"Nation" Transcript

By Mark Sundaram

Welcome to the Endless Knot! Today I’m joining forces with the Cynical Historian to talk about the history and etymology of Nation.

The word nation entered the English language around the year 1300 with the sense of a group of people united by birth or ancestry, in other words a distinct people sharing common descent. It came into English from Old French nacion “birth, rank; descendants, relatives” and thus by extension “country, homeland”. The political/geographical sense didn’t develop until later, perhaps as late as the 16th c.. Old French nacion came from Latin natio “birth, origin; breed, stock, kind, species; race of people, tribe”, from the past participle natus of the verb nasci “to be born”, originally spelled gnasci in Old Latin, and can thus be traced back to the Proto-Indo-European root *genə- “to give birth, beget”. Now when combined with the prefix com- “together”, Latin gnasci produced the adjective cognatus “sprung from the same stock, related by blood, kindred”, and that gave us the English word cognate, originally meaning “allied by blood, connected or related by birth, of the same parentage, descended from a common ancestor” but in linguistics the term is used to refer to words that have a common etymological origin. So the words nation and cognate are cognates. Another cognate of the word nation is nature, which passed through French from the Latin word natura “course of things; natural character, constitution, quality; the universe”, which formally is the future participle of the Latin verb nasci.

Now I said that the modern political sense of nation was a later development and so too is the concept of the nation-state, which my friend Cynical Historian can tell us all about.

[Joe: Nation states are a fairly new concept. They really only date back to the 1840s. Otherwise most people are actually referring to ethnicity, which is quite a different thing from nationality. Yeah, some nations are newer than the country they were formed out of. National histories in the late-19th Century perpetuated the myth of continuity before that. In fact, you could argue the entire history profession was founded on nationalism. What we think of as nationality is something that only formed with this thick layering of mythology on top of it. After all, myth informs identity. But you’ll have to come over to my channel to find out more on that.]

As for the word state, it first appears in English around the year 1200, but this is in the general sense “circumstances, position in society, temporary attributes of a person or thing, conditions”. It comes in part through Old French estat “position, condition; status, stature, station” and in part directly from Latin status “a station, position, place; way of standing, posture; order, arrangement, condition”, which could figuratively mean “standing, rank; public order, community organization”, from the verb stare “to stand”, ultimately traceable back to the PIE root *sta- “to stand, make or be firm”. But the political sense of the word state, “the body politic” or “polity”, was a later development, only appearing in English in the 16th c., growing out of the meaning “condition of a country” with regard to government, prosperity, etc., from Latin phrases such as status rei publicae “condition of the republic” and status civitatis “condition of the body politic”. In the ancient world the dominant political organization was the city-state, though this is a modern term coined in the 19th c. to refer to what were in the ancient world called by such names as Greek polis, from the PIE root *pelə- “citadel, fortified high place”, from which we get such English words as political, body politic, and polity, or Latin civitas, from civis “citizen” from the PIE root *kei- “to lie; bed, couch; beloved, dear”, from which we get the word city.

Another way we typically think of countries in the pre-modern ancient or medieval worlds is as kingdoms. But it turns out that this too comes back to the same sense of “common ancestry”. The word king comes from Old English cyning, which is itself most likely formed from the word cynn “family, race” or kin in Modern English, king thus meaning the “leader of a people”, and cynn comes from that same PIE root that lies behind nation, *genə- “to give birth, beget”. But the sense of the English being a people that extended beyond a kingdom took some time to develop. You see Early Medieval England was at first a number of disconnected kingdoms ruled by different kings, such as Wessex under the West Saxon kings, Anglia under the Anglian kings, and so forth. The earliest notion of a common English identity can be traced to the writings of a monk and historian in the Kingdom of Northumbria called the Venerable Bede, who wrote the historical work Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum or The Ecclesiastical History of the English People. That Latin word gens “race, clan, house” comes from that same root of nation and kin. For Bede, much of this sense of English identity was rooting in religion, Christendom, coupled with the national myth of the English coming to Britain at the request of the Britons after it was abandoned by the Roman Empire and they were left unable to defend themselves from the various non-Romanized local populations such as the Picts to the north. The invited group was led by the brothers, Hengist and Horsa, both of whose names mean “horse”, who decided to take over the land for themselves. But language was an important factor as well, as becomes clear a little later in the reigns of King Alfred the Great and his successors. It was during Alfred’s reign that not only was Bede translated from Latin into Old English but numerous other books were either translated from Latin into English or created in English, specifically what is now referred to as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles. The Chronicles repeats that English national foundation myth of Hengist and Horsa, and in later entries recounts the numerous battles between the English and the Vikings, including the poem The Battle of Brunanburh which tells of a decisive battle driving off the Danes and unifying England under one king, Æthelstan, a descendant of King Alfred, who in his own time was at least acknowledged as king of all the English not under Danish rule. But even in Brunanburh there is still some sense of the English as being a collection of different peoples, with Æthelstan returning to his cyþþe “native land” Wesseaxena land “land of the West Saxons” after this greatest battle, and the poem ends with the lines “the Angles and the Saxons came from the east, sought Britain over the broad sea, proud warsmiths, glorious warriors, overcame the Welsh and conquered the land”, a reference to the battles of Hengist and Horsa when they came to Britain.

