Peter Harvey, linguist
A blog about language and languages, not forgetting the books I have written
19/11/2005
Surprising etymology
Voltaire is credited with saying, and with reason, that "etymology is a science in which the consonants count for very little and the vowels for nothing at all" (une science où les voyelles ne sont rien et les consonnes fort peu de chose) although no such statement has ever been found in his work; one good example of this is the definite relationship that exists between the German and Spanish words for clock, which are Uhr and relojrespectively. Both of these words derive from Latin horologium (cf French horloge) with German taking the first part only and Spanish taking the second, leaving the letter as the only common point between the two. The English word clock derives from the Irish word cloc, meaning a bell, which was taken to Germany by Irish monks and later brought to England.
Another strange and surprising example is the fact that the English word hundred and its Russian equivalent sto are also clearly connected with each other, and also with the various forms that Latin centum has developed into in the Romance languages. What happened was that Proto-Indo-European (PIE) developed into two groups or families called satem or centum according to the development of the word for hundred (remember that in Latin was always pronounced hard, like ); the PIE word for hundred is estimated to have been kmtom. The Germanic and Celtic languages are in thecentum group, but in English and German the initial sound of the word changed to an (hundred and hundert), as is also the case in Greek hekaton. In general the centumlanguages are found in the west and the satem ones, which include Sanskrit, are in the east. The Slavonic languages, like Persian and the Indo-European languages of the Indian sub-continent, are in the satem group, so the Russian word for hundred begins with an sound, its first vowel has disappeared, the corresponds to the in the middle of the English word, and the final consonant has also disappeared.
The important point about all this is that language relationships must never be based on apparent similarities or differences in the form of words any more than biological taxonomy can be based on superficial similarities of colour and size. It is the structure of a language, especially in a historical context, that defines its category and shows how it is related to others, and on that basis Russian shows a clear, unmistakable, and undeniable similarity to English, however alien it may seem to an English-speaker who sets out to learn it.
Wikipedia has more detailed information on the Proto-Indo-Europeans and their language, and on the centum/satem distinction.
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