History in English words

by Owen Barfield

Rome not only extended her jurisdiction over all Europe; she was responsible for the birth of a new idea in men’s minds—the idea that “authority”, as such, based on an abstraction called “law” and irrespective of real ties of blood or affection, of sympathy or antipathy, of religion or ownership, can exist as a relation between human beings.

But we have hurried on to the Empire and left out the Republic. What were the beginnings and early occupations of this astonishing race, of whose national hero we are reminded when we use the word brute? In the [previous chapter] reference was made to certain words and phrases which are now used for the purposes of everyday life, but which were originally technical metaphors drawn from the phenomena of electricity. If we examine such words as calamity, delirious, emolument, pecuniary, prevaricate, tribulation, we shall find that they possess a similar history. Although the Romans of classical times used the Latin words from which they are derived in much the same way as the English words are used now, yet if we trace them a little farther back, we learn that ‘delirare’ had at one time no other meaning than to ‘go out of the furrow,’ when ploughing; ‘praevaricari’ was to ‘plough in crooked lines’; ‘tribulare’ to thrash with a ‘tribulum’, and so forth. In interval, on the other hand (from ‘intervallum’, the space between two palisades), excel, premium, salary, and many other words we have examples of metaphors taken from the military life. The English-sounding word, spoil, comes to us from a Latin term which once had no other meaning than to ‘strip a conquered foe of his arms’. By entering with our imaginations into the biography of such a word, as it lives in time, we catch glimpses of civilization in primitive Rome. Agriculture and war, we feel, were the primary businesses of life, and it was to these that the Roman mind instinctively flew when it was casting about for some means of expressing a new abstract idea—of realizing the unknown in terms of the known. Not often could the warlike city afford to beat her swords into ploughshares, but she was constantly melting both implements into ideas.

Wherever we turn in our language, we have only to scratch the surface in order to come upon fresh traces of Rome and of her solid, concrete achievements in the world. With Greece, however, it is different. It was not the outer fabric of a future European civilization which the Greeks were building up while their own civilization flourished, but the shadowy, inner world of human consciousness. They were creating our outlook. We shall see a little later how the language which is used by the theologians, philosophers, and scientists of Europe was the gradual and painful creation of the thinkers of ancient Greece; and we shall see that, without that language, the thoughts and feelings and impulses which it expresses could have no being. Rome’s task was to erect across Europe a rigid and durable framework on which the complicated texture of thought, feeling, and will, woven in the looms of Athens and Alexandria, could be permanently outspread. Yet the performance of this task, concrete as it was, was inseparably connected with an event of tremendous import for that growing, inner world to which we have already referred—the most significant event, as many believe, in the whole history of mankind.

The first casual contact between Greek coaster and Semitic trader, imaginatively portrayed in the stanza quoted above from Matthew Arnold, was indeed prophetic. It proved afterwards to have been not merely a memorable event, but a sort of fertilization of the whole history of humanity. For to one Semitic tribe the passionate inner world of its thoughts and feelings had remained almost more real than the outward one of matter and energy. The language of the Old Testament is alone enough to tell us that, while the Greek Aryans had been pouring their vigour into the creation of intellectual wisdom and liberty, the Hebrews had been building up within themselves an extraordinary moral and emotional life, as narrow as it was intense. The two streams of evolution, stronger for having been kept apart, were destined to meet and intermingle. In 332 B.C., when Alexander the Great sacked Sidon and Tyre, Aryans and Semites began for the first time to live side by side. They did not intermarry, but subtle influences must have passed from one to the other, for in Alexandria, shortly afterwards, contact between the two grew so intimate that by the second century B.C. Greek had become the official language of the Hebrew Scriptures. In the same century a Roman Protectorate was established over Syria, which in due course of time became a province of the Roman Empire. In that province was born the individual who is known to history as Jesus of Nazareth.

His teaching, as far as it has come down to us, was Semitic both in its form and in its outlook on the past. Nevertheless, it was His teaching, and the feelings and impulses (though in a somewhat unrecognizable form) which He implanted in the hearts and wills of men, which were spread by the organization of the Roman Empire all over Europe; and it was, above all, that part of the Greek world of thought which had crystallized round His teaching that was carried over into the thought and feeling of modern Europe.

But all this could only happen very slowly; for while Greece and Rome had been rising successively to pinnacles of civilization, the rest of the north-western group of Aryans had remained plunged in darkness. They had passed Italy by, and already, more than a thousand years B.C., begun to spread themselves over the rest of Europe and to develop in the different areas wherein they found a final resting-place the distinctive characteristics of Teuton, Slav, and Celt. The Slavs, although they occupied—and still occupy—the whole vast east of Europe, and although they number something like two hundred million souls have as yet had extraordinarily little influence upon our national life. There are only two Slavonic words which may be described as common in all our language, trumpet and slave, and both have come to us by devious routes, the first through German and French, the second through Greek and Latin. One of the lesser Slavonic races, the Croatians, developed a kind of neckwear which appealed to the fashionable French, who adopted it and described it as ‘croate’, ‘crovate’, or ‘cravate’, from which we get our cravat. Otherwise the words are mostly exotic both in sound and meaning. Thus, those that come to us direct from Russia are copek, drosky, knout, rouble, samovar, steppe, verst—all of which, with the possible exception of steppe, are still only used when we are speaking of life in Russia itself.

