Etymology of meanings. Brief etymological dictionary of planetary toponyms. At the origins of civilization
it needs food to keep from starving, and it needs water. In addition, he\she needs to continue the family line, needs security, a roof over head, and other needs that are reflected in the language. Therefore, it is objective that besides the sounds of breathing, the first roles in the meaning-making had the “sounds of food”.
Man is a mammalian creature, breastfed. This is why, from infancy, from unconscious memory, we reproduce this deep key sound of the compressed lips —“m” and the following sound of the opening lips—“ma”. In almost all languages the word “mama” (mother) includes this ancient, imbibed with mother’s milk, protoroot. But with feeding, the child uses not only the lips but also the tongue. The tongue presses the nipple of the breast to the palate, and the milk falls on the taste buds of the child’s tongue under pressure. What sound is formed when the tongue pressed to the roof of the mouth? It is a sound “n”. In some languages this sound forms the word “nana” with the meaning “mother”. Nurses are traditionally called “nyanyas” (wet-nurses). And the famous “nyam-nyam” (yum-yum) is just a fusion of two feeding sounds “n” and “m”. By the way, when it is especially delicious, children like to click their tongue and pronounce the famous children’s word “naka”, which means “delicious”. In English this word sounds a little different: “nice”. Among the Greeks, “nostimo” (νόστιμο), although it has the same meaning “nice”.
However, there was not always enough food. Sometimes it was necessary to eat anything spoiled or fermented fruit or carrion. How does the body react to harmful food? It rejects it. And what is the sound produced while vomiting? The sound is complex: both growling and plaintive. Over time, the sound formed is one of the oldest protoroot “mr” with meaning “mertvyy” (dead).
There are a huge number of words with this root in the world. In Russian, this word is “smert’” (death) with all its derivatives: “smrad” (stench), “merzost’” (abomination) and others. This is the word “moroz” (frost) that kills all living things. This is the “more” (sea), the famous “mertvaya voda” (dead water), which is not suitable for drinking, but has nevertheless healing properties, and has retained its name in Russian folk tales about “living” water and “dead” water. This is the Greek God of dreams “Morpheus” and even the science “morfologiya” (morphology). Surprisingly, the word “mir” (peace) is also formed by this protoroot. But the interpretation of this word is a little creepy: mir is when everyone is killed, all are dead, there is no one to fight and the war ends.
The sounds of the food include protoroots “gr”, “kr”, “hr”. Their meaning goes back to the concept of “krepkiy” (strong)—this is the sound of “krosheniya” (crumbling), “khrusta” (crunching). It appeared when a person had to chew bones, or sand and stones enter into his mouth with food. And the sand khrustel (crunched), and the teeth “kroshilis’” (crumbled)! Next to them growling sounds of aggression appear. Growling, as a rule, was accompanied by a demonstration of teeth, and the sound warned that the enemy will stratch. Hence the whole galaxy of “rvanyh” (torn) words: “rychat’” (to growl), “ristat’” (to fight), “rvat’” (to tear), “rubit’” (to hack), “rezat’” (to cut), “rana” (wound).
Another palette of protoroots formed the sounds of drinking. In ancient times, there were no glasses and mugs, so our ancestors drank either from reservoirs, or, to get running water into the palm of their hand, they drew it in, as sometimes children or tourists do. What kind of sound is produced by such a drink? Only the sound of “ms”. “M” is the sound of food, but in this case it is liquid food, the consumption of which is accompanied by a “whistling” sound – the sound “s”. It formed protoroot with the meaning “drinking water”. It can be found everywhere in the names of localities, where water is suitable for drinking. There are a lot of such toponyms\place names on the planet – I found more than three hundred of them on the map, although I assume that there are many more. This is our Moskva reka (Moscow river), the Mississippi, the “Temza” (the Thames), and lake Michigan. This root has been preserved in various languages – for example, in Japanese, where there is still the word “mizi” with the meaning “water” and there is the word “mizimi” with the meaning “lake”.
Like all protoroots, “the sounds of drinking” too, lived their own lives, grew up and changed. So, in a number of languages, the sound of closed lips, the sound of eating “m” disappeared, and only the whistling “s” remained. For example, in the Turkic languages “su” means water. The English word “sea” is similar. And somewhere the whistling “s” evolved into hissing sounds.
The sounds of drinking can also include the sound of slurp in thick, hot and delicious food. Imagine that you have made soup, but instead of eating it with a spoon, you try to drink it directly from the pot. What kind of sound is produced? It is mixed sound “khl’”. Many words were formed from this sound: “khl`ebat’” (to slurp), “khl`upat’” (to slurp), “khl`eb” (bread), “khal`va” (halva), “kha`lyava” (freebie), and even “khl`yabi nebesnye” (“heavenly bread or slush”), which are heard in the name of the city where I have lived all my life and which I love— Chelyabinsk…
“Unnecessary knowledge” or two words about entropy
Why am I telling it for you? I want that it will be clear: there are no meaningless words or meaningless sounds in the world. Words didn’t fall from the sky. When the first sounds appeared, they already had some meaning, carried a semantic load. In other words, all the ancient phonemes were already morphemes in their own way. This semantic load has not disappeared – we just stopped noticing it. But even in those words that we borrow from other languages, when parsing it turns out that these words have returned to us like a boomerang, preserving their root basis, their sound history, which goes back to ancient times. And if you want to learn and to understand words, you need to be able to look into this story.
What do we know from the history of the language? I remind it very briefly. We know that Russian language belongs to the Indo-European language group. The concept of “Indo-Europeans” was formed relatively recently, when India was colonized. A little later, the English philologist William Jones, studying Sanskrit, an ancient Indian language, and comparing it with European languages, was one of the first to suggest that before the appearance of all these languages there was one, common to them, more ancient, some proto-Indo-European language. And then scientists came to the conclusion that there were even older languages, so-called Nostratic languages, common not only to Indo-Europeans, but also to other language groups.
But this is only the top layer of the story. Russian scientist Svetlana Burlak experimentally proves that even ants have their own language, and they are able to exchange information. The development of language is directly related to the evolution of man with the development of his brain, improving from simple to complex. But if we automatically inherit the brain with all its potential from our parents, from nature, then it is impossible to inherit knowledge. Knowledge is accumulated, but not inherited. I did not complain for nothing that the Greeks had lost the meaning of the metaphor of the myth of Sisyphus. For every new inhabitant of the planet, civilization begins with a void, from scratch. Every new inhabitant of the planet has to repass all the way that humanity has passed for hundreds, thousands and even millions years.
Continuity is very important here. Any violation of continuity in the transmission of knowledge leads to its distortion, loss, degradation, degeneration and even death. This can also be observed in the animal world especially when people try to return to the wild, for example, chicks who have lost their parents, and even teach them to fly on a hang glider. It’s much more complicated for a human. Neurolinguists believe that the mechanism of thinking in humans is triggered by speech sounds. Just those sounds of speech that we are considering and that accompanied it throughout its evolution. What does “launch” mean? Let’s assume that some sounds inherent in the life of the baby and its environment are installed on empty brain