Linguists tend to believe that all Indo-European languages come from a single protolanguage, possibly Sanskrit or its predecessor.
As far as I know, no one has advanced this view beyond the level of a hypothesis, but it’s a credible hypothesis. It certainly explains why so many of the same roots appear in different languages, even those belonging to different groups.
Like numerous other scientific theories, this one doesn’t contradict the Bible. It states unequivocally that all people used to speak the same language. But then they decided to erect “a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven”, which rather displeased God.
The deity punished them with the disintegration of their common language: “Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.” So it is because of that ill-advised construction project that we now have to shout English words at Parisians in the hope that they may cotton on that we want ketchup and not mayo on our fries.
Tracing common roots in different languages is an amusing pastime, but I’m more interested in another linguistic phenomenon, one for which no explanation exists, not even a hypothetical one.
How did certain sounds get attached to the concepts they designate? Why is a bird called a bird, for example? And why does an Englishman associate those sounds with the avian creature, which a Russian calls ptitsa, a German calls Vogel, or a Frenchman calls oiseau?
I haven’t a clue, and I’m not sure anyone knows it either. There has to be some connection between the sound of a word and its meaning, but it’s elusive – and in these cases different in different languages.
There exist, of course, cases of onomatopoeia, a word imitating the sound it describes. The most obvious cases include ‘cuckoo’, ‘chirp’, ‘roar’, ‘oink’, ‘meow’, ‘choo-choo’, and some of these words are similar in different languages (the Russian for a cuckoo, for example, is kukushka).
But I’d like to offer you another series of words that I had in mind when asking the question in the title: ‘slut’, ‘sloven’, ‘slag’, ‘slapper’, ‘slattern’, ‘slime’, ‘sleaze’, ‘sludge’, ‘slurry’, ‘slop’, ‘slug’, ‘slush’, ‘slob’, ‘soiled’.
Some of those words mean a woman of easy virtue, and they all designate something dirty, untidy or messy. And — they all start with the letters ‘sl’ or at least feature them prominently. Why? These words aren’t etymological cognates, they have come into English from different sources, and yet they all converge on those two letters.
What is it about the combination of an ‘s’ and an ‘l’ that’s associated in the Anglophone mind with physical or moral dirt? And is it just the Anglophone mind?
For example, an uncouth Frenchman may refer to a woman liberal with her favours as sale salope, meaning a ‘dirty slut’. Note that the letters in question appear in both the adjective and the noun, even though I’m sure no Frenchman will ever be rude enough to denigrate a lady in such a crude fashion.
But then one remembers that the same woman could be called Schlampe in German and shlyukha in Russian, and questions multiply, with nary an answer anywhere in sight. My gut feeling is that the phonetic shape of a word and its semantic content are linked at an ontological level.
In fact, Noam Chomsky, who makes more sense on linguistics than on anything else, argues that language in general is ontological. It’s a product of an innate and universal human property that develops in a certain linguistic environment as one matures.
If so, then linguistics is closely linked with all the sciences that try to penetrate the mystery of the human mind: philosophy, theology, neurophysiology, psychology, biology – and I’m sure I’ve left some out. Chomsky goes so far as to argue that all languages, from Latin to Urdu, are variations on a Universal Grammar, differing only in relatively unimportant details.
Once again, this rings true to me, though I’m not sufficiently well-versed in structural linguistics to argue one way or the other. Many scholars who are more knowledgeable disagree with Chomsky, but then scholars seldom share a uniform view of anything. (When I taught English grammar in my youth, I found structural linguistics to be a useful practical tool, but that’s a different matter altogether.)
Yet I’m sure that even the most erudite linguist will admit that the moment we touch upon the ontology of language, we approach a mystery that may well point at the Mystery, the ultimate secret of the human mind. So far we haven’t solved that puzzle, and chances are we never will.
However, anyone who insists that Darwin found the solution or at least signposted a path leading to it is guilty of slapdash thinking. You see, it’s those two letters again.
Your hypothesis that the initial “sl-” sound is intrinsically ugly is supported by the fact that no word in Ancient Greek (perhaps the most beautiful of all languages) starts with “sl-“. (The pseudo-word “sliphomachos” appears in the LSJ lexicon, but it’s a conjectural reading of some scratches on a vase.)
Latin is a tolerably euphonious language too, and my old Cassell’s Latin Dictionary contains no words between “sive” and “smaragdus”.
But English has always been stuffed full of initial “sl-” sounds. Slack, slay, sleep, slow, slag (in the sense of dross), sleep, sleek, slide, sleeve, slime, slink, slippery, slit, slough and slumber are all Anglo-Saxon words that King Alfred would have understood. The best of these words are morally and aesthetically neutral, and the worst are nasty.
*
By the way, a bird is called a bird for the same reason a pig is called a pig. In both cases the modern word for the adult creatures was used anciently for the juveniles. The infant offspring of a boar and a sow (with distinction of sex in their names) was a pig. The infant offspring of two fowls (with no distinction of sex in their names) was a bird. Often the domestication of animals has led to our speaking of adults as if they were juveniles.
*
As for Chomsky, would any genuinely scholarly philologist take him seriously? I mean, would Wilhelm Gesenius or Michael Ventris or J R R Tolkien take him seriously?
I’m not sure what the citizens of Slovenia, Slovakia or other Slavic-speaking nations would make of this hypothesis. (I understand that Slava, the name of my first violin teacher, has a positive meaning in most Slavic languages- honour, glory, fame. It is outsiders who turned Slav into slave.)
Sanskrit is certainly closer to Proto-Indo-European than, say, Modern English, but, pace certain zealous Hindus, is not PIE itself. (For example PIE e and o are both lowered to a in Sanskrit. Sanskrit ē and ō are inherently long vowels deriving from earlier dipthongs ai and au respectively.)
The Slavs aren’t the only speakers of Indo-European languages who find initial sl- inoffensive. Scots Gaelic offers us “slat” (a rod), “slige” (a shell) and “slighe” ( a journey), while Old Norse has “Sleipnir” (Odin’s magnificent horse) and the very common “slikr” (“such”).
So sl- is bad in West Germanic, but good or neutral in North Germanic. Alas, this means that we’re no closer to settling the Great Philological Debate about the relation of sound and meaning. Mr Boot thinks there must be a relationship, and I’m inclined to agree, but we have a feeling, not evidence.
And then there’s Irish Sláinte, Scots Gaelic Slàinte, the well-known toast. Definitely positive.
PJR- I also checked my old Cassell’s Latin dictionary. It seems the Romans didn’t like the sl- combination and simplified it to l. So you have līmus – slime, mud, mire, and labor, lapsus which can mean to fall or to slip.
Sl- in Slavic words like Slava is a reflex of PIE *kl- , thus making the name Slava a distant cousin of the name Cleo, as in Cleopatra (a Greek, not Egyptian name) – “glory of her father.”
I think ptitsa must go back to the PIE root *pet, to fly, possibly derived from an earlier meaning “spread”, ie: spread one’s wings. Ah, but why should the sound pet (or peth2, to get really technical) mean spread? I’ve just pushed the question back a few millennia. Similarly birds (originally young birds) demoted fowls (once all birds) to KFC status. Fowl and German Vogel are related to the verbs Eng. “fly” G. “fliegen” from PIE *plewk. But why…
Linguistic separation gave rise to different nations with their supirous “interests”. Not only do people from different nations no longer understand each other’s aspirations; their elites pursue their own agendas; they speak different languages both literally and figuratively. Yet Jesus came to reverse the effects of the Tower of Babel, to break the wall between Jews and Gentiles to create one God-loving people of faith.