Dog's Best Friend — Ratchet's Reprieve

The dog was first domesticated 15,000 years ago in north-east Asia by the ancestors of the Eurasiatic and Amerind Peoples. (The Eurasiatics are the ancestors of the Indo-European, Uralic, Altaic and Eskimo peoples, among others, while the Amerinds are the ancestors of most of the Natives of the Americas.) Both evolved from pack animals, men and dogs have a similar primitive social hierarchy. The dog adapts well to human companionship, and man accepts the dog and bonds to him as family. The strength of that bond is rivalled only by that between man and horse, another pack animal.

There are people who don't like dogs. I won't go so far as Simon Marchmont to argue that they should be shot. Only people who actively dislike dogs arouse my suspicion. The love of dogs seems to be something natural to the military mind. The military does not normally allow soldiers to adopt pets overseas or to ship them home, but there is one recent happy exception.

Above is a picture of Seargeant Gwen Beberg with the puppy Ratchet she rescued from a burning trash pile in Iraq. And here is the story at FoxNews, but I think the picture says it all.

Immortal? No. Eternal? Maybe. (Part I)

The question of immortality doesn't arise to animals, they can't conceive of time in the abstract or of their own deaths. But humans can look at both the distant future and the deep past. Indeed, every time you look at the sky, you see history. The stars of Orion, for instance, lie some 500 light years away, and ago.

The science of comparative linguistics deals with the past as well. By comparing related languages we can deduce the nature of the mother tongue which gave rise to them, even though this dialect may be long dead, and was never written down. For example, the English words wit and wise, the Latin video, and the Greek idea all come from the same Proto-Indo-European root wid- meaning to see, and hence to know. The Proto-Indo-European language is not attested in any written form. It was spoken by pre-literate horse nomads in the area north of the Black Sea some six thousand years ago, long before Sumer or Stone Henge or the Pyramids. We know it existed because we know its descendents. See my post on Calvert Watkins' Proto-Indo-European dictionary. No current descendent of Proto-Indo-European uses the form "weid-" today. Over the millennia the /d/ in "weid-" changed to a /t/ in Proto-Germanic and hence English. In Latin the /w/ became a /v/ as we see in modern French and Spanish. In Greek the /w/ dropped out, leaving only "idea."

Most of our vocabulary results from either our native stock inherited through Proto-Germanic or comes through other Branches like Greek and Latin, as well as Celtic, Slavic, Indo-Iranian and the like. Other Branches include Baltic, (e.g., Lithuanian,) Albanian and Armenian. And last century the extinct Hittite and Tocharian were discovered in Anatolia and Central Asia.

Ferdinand Saussure, famous mostly today to postmodernists who have developed relativist theories based on the notes for his university course published and modified by his students after his death early last century, was a brilliant theoretician who studied an anomaly he saw in the reconstructed roots of the Indo-European proto-language. Most IE verbs had the root form noted by linguists as CVC- or more specifically CeC- meaning consonant-vowel-consonant. And in such root the vast majority had the specific vowel /e/. Examples include *bher- "to carry" (Latin fer-o English bear Greek pher-ein) and *pe(r/z)d- "to fart" (Latin "pest-" Slavic "perditi"). But there were also a large number of roots with either no first or last consonant, and the majority of these roots had some other vowel than /e/ as their root vowel. Examples include *ag- "to lead/plow" (English "acre" and from Latin "agriculture") or *sta- "to stand, to stay" as in Latin "sta-tus" or Greek "stasis". Saussure wondered if there might not have been some now unknown letter that existed in Indo-European but which, becoming silent, had affected the sound of those vowels as had silent /e/ in English which lengthens the vowel of breath to breath or of wisdom to wise. Maybe *sta- was originally *steH where the lost consonant (probably a sound made in the throat) changed the vowel before it left.

Saussure came up with the theory as a university student. Others found this theory fascinating, and suggest some /h/-like sound. But how to prove it? Saussure died in 1913. In 1915 and subsequently the Czech linguist Bedrich Hrozny published his translation of the newly discovered Hittite language of ancient Anatolia. It turned out that Hittite was an Indo-European tongue, and that this pre-Greco-Roman dialect exhibited /h/-like sounds just where Saussure had predicted them.

Saussure, using the scientific method, had predicted the sounds that existed in a language he had never heard, and that had been unspoken for millennia. Most people know linguistics as an exotic academic subject. Professor Doolittle in My Fair Lady springs to mind. No one can make money from historical linguistics. utterly impractical, it is a perhaps seen as pursuit of racists, cranks and the English upper class. Perhaps. But like the paleontologists impractical study of fossils, the astronomers impractical study of stars, and the historians impractical study of long forgotten wars, historical linguistics does have a connection with the human soul, one on the level of fine art, it connects us with the universe on a scale that far exceeds our here-and-now moment-bound existence. Far from showing us how small we are, such studies connect us with the timeless, and show how great is the mind of man. Such knowledge may not make us immortal, but it does connect us with the eternal.

