The Mystery and Wonder of Words

by Maxwell Nurnberg

How long a time lies in one little word! WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE: King Richard II

Millions of years ago, there were no words. There was no language. The first human beings, like animals, were probably able to make only those sounds that expressed the simplest feelings. They must have made sounds like the bark of a dog to convey excitement or like the purr of a cat to show contentment. Man was very much like Tennyson's

An infant crying in the night;
An infant crying Jor the light,
And with no language but a cry.


These sound and cries nature gave to man as she gave him hands. Man's hands, however, were not by themselves powerful enough to conquer the earth and get from it everything that was needed. Therefore, he had to invent tools made out of wood and stone to extend the power of his hands.
In the same way man had somehow to create or invent words, tools made from sounds, to extend his power of communication with others, to share with them some of the ideas that lay imprisoned in his brain.
One day, aeons ago, it is possible that an early ancestor of ours, running barefoot on the forest floor, suddenly happened to step on a sharp stone. Undoubtedly he uttered a startled, piercing cry of pain—the primitive equivalent of a word like Ouch! He was probably frightened by his outburst, yet somehow excited by it too.Imagine him later that day back in his cave. Remembering the sharpness of the pain, he was eager to let the others know all about his experience. As he acted out his story for them with gestures, he came to his startled outcry. Having a sense of the dramatic, he pointed to the sole of his injured foot and, to make his story more vivid, let out the same piercing sound he had made at the time of his accident.
The story was an instant success. He was made to tell it over and over again, the others joining in when he came to the "sound effect." After frequent repetitions we can see how the sound became a word that they could now all use. And it probably had many meanings. Depending on the particular gesture that accompanied it, the word could mean "pain" or "wound" or "blood" or "sharp stone" or even "sole of a foot"!
How do we know all this? We don't. Through the years, students of language have developed many theories, pure guesses. This is my guess.
However, at this point science can step in to help us with part of the story of language. For there is a theory which says, "Ontogeny1 recapitulates phylogeny2 . Simply stated, it tells us that the individual, especially in his earliest stages, goes through a development similar to those stages that the human race has gone through. If, therefore, we study how a little child's language develops, it may give us some idea of how language itself developed.
Let us take the case of Ellen. She was a big-city child, surrounded constantly by passing automobiles and trucks.
Therefore, the first word she learned—it was really a sentence—was It's a car. She would call attention to each passing vehicle proudly with It's a car.
On her first day in the country, she saw an ant crawl by. Her pudgy little finger shot out and triumphantly she announced, "It's a car”. For Ellen, anything that moved was a car. No distinctions or refinements were made. It's-a-car was a general word to describe any moving object.
In the same way, the ouch word of our earliest ancestors was a general word and of-ten covered a lot of ground. Later, much later, more specific words were developed. 0uch remained the word for a cry of pain other words were found for stone and pain and wound and blood and ole that had specific, unique meanings. Today, Webster's Third New International Dictionary contains 450,000 separate entries. And there exist in the world today about 2,5OO languages!

In his play Prometheus3 Bound, Robert Lowell4 has Prometheus say:
"Before I made men talk and write with words, knowledge dropped like a dry stick into the fire of their memories, fed that fading blaze an instant, then died without leaving an ash behind."
It is written words that have made man's memories live on in others and have fed the flame of knowledge which lighted the avenues to all of man's serious thinking and his great achievements.

For example, you press a button and where there was darkness before there is now light. You press another button and you shoot up eighty floors, almost to the top of the Empire State Building. You turn a dial in your living room and you are present at an event taking place thousands of miles away. These miracles, which have taken millions of years to achieve, are taken for granted by all of us.
In the same way, we take for granted another miracle—the words we speak, read, and write so naturally and effortlessly. Let's take a very simple example. Every morning, wherever English is spoken, people sit down to what they call breakfast. Few of us ever think of the word as meaning more than merely some fruit juice, a cereal or egg, toast, and a hot drink. Yet if you look closely at the word, you see that it means that you are "breaking your fast," eating for the first time since the evening before.

You don (do on) your clothes before sitting down to breakfast and you may doff (do off) your hat when you say goodbye. But what are you saying when you say goodbye? In Shakespeare's plays you will find that characters, on leaving one another, sometimes say, "God be wi' ye!" (God be with you!) Now say God be wi' ye fast. Faster. Faster still. In a few seconds you have covered hundreds of years and you have arrived at the modern goodbye. Thus whenever you say goodbye you are really saying "God be with you."
In most modern languages of Western Europe the formal words of farewell have God in them. The French say Adieu5; so do the Germans and Austrians, though they pronounce it a little differently. The Spaniards say, Adios6 and the Italians, Addio.7 All of these words come from the Latin word for a god, deus,8 which comes from the Greek theos,9 which comes from—but that's another story.
You may eat breakfast with, or say goodbye to, a companion. Let's not take that word for granted. Let's look into it. Companion has the structure of most English words of three syllables or more: a prefix, com; a root, pan: a suffix, ion.
You have seen the prefix com in words like combine, combat (fight with), compose (put together), and you probably know that com is a prefix meaning "with" or "together." The suffix ion shows that the word is a noun.
But what does the all-important middle part pan mean? It comes from a Latin word panis, appearing in French as pain (pronounced "paa" with a nasal twist at the end), in Spanish as pan, and in Italian as pane (pronounced "pah-nay") and it means "bread." Is there a better way to describe a companion than to say that he is one with whom we share our bread?
You probably know that the word alphabet is made up of the first two Greek letters—alpha and beta. But do you know that the word atone really means "at one"? If you atone, if you make amends, for something you have done, you feel "at one" again with whomever you may have offended.

If all you know about a word is its spelling and its meaning, you sometimes don't know the half of it. As a matter of fact, you don't know the most interesting half of it. You don't know who its parents are, who its relatives are, what country it was born in, or what picture may be hidden somewhere within it. By the way, the word infant comes from Latin in, "not," plus fant, "speaking." Strictly speaking, therefore, you are no longer an infant when you begin to speak.

Notes:
1 Ontogeny (an taj" a ne) n.: The life cycle of a
single organism or individual.
2 Phylogeny (fi laj' a ne) n.: The development of a
species or group.
3. Prometheus (prs me' the as): In Greek mythology, a titan who stole fire from heaven for the benefit of mankind. To punish him. Zeus chained him to a rock, where a vulture attacked him each day.
4.Robert Lowell (1917-1977): American poet and dramatist.
5. Adieu: Pronounced a dyoo'.
6. Adios: Pronounced a de 6s'.
7. Addio: Pronounced a de' o.
8. deus: Pronounced da oos.
9. theos: Pronounced the' as.

Source: Prince Hall Literature Bronze, 1989