The Collected Works of the Phantom Linguist

About 5,000 years ago people along the Dnepr River in what is now the Ukraine, spoke a language from which virtually all the languages of present-day Europe and India developed. Linguists call it 'Proto-Indo- European' or simply 'PIE'—and, boy, is it a linguistic dessert! As the original tribe expanded, various segments of it moved farther and farther away from the central mother language, developing their own dialects. Without TV and cell phones to keep everyone in contact, eventually those dialects changed so much that they became different languages, usually called things like 'Proto-Slavic', 'Proto-Germanic', 'Proto-Indo-Iranain'. The same process repeated itself over and over in these languages until we reached modern English, French, German, Russian, etc, illustrated in the abbreviated table below.

PIE contained a word with three variants: "pt-, pet-, pot-", which meant something like 'fly' or 'flow' or both (note the "fl-" in both English words—they probably share the same origin, too). The forms probably corresponded to tenses such as are found in English "grow" : "grew" (we don't know for sure) but that relation broke down in the dialects where they became separate words. When they became separate words, their meanings began to change in the various languages they were used in. In the Greek dialect, the "pot-" variant became the word for 'river': "pot-amos" from the sense 'that which flows'. The English word "hippopotamus" is taken from the Greek "(h)ippo" 'horse' + "pot-amos" 'river' = 'horse of the river'.

In the Germanic languages, to which English belongs, the "pet-" variant of the same word attracted the suffix "-er", something like "pet-er-". But as the Old Germanic dialects continued to develop into the modern Germanic languages, both the pronunciation and meaning of this word changed. Jakob Grimm, the famous linguist who collected fairy tales on the side, figured out the rules by which Germanic sounds differed from those of Indo-European. According to Grimm's Law, Indo-European [p] became Germanic [f] and Indo-European "t" became Germanic [th], and Indo-European [k] became Germanic [kh] (the now unpronounced [gh] in many English words).

Thus the "pot-" of "hippopotamus" and the "feath-" of "feather" share a common origin. By the way, the suffix "-er" has played an interesting role in these words. This suffix derives agents (someone who does something) and instruments (the means by which something is done) from verbs, e.g. "bake" > "bak-er" (agent), "slice" > "slic-er" (instrument). Russian placed its own suffix, "-ica", on the "pt-" stem and guess what the result was: "pt-ic"a 'bird, one which flies'. Greek also used this vowelless form with the suffix "-er" : "pt-er-on" 'wing, the means of flying' ("pter-o-dactyl" = 'wing-fingered one').

Remember, the magic word is "linguistics", a very new science. Etymology is the study of the historical development of words, part of historical linguistics. Check with the Linguistics Program at the university nearest you for the courses you can take next semester.

Next: How to Pronounce "Ghoti" and Why >