How different it is when we come to consider the Teutons! When we have abstracted all the Latin words, the French words, the Celtic words, etc., from our vocabulary, the “English” words which remain are all Teutonic; for we, ourselves, are a branch of the Teutonic race.[8] Accordingly some of our older and most English words contain buried vestiges of the lives which our ancestors once lived in the continental forests. Fear, which is thought to be derived from the same word as fare, has been taken to suggest the dangers, and weary, which is traced to an old verb meaning ‘to tramp over wet ground’, the fatigues of early travel, while learn goes back to a root which meant ‘to follow a track’. As the Italiot Aryans, the Romans, created and extended their great empire, they came into contact with these barbaric Teutonic tribes, whom they regarded, naturally enough, not as kinsmen, but as strangers. We find some of the results of this contact in such words as inch, kitchen, mile, mill, pound, street, toll, wall, and table—all of which are Latin words borrowed by our ancestors while they were still living on the Continent together with the ancestors of the Scandinavian, Dutch, German, Austrian, and Swiss nations. By their nature these words suggest civilizing influences, and we find in their company the names of more portable articles, such as chest, dish, kettle, pillow, and wine, which traders might have brought with them on their beasts of burden. This hypothesis becomes almost a certainty when it is seen that mule and ass were borrowed from Latin at this time; that -monger (in costermonger, fishmonger, ...) is a corruption of ‘mango’, the Latin name for a trader; and that the old English ceapian, ‘to buy’, which we still keep in chap, chapman, cheap, ... goes back to ‘caupones’, the Roman name for wine-dealers. A few words like pepper even seem to have come in at this time from the remote East, by way of Rome, and altogether these old Teutonic words may indeed give us, as Mr. Pearsall Smith has said, “a dim picture of Roman traders, travelling with their mules and asses along the paved roads of the German provinces, their chests and boxes and wine-sacks, and their profitable bargains with our primitive ancestors”. Finally, the military words camp and pile recall the heyday of the Empire, when Rome would recruit vast armies from her provincial subjects; and even church (another word common to all the Teutonic languages) may have been brought home by German mercenaries on service in the East. The Greek ‘Kuriakon’, from which it is said to be derived, was in use in the Eastern provinces, as opposed to the ‘ecclesia’ (French ‘église’, Italian ‘chiesa’ and ecclesiastical) of Latin Christianity, and our pagan forefathers probably picked it up accidentally while they were pillaging the sacred buildings in which their posterity was to kneel.

The modern nations of Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Holland, England, Germany, Austria, and Switzerland cover most of the area over which the Teutonic immigrants originally spread. In a good many cases they found Celtic predecessors already in possession. These Celts had been the first Aryans to arrive in Northern Europe, and they seem, at one time, to have spread over most of the Continent. Later on, in historical times, they were to be found chiefly throughout that wide district—including most of modern France and a great part of Spain and Portugal—which the Romans called “Gaul”, as well as all over Great Britain and Ireland. In Spain and France they mingled their blood extensively with that of the Italiots, the two together becoming the ancestors of the present “Latin” races or speakers of the “Romance”[9] languages. But already, long before the decline of the Roman Empire, the Teutons were beginning to drive the Celts westward and away, a process which is clearly marked in these islands by the prevalence of Celtic place-names in the west country. Thus, the percentage of Celtic place-names in Cornwall has been calculated to be about 80; in Devon it is only 32, and in Suffolk 2. The conflict between Celt and Teuton dragged on in Ireland until 1921, and it is doubtful if it is quite finished yet. One contingent of the old Celtic inhabitants of this island, or Britons, driven to the tip of Cornwall, decided to leave these shores altogether. They sailed back to the Continent, and there established themselves in the sea-board district which still bears the name of Brittany. It is said that a Welsh peasant and a Breton can still, to this day, understand one another’s speech well enough for most practical purposes.

The number of proved Celtic words which have found their way into English is extraordinarily small—scarce above a dozen. Bard, bog, and glen are among those which have come to us direct, and car had to travel through Latin and French before it reached us, the original having been borrowed by Julius Caesar from the Gauls, who had thus named their war chariots. But for the most part, Celtic words like banshee, eisteddfod, galore, mavourneen, ... have a remote and foreign look, even though we may have used them for many years. When we reflect that the Welsh tongue is still spoken within two hundred miles of London, and that another Celtic language, the Cornish, has only just died out, this seems very difficult to understand.

Such, then, in barest outline, was the distribution of the Aryan races which formed the major part of that vague and loose-knit organization, the later Roman Empire. But it must not be imagined that this picture of Rome’s European subjects is anything like complete. Evoking history from words is like looking back at our own past through memory; we see it, as it were, from within. Something has stimulated the memory—a smell, a taste, or a fragment of melody—and an inner light is kindled, but we cannot tell how far that light will throw its beams. Language, like the memory, is not an automatic diary; and it selects incidents for preservation, not so much according to their intrinsic significance as according to the impression they happen to have made upon the national consciousness.