Why etymologies matter

How tracing words can illuminate history

“Little bit you speak Farsi?” my two-year-old daughter Yara asked me yesterday.

My wife and I are raising Yara and her little sister in a bilingual household with both Farsi (Persian) and English. Although I’m the English-speaker 99 percent of the time, I have indeed been making an effort to learn Farsi. As a historian, I find it an especially fun language because there are so many hints of past events embedded in the vocabulary itself.

A favorite example: there is a century-old debate among historical linguists that hinges on the Farsi word div, which describes a type of demon from Persian mythology (you can see two examples below). Farsi is an Indo-European language, and div is easily traceable back to an ancient Indo-European word for gods or divinities. The original word, used by proto-Indo-European speakers who lived around 5000 BCE, sounded something like deywós and likely referred to a sun god. Today, it’s the origin of Spanish dios, Latvian daievas, English deity, and Hindi deva, all of which mean “god.”

Ali Quli, Two Div Following the Order of King Solomon, detail of an illustration from a 16th century Mughal manuscript at the Walters Art Museum (Walters W.624)

So if all these words that are related to div mean “god”… why does the Farsi word mean “demon”?

The answer lies in the ancient sister-tongues of Avestan and Old Persian — the languages of the Iranian peoples circa 1000 to 500 BCE. Both of these languages feature the word daeva. The Wikipedia page for this term is a decent explainer for what may be going on here (and here’s a more scholarly article if you want to go into the weeds). It would appear that among ancient Zoroastrians, the daeva, including gods like Indra, came to be regarded as an older category of “gods to be rejected” in favor of Zoroastrian deities like Ahura Mazda.

Over centuries, the daeva were demoted from gods to demons. By the time of the image above, which was made in the 16th century, the div had become something like an evil djinn or the monsters of Greek legend. Meanwhile, the speakers of the Indian branch of the Indo-Iranian languages (like Sanskrit and its descendants) continued worshipping gods known collectively as deva.

Did an ancient group of Indo-Iranian speakers, in their migrations south and east in the centuries before the Vedic period, undergo a social and religious schism? Did one branch condemn the old gods, while another (the proto-Vedic) continued to worship them?

The honest answer to this question is: no one knows for sure. But there is evidence that the switch to a negative perception of daeva among the ancient Persians really does map on to a historical event in the very distant past, perhaps around 1500 BCE.¹

These sorts of parallels between closely-related Indo-Iranian languages are one thing. But to a degree I find surprising, even Farsi and English — which are far more widely separated in the family tree of Indo-European languages — have some strikingly similar cognate words.

Here are a few:

Abru = eyebrow

Baradar = brother

Dokhtar = daughter

Garm = warm

Likewise with Farsi and Spanish:

Dust (friend/liking) = Spanish gusto (taste/liking).

I’m emphasizing the Farsi cognates because it’s a language I’m currently learning, but if you cast a wider net, you can find even more ancient shared words. My favorite example: lox. Yes, the word for smoked salmon.

This word, amazingly, appears to have remained basically unchanged for about six to eight thousand years. It is thought to derive from Proto-Indo-European *laḱs- (“salmon, trout”). The same basic sound continued to mean the same thing in:

• Middle Dutch (lacks, lachs, lasche =“salmon”)

• German (lachs = “salmon”)

• Latvian (lasis = “salmon”)

• Russian (лосо́сь losós = “salmon”)

As this article on the subject from Nautilus points out, “laks” even means “fish” in Tocharian B!

Why etymologies matter for historians

Cognates are useful not just for linguists, but for historians of religion, culture, and science and technology. They allow us to make guesses — tentative, but still evidence-based — about stories and events from before the advent of written records.

One example that has stuck with me since it was announced in 2016 is this phylogenetic study of fairytales conducted by the folklorist Sara Graça da Silva and the anthropologist Jamshid Tehrani.² Da Silva and Tehrani reached the conclusion that certain legends found in story collections like Grimm’s fairy tales, Aesop’s fables, and The Arabian Nights may date to around six to seven thousand years ago, in the era when proto-Indo-European was still a living language. Among the very oldest stories they could trace back was the tale known as the Smith and the Devil: the origin for the later tale of Doctor Faustus. In it, a blacksmith — a figure associated with magic and the supernatural across a remarkably wide cultural sphere, from Europe to sub-Saharan Africa — enters into a pact with a malign supernatural entity, usually a devil. The Smith wins the power to forge any substance, then uses it to fix the devil to a piece of heavy metal, allowing him to get out of his devil’s bargain.

A chart of different legends via da Silva and Tehrani, “Comparative phylogenetic analyses uncover the ancient roots of Indo-European folktales” (2016). Number 330 is “The Smith and the Devil.” Other legends that appear to date back to the Bronze Age include #328, a version of Jack and the Beanstalk.

If true, this is one of the oldest documented human stories, predating the Bible, the Odyssey, or the Vedic hymns. (As a side note, I find it interesting that it’s a story about technology).

There is something deeply appealing for me in finding these echoes across vast distances and many thousands of years, connecting cultures that are usually depicted in contemporary media as having little in common.

