1. An introduction to vocabulary development through semantic webs:

The archeology of words

Words and their meanings change through time because human cultures and their physical productions change. English is a Germanic language, whose speakers conquered a Roman Imperial province, Britain. There they were themselves conquered by Germanic cousins, Vikings and Normans. Each change of ruler opened up changes in trade, agriculture, and religion, which appear in the archeological record as distinct buildings, tools, and other artifacts and in the vocabulary record as different words, whose meanings were modified because they reflected those differences in the architecture, religion, government, and economy around the speakers.

Just as new buildings are often built with the remnants of older buildings; new words often use remnants of older words. If they are Germanic, they develop older Germanic meanings. If they are Germanic translations of Latin or Greek or if they are direct borrowings from Greek or Latin, they develop the older meanings of words from or borrowed by the Romans or the Greeks all the way back to the Sumerians, Ancient Chinese and Ancient Egyptians.

As an immediate example, we can take the common Germanic word for “thanks,” which clearly derives from an old past tense of “think.” Just as sink, sank, sunk, there was a pattern think, thank, thunk. But, the past form “thank” was limited to a narrower meaning, while still emphasizing thinking about someone. The pattern was changed to think, thought, thought, and thank was given new and particular duties. For being thoughtful and considerate (a Latin translation of the Germanic original) to anyone is a proper response to that person’s good behavior towards you. Thinking about someone leads to gracious behavior (the Latin idea found in Spanish and Italian) and to obligation (the Latin idea found in Portuguese), and to mercy and compassion (the Latin ideas found in French). Therefore, gracious, compassionate persons feel obliged when they think about others’ graciousness to them.

European revolutions and social change have modified the meanings of many words. Modern words do not have the same meaning through time: for example, a simple 14th century description of a Catholic nun, whose words all have modern equivalents, requires a full translation into modern English:

“She was a silly, gentle nun,” meant she was a holy nun from a noble family 600 years ago, not a giggly, kind, older lady.

For the English word “silly” remember that German “selig” means holy, and for gentle remember that genteel and gentleman originally referred to the nobility. As society changes so do the social meanings of words.

Let’s take a few more examples and see how far back they lead us.A. The web spun by Bread and its many implications:

Bread was and is a basic food concept in all of Europe, but all of the ancient Germanic peoples, Goths, Gepids, Franks, Ostrogoths, Saxons, etc., who conquered the Romans and became rulers of the Holy Roman Empire, arranged social ranks through Bread. Over time these forms were translated into Latin equivalents based on Roman meanings except for the lowest rank that kept its older meaning in a Latin word.

English was further from Rome and its speakers kept the old ideas in old words—except for the lowest rank that changed into a Latin form with the same older Germanic meaning:

A leader was a lord (loaf + ward/guard (protector)).

A leader’s noble wife was a lady (loaf + dough (maker)).

The followers were companions (from Latin panis, bread, but a translation of the original Germanic, loaf-eaters)

Thus, our modern House of Lords has semantic connections with a bakery. The lord gives the lady’s bread to his companions, who are thoughtfully grateful and loyal. Today, bread (except when it refers to cash money) would not get a politician far, although bread and circuses worked very well for Caesar.

B. Traveling’s web of difficult meanings in English:

Old English had “fare” for travel in all of its aspects. We still ask for cab or bus fare, and inquire about the fare at a restaurant—meaning the food, which keeps the traveler’s legs going. We also journey (a day’s travel) and voyage (sight-seeing) using words of Latin origins. Yet, the most common word is also from Latin and is shared by almost all Romance languages as the common word for “work” (in French, Italian, and Spanish).

This word “travel” has a sister form “travail” that is a nuanced form of “labor” as in to give birth. It means to undergo a very painful birth, and this is no surprise because the original meaning of the Latin word was a form of torture. Labor in the late-Latin Imperial period was metaphorically, torture. Therefore, the English have designated a common trip or a journey, a very painful experience. Yet, travel today may not reflect much of this older aspect, which still is recognizable to anyone speaking French.

C. Trees durable and very much involved in the web of the truth we value:

The ancient Germans and many other European peoples considered trees divine representatives. Many folk traditions involve tying wishes to trees or to expecting fairies or elves to live in or around trees. Christian missionaries converting the pagan Germans were armed with axes in order to destroy sacred groves of trees—especially long-lived oaks.

The Germanic word tree is related to the Latin root that gives English “durable,” but the Germanic word is the source of many native English words that would seem very far from a forester’s world. Trust, true, troth, truth, and truce are all developments of the root meaning tree.

The next time that you reflexively knock on wood remember that anciently many a wedding troth—promise (betrothal) or a battle truce were officially sworn to under a sacred tree while both parties touched its wood.

