Word origins…
I was doing the NY Times crossword the other evening. It contained clues for the words mercurial, venial, martial, ETs, jovial, and saturnine. While today these words mean capricious, forgivable, warlike, extraterrestrials, jolly, and gloomy (except for ETs, those were the clues), their common origin can be found among the names of planets, i.e. Latin. Maybe that only appeals to a sci-fi fan like me, but in general I find such word origins fascinating.
English is a mongrel language, of course, no matter what the Queen says. It grew, and still is growing, creating new words and borrowing old ones from other languages. As a result, English is rich in synonyms because it possesses many different words for the same idea. (Hog, swine, and pig are three examples.) Some words are just borrowed without change; others are modified. The richness of the language is writers’ best friend if English is their birth language; it’s probably their worst enemy if it’s not.
Etymology (which has a Greek origin) is the study of the origin of words. The origins of English words are fascinating because they tell stories of conquests and defeats, religious and other cultural upheavals, and changing national boundaries. All languages evolve, but English is continually mutating as well. Words come and go; meanings are created and destroyed.
David Crystal’s The Stories of English focuses on how words and their usages evolved; it’s not just an erudite work focusing on etymology. You can access any good dictionary and find out about the latter, but I find the stories in the words much more interesting. Crystal tells the stories in the words and makes their history come alive.
In my sci-fi books, the ones that probe into the far future, I talk about standard this and that—standard year, standard day, and so forth—but by Standard I just mean an extrapolation to what humanity’s “official language” becomes. It’s not English at all, but a mishmash of many terrestrial languages. (Many sci-fi writers do the same thing.) I’m not too precise about it, and I don’t try to create a new language as Tolkien did with Elfian (he even had seven dialects, I believe). This is all just a recognition that, whether we colonize the planets and nearby star systems, English is bound to borrow and change so much that it becomes unrecognizable. (Of course, faraway human colonies will have their own dialects of Standard, whatever the latter is. And the common roots might not be English at all!)
Languages are fluid if they live on. Only Aramaic, Latin, and other “dead languages” remain frozen in time. Academies and their purists who try to freeze a living language have a hopeless task. And that’s as it should be. And literature will also suffer parallel changes. In the future, Shakespeare’s work will sound as foreign as Chaucer’s. Or the major languages of diplomacy, business, and science will morph into one. Maybe that’s not progress, but it’s inevitable.
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Comments are welcome!
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Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!