And that, in fact, is why I wanted to write about etymology. The hunt for shared etymological origins doesn’t just have an intellectual appeal. It’s also a reminder of the profound interconnectedness of human history. Including the connections between languages and cultures — between, say, the English-speaking world and the Persianate world — that contemporary media tends to depict as two separate and even opposing spheres.

Oh, hello…

Etymology is not just a tool for uncovering ancient myths and cultural connections. It can also reveal unfamiliar aspects of more recent history. Take the word hello, for instance. I like to remind my students that many words that sound “modern” tend to have longer histories than we might realize. For instance, Shakespeare’s characters call one another “cuz,” and the earliest use of “bro” as an abbreviation for “brother” dates to the 16th century.

But “hello,” it turns out, is strangely new. It first appeared in print in the 1820s, and only became popular following the invention of the telephone.

On his old blog for NPR, Robert Krulwich gave an overview of the word’s surprisingly recent history. Drawing on the research of Ammon Shea, Krulwich writes:

The Oxford English Dictionary says the first published use of “hello” goes back only to 1827. And it wasn't mainly a greeting back then. Ammon says people in the 1830's said hello to attract attention (“Hello, what do you think you're doing?”), or to express surprise (“Hello, what have we here?”). Hello didn't become “hi” until the telephone arrived.

The dictionary says it was Thomas Edison who put hello into common usage. He urged the people who used his phone to say “hello” when answering. His rival, Alexander Graham Bell, thought the better word was “ahoy.”

I did a bit of digging on Google Books and the Internet Archive, and can attest that “hello” appears to have taken over the world alongside the telephone. There’s an explosion of uses in the 1880s and 1890s in newspaper accounts of the newfangled device.

For instance, this from 1893:

“Hello ! Hello ! Is that you ?”

Repeated uses of “hello” as a salutation on the phone appeared in an incredibly complex series of lawsuits filed by and against the Bell Telephone Company in the 1880s. Some of the legal wrangling hinged on whether “hello” could actually be heard by someone on the other end of the line in a 1887 experiment:

From around this time onwards, usage of “hello” as a greeting takes off throughout the English speaking world.

Why the sudden shift?

There’s a hint in this 1877 letter from Thomas Edison to a telegraph executive:

I do not think we shall need a call bell as Hello! can be heard 10 to 20 feet away. What you think? Edison – P.S. first cost of sender & receiver to manufacture is only $7.00. [source]

Before the telephone, there were several options for greetings — variations on “how do you do,” “good day,” and the like. But as the text of that Bell Telephone lawsuit suggests, one of the biggest problems with early telephone lines was noise. Witness poor Leon O. McPherson, futilely shouting “Do you understand any word that I say? Hello, hello, hello! Do you hear me? Jack and Jill, and so forth!” through a static-y telephone line, his efforts spoiled by the noisy lead pencil of a stenographer.

The affordances of the technology itself pushed its users to settle on a single, clearly enunciated word: “hello!”

This isn’t necessarily a process that anyone at the time wrote about in a self-aware way. Like the shift in the meaning of daeva in the distant past, it was one of those moments of change that happened without documentation, and which must have seemed entirely natural and even inevitable at the time. These moments of unheralded change are what historians like me spend so much time trying to unearth and understand.

I love etymologies because they evoke the strange mixture of familiarity and difference that makes history so compelling. They are ways of seeing around the corners of the past into vanished worlds of thought.

We say “hello” to them, and we always receive an answer we didn’t quite expect.

Weekly links

• As someone with ties to both universities, my thoughts lately are with the Columbia and UT Austin students calling for a cease fire in the Israel-Gaza conflict. I was heartened to see friends and former colleagues like Columbia history professor Chris Brown and classics professor Joe Howley speak out against the clear threat to freedom of expression represented by the completely uncalled-for response from police and administrators.

• The UK edition of my book Tripping on Utopia is out now, with a new cover and slightly different subtitle: “Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Birth of Psychedelics.”

• “How many bathrooms have Neanderthals in the tile?” (Johnhawks.net)

•

Ethan Mollick

’s new book Co-Intelligence. This promises to be the most thoughtful work yet on how generative AI can help augment, rather than replace, aspects of research and pedagogy (it also features a surprise Res Obscura cameo — my post on history simulations using ChatGPT is discussed on pages 174-175).

• For a much more extensive list of Farsi-English cognates: Hidden in Plain Sight: Illuminating Indo-European Words in Persian.

• And from Miller’s Book Review, which is a great newsletter on books and the book trade, a charming post on dedications and footnotes, including this amazing example of the latter: “This was once revealed to me in a dream.”

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If you liked this post, please consider forwarding it to friends. I’d also love to hear from you in the comments below — especially about your favorite etymology. I didn’t get a chance to mention weird, but that’s a really good one.

1. Mary Boyce’s research into the deep history of Zoroastrianism is a good example of the incredibly intricate etymological sleuthing involved here. For instance, she compares the ancient Persian concepts of drug (falsehood, disorder, evil) and asa (order, truth) to the related Sanskrit concepts of druh and ṛta, finding that they “go back to Indo-Iranian times.”

2. Sara Graça da Silva and Jamshid J. Tehrani, “Comparative Phylogenetic Analyses Uncover the Ancient Roots of Indo-European Folktales,” Royal Society Open Science 3, no. 1 (2016): https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.150645.