D. The 'papyrus' web has created a mighty tree of many branches:

The art of writing was differently developed in different cultural areas. Today, we kill whole forests to make the paper for our records. In Egypt, they wrote on scrolls formed of pasted together sheets made from the pounded stems of the papyrus plant (the Greek word) and the Greeks used the Egyptian technology, when they founded Alexander’s Empire. For an Empire requires records—especially tax records. The Alexandrian Library was formed of scrolls stacked in numbered and lettered racks.

The Greeks had long before used the wet clay tablet, an idea borrowed from the Sumerians of Ancient Iraq. This writing called Linear-B was preserved when volcanic destruction hardened the wet clay.

In between these periods Greek kingdoms experimented with writing on treated sheep and goat skins. This was the ancestor of today’s parchment (a name derived from the city of Pergamum in Anatolia, where workers cured the leather sheets). This form of writing material had the distinct advantage that writing could be erased with a scraper.

Other cultures had related but locally produced writing materials—in India they wrote on prepared palm leaves; in China they wrote on silk rolls. Every culture that ruled over large populations created record libraries that were continuously added to by professional scribes. For the Romans, a drought in Egypt or Cyprus that killed the papyrus crop was a disaster for the Emperor’s bureaucrats.

Repeated droughts largely due to wars and invasions led to increased reliance on parchment over papyrus in the northern sections of the Empire. Parchment was not easily formed into scrolls or long strips of papyrus pasted together. Parchment was best collected into flat stacks that were sewn together between hard wooden covers. Thus, books—called codices—replaced the scrolls so famously used in Egypt.

The Chinese discovered that foreign kingdoms especially prized their silk, and as foreigners paid higher prices for it, they sought a substitute for it for their record keeping. The invention of paper brought the world a cheaper sheet that shared many of the characteristics of papyrus and of parchment. The technique was soon learned by the people of India, who shared it with the Arabs, who shared it with the Europeans.

As outside circumstances changed the availability of writing materials, the nature of the storage places—libraries and archives—changed as well. The entire Eurasian world was conquered by paper, and the parchment, palm leaf, and papyrus book became largely replaced by paper, which could also be erased. Parchment remained a writing surface for the most expensive and durable books (note that the Germanic word book refers to the beech bark the Germans originally wrote on), and all of the contemporary books had the same convenient form of codices, sewn between two hard covers.

Note, however, that our word paper is the Latin form of Greek papyrus, and other specialized words referring to finished papyrus, schedule (leaf of papyrus) and chart (many papyrus sheets glued together) continued to be the terms used by bureaucrats writing on recently arrived paper. Just as in the word book, the word paper remained the same, but the physical thing referred to was completely different and from China, not Egypt.

Today we continue to use the words chart, card, charter, carton, cartoon, cardboard, schedule, cartridge, and cartouche—all derived from a Greek word referring to thickened papyrus sheets. Ironically, the paper gun powder cartridges used by Napoleon’s troops in Egypt had the same shape as the parenthetical frame that Ancient Egyptian writers placed around names in their texts and carved monuments. The term cartouche, now used by serious academic archeologists, is derived from Napoleonic soldiers’ slang.

There is one word that we might add—divan. Originally, this word entered English from the native governments in India. In ancient Persia it referred to the record library of clay tablets-dipikhane, where

the great king ruled on political matters advised by the bureaucrats of state. Dipi is the Akkadian word for clay tablet and is as old as or older than Egyptian papyrus. Khane means home or house in ancient Persian. The place of making official decisions was ultimately named for this place of records and the word divan became both a collection of books and alternate name for government in both Arabic and Persian throughout Islamic territory.

Today, the term denotes a backless couch, like the one sat on by a Muslim ruler in India. The English narrowed the library to a piece of furniture in it.

Cards, charts, schedules and electronic paper continue to flourish in the digital age. As you create a chart with your I-Pad on the divan, remember that you are using terms familiar to Alexander and Darius. We will now turn to schools in all their variation.

E. Oddities, hanging about School:

As we have noted many times, the word for an activity sometimes becomes the name of the place, where people do that activity.

The Greek word school had a very special meaning close to the French word salon. The original meaning of the word was having leisure or taking a vacation from daily work in order to meet with friends to discuss the political matters of the city state. Ancient Greeks thought that this was an elevated form of entertainment. So we have Plato’s and Aristotle’s schools or as 18th century French ladies might say, salons.

It was a long road from philosophical school to the average school on the city block. No one today would think of taking a vacation at school, Instead they take a vacation from school. Yet, we can hope that they never need to take a vacation from learning.