Calvert Watkins "Dictionary of Indo-European Roots"

Throughout history civilized peoples have wondered at the source of their language, looking often to the tongue of a prestigious cultural predecessor as its imagined source. In the Aeneid, Vergil traces the imagined source of Rome to Troy, and the Romans thought it obvious that their tongue was a debased form of Greek. More recent theories, based on a naive notion of Biblical history, trace all the worlds languages to Hebrew. It wasn't until widespread European familiarity with Sanskrit, the ancient liturgical language of India, that the notion became widespread that Greek and Latin, as well as the ancestral dialects of the Celts, Slavs, Germans and others might share some common origin with Sanskrit and other ancient tongues in some source which no longer exists. We now know that what are called the Indo-European languages are the descendants dialects of an ancient language of bronze-age wagon-riding horse and dog domersticating nomads who inhabited the Pontic-Caspian steppe. Known as the Kurgan culture as identified by Marija Gimbutas, this people infiltrated Europe and Central Asia, displacing speakers of tongues such as Etruscan and the ancient relatives of Basque, and interacting with their neighbors who spoke tongues from such separate families as Semitic and Finno-Ugric as well as many more exotic families.




Any who would understand the origins of English, with its own native Germanic word stock, as well as a vocaubulary well supplimented by such languagGes as Latin and Greek would do weel to familiarize themselves with the Indo-European roots of our Language. Calvert Watkins' American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots does that quite admirably. His beautiful and scholarly tome has more facts per inch in its 149pp than in almost any other work in my library. The second paperback edition is easily worth three times its cover price, and except for one flaw, this work is as near perfection as one could ask in a work of linguistic reference.

First, in praise:

To the scholar (or layman) studying the Indo-European roots of the English lexicon, there is no other work (in the English language) of comparable value to this book.

(View the index pages available above to see the English words referenced in the work.)

Each word is derived from its putative IE root, and each root is exemplified by its various reflexes in English, whether native or borrowed. For example, if we look up "deal" in the index, it gives two roots, *dail- (from which we get the meaning "portion out") and *tel- meaning plank or flat stone:

"*tel- Ground, floor, board. 1) DEAL from Middle Low German and Middle Dutch dele, "plank," from Germanic *thil-jo. 2)Suffixed form *tel-n-, TELLURIAN ...[also tile, title].... From Latin tellus "earth, the earth.....[Pokorny 2. *tel- 1061.]"

Hence, Watkins gives us the modern English exemplars of the root, whether they come through Germanic directly or indirectly, or through another PIE sister language such as Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, etc.,. For each root Watkins refers to the proto-form as it is given and numbered (i.e., here 1061) in Pokorny's authoritative "Indogermanisches Etymologisches Woerterbuch" or notes its absence therein.

Watkins also inserts a "language and culture note" on about every other page, giving philological/ethnological insight into the implications of the existence of certain forms and their connotations in the IE proto-language.

Regarding the PIE nominal root *Rtko-s "bear," which is absent as an inherited form in English, Watkins explains that the root (which is found in the Hittite "Hartaggas," Latin "ursus" Greek "arktos" and so forth) is replaced by "taboo" avoiding forms meaning "the brown one: "bruin" or "the honey-eater" as in Slavonic "medv-ed." The significance of such avoidance for hunter-gatherers such as the putative PIE speakers is obvious to anyone who knows the meaning of the word "jinx."

Yet, in criticism:

The book as it is currently titled (second edition, paperback) implies a completeness that the work lacks. When we find that certain English words such as "basket, boy, dwarf, dog" and "girl" are not listed in the lexicon, what are we to assume?

Are they neologisms, as are perhaps "boy, dog" & "girl?"

Are they Germanicisms such as "dwarf" (although it apparently has a canonical PIE root structure)?

Or are they just inexplicable - as it would seem is "basket" which looks an awful lot like a cognate of the Latin "fasces"?

Also, PIE roots not native to or not borrowed into English are ignored, as are most non-PIE-derived yet acceptably 'English' words such as "alcohol."

Nevertheless, even Tolkien had his criticisms of the OED (Oxford English Dictionary) and that work was some 1000 times the length of Watkins' achievement. Anyone who finds these caveats discouraging will know where to seek for further enlightenment.

This work is worth well more than its dime a page asking price, and a must have for any who take their language seriously.