded from around 1300 as the name of this spirit and of the choking feeling it brought. Only in the 1820s did it come to mean any bad dream, and soon after any distressing experience. The same creature appears across Germanic and Slavic folklore, as German Mahr and Swedish mara, and the French word for a nightmare, cauchemar, joins an Old French verb meaning 'to trample' to the same Germanic root. Today the experience behind the legend is usually identified as sleep paralysis: waking briefly while the body is still held in the stillness of dreaming sleep, sometimes with a sense of pressure on the chest or of someone in the room. Turkish folklore has its own name for it: karabasan.

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WonderLanguage

'Panic' comes from Greek panikos, 'of Pan'. Pan was the goat-legged god of shepherds, flocks and wild places, and the Greeks blamed him for the sudden, groundless fear that could sweep through a herd, a crowd or a lone traveller.

Pan's home was Arcadia, the mountainous heart of the Peloponnese in southern Greece. Stories said he hated being woken from his afternoon nap, and that his angry shout could send anyone nearby running in terror. The Greeks also gave him credit in war: after the Battle of Marathon in 490 BC, the Athenians believed Pan had taken their side and struck panic into the Persian army, and they honoured him with a shrine on the slopes of the Acropolis. The word travelled through French panique and reached English around 1600, first as an adjective in phrases such as 'panic fear', and only in the 18th century as a noun for sudden mass terror. Turkish panik also came from French.

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WonderLanguage

'Lunatic' comes from Late Latin lunaticus, 'moonstruck', from luna, 'moon'. For centuries people believed the Moon's phases could bring on madness or epileptic fits, and the word carried that belief into English in the late 13th century.

The Roman writer Pliny the Elder argued that the full moon could bring on madness and epilepsy through its effect on the brain. The idea lasted for centuries and found its way into law: in England, the Lunacy Acts of 1890 to 1922 still spoke of 'lunatics' until the Mental Treatment Act 1930 replaced the term, and the United States removed 'lunatic' from its federal laws only in 2012. Modern researchers have looked hard for a full-moon effect. A 1985 review of 37 studies found no reliable link between the phases of the Moon and human behaviour, and nearly half of the studies that had claimed one contained at least one statistical error.

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WonderLanguage

'Goodbye' is a shortened form of 'God be with ye', a parting blessing used in English since the late 14th century. By the 1570s it had been squeezed into forms such as 'godbwye', and 'God' later became 'good' under the influence of 'good day' and 'good night'.

Sixteenth-century writers spelled the phrase in many worn-down ways, such as 'God be wy you', 'God b'uy' and 'God buy', which shows how quickly everyday speech shortened it. The modern spelling 'good-bye' appears in the 1590s. Many languages hide a blessing in their farewells. Spanish adiós and French adieu mean 'to God', in the sense of 'I commend you to God'. In Turkish the person leaving says Allah'a ısmarladık, 'we have left you in God's care', and the person staying replies güle güle, literally 'smiling, smiling', a wish that the traveller goes happily. English 'farewell' is a wish as well: 'fare well', meaning have a safe journey.

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WonderLanguage

The sandwich takes its name from John Montagu, 4th Earl of Sandwich (1718–1792). The popular story says he asked for meat between slices of bread so he could eat without leaving the card table; his biographer thinks he more likely ate it at his desk.

The gambling version comes from the French writer Pierre-Jean Grosley, who visited London in 1765 and described a minister who stayed at the gaming table for 24 hours, living on beef between slices of toast. His book appeared in French in 1770 and in English in 1772. The historian N. A. M. Rodger, Sandwich's biographer, points out that as First Lord of the Admiralty, the minister in charge of the Royal Navy, Sandwich was a hard-working man who was more likely eating at his desk. Putting food between bread was nothing new; his title simply gave it a name. Captain James Cook, whose Pacific voyages Sandwich supported, also named the Sandwich Islands, today Hawaii, in his honour.

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WonderLanguage

English 'berserk' comes from Old Norse berserkr, the name for warriors who, in the sagas and poems of Scandinavia, fought in a howling, shield-biting fury. The word most likely meant 'bear-shirt': someone who went into battle wearing a bearskin.

The fullest description comes from Snorri Sturluson, the Icelandic historian who wrote around 1230 that Odin's warriors went into battle without armour, 'mad as dogs or wolves', biting their shields and as strong as bears. Snorri read the name as 'bare-shirt', meaning without mail, but most scholars now prefer 'bear-shirt'. Berserkers were eventually outlawed: a Norwegian ruler banned them in 1015, and Iceland's medieval law code punished berserk frenzy. Among the Lewis Chessmen, carved in the 12th century and found on a Scottish island in 1831, four of the rooks are berserkers biting their shields. English took the word from Sir Walter Scott's novel The Pirate (1822), and the adjective followed in the 1840s. Theories that berserkers used drugs remain unproven.

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WonderLanguage

To 'tantalise' is to tease someone with something they want but cannot have. The word comes from Tantalus, who in Greek myth was made to stand in water that drained away whenever he bent to drink, beneath fruit that swung out of reach whenever he stretched for it.

Tantalus was a legendary king who, in many versions, ruled at Mount Sipylus, today Spil Dağı near Manisa in western Turkey. He was a favourite of the gods and even dined at their table, then betrayed them: the myths variously say he stole their nectar and ambrosia, gave away their secrets to mortals, or served them his own son Pelops to test whether they would notice. Homer's Odyssey contains the oldest surviving description of his punishment in the underworld. 'Tantalise' has been used in English since the 1590s. In 1802 the chemist Anders Ekeberg named a newly found metal tantalum after him, partly because it could sit in acid without absorbing any, much as Tantalus stood in water he could not drink.

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