Such foundation myths are common around the world, and important for group identity. A famous example involves the patron deity of the ancient Greek city of Athens. According to this myth, Athene, the goddess of wisdom, and Poseidon, the god of the sea, competed to become the patron of the city and the namesake of the as-yet-unnamed city by each providing them with a gift, which the king Cecrops would judge. Poseidon struck the ground with his trident and a spring welled up, though it was salt water since he was god of the sea, whereas Athene produced the first domesticated olive tree and the city became named Athens in her honour. Ironically modern scholars now believe that the goddess’s name actually comes from the city, not the other way around, because the ending -ene is common in names of locations, but rare for personal names. In more recent examples, mythic themes such as manifest destiny, which saw the newly formed United States as destined by God to expand across the continent and remake the west and cultivate the land due to the unique nature and virtues of the American settlers, coupled with the mythic overtones of the western frontier, with its emphasis on rugged self-reliance and freedom from many of the strictures of societal constructs, informs much of the self-impressions of modern day Americans, reflected in popular media like cowboy novels, comic books, and films. And once again, Cypher has this topic covered.

Now speaking of national myths, another kind of narrative that can help to create a sense of national identity is a national epic. The most famous examples of course are the Homeric epics the Iliad and the Odyssey, which created a sense of Greek unity though politically ancient Greece was made up of independent city-states until much later. Many European national epics were only written or synthesized from existing folk traditions during the age of nationalism in the 18th and 19th centuries as conscious efforts at bolstering national identities and nation-states, a part of what’s often referred to as Romantic nationalism. For instance, the Finnish Kalevala was collected and compiled in the 19th century by physician, philologist, and poet Elias Lönnrot, who collected shorter ballads and lyric poems from still-existing oral traditions, and then worked them into a long epic, modifying or even composing material himself to produce a coherent narrative. The Scottish poet James Macpherson largely composed The Poems of Ossian himself in the 18th c. as what was a hugely successful literary fraud which impressed the likes of Napoleon, Denis Diderot, and Thomas Jefferson, who called Ossian “the greatest poet that has ever existed”. Didn’t fool Samuel Johnson though, who referred to the work as “another proof of Scotch conspiracy in national falsehood”. It certainly demonstrates the importance of national epics in the establishment of national identity during this critical period of nation-state development. If you didn’t have existing epics of ancient pedigree like the Homeric epics or the Old English Beowulf, you had to put them together from what you had, or just make them up if necessary. After all, it’s not really all that different from what Virgil did in writing the Aeneid, having been inspired by the Iliad and the Odyssey.

Now speaking of the US President Thomas Jefferson, besides Ossian, the other thing he was really into was the Old English language and the culture of the people who spoke it in England before the Norman Conquest in 1066, at the time both typically referred to as Anglo-Saxon on account of Germanic tribes such as the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes who came to Britain in those foundation stories in Bede and the Chronicles. He thought highly of what he saw as a noble and freedom-loving people and of Anglo-Saxon laws which he thought became debased after the Norman Conquest. Jefferson was a linguistically gifted man who learned many languages, and taught himself to read Old English and even published his own simplified Old English grammar to make Old English texts more accessible to people. In addition to the Old English texts themselves, Jefferson was highly influenced by the book by Roman writer Tacitus known as Germania, an ethnographic description of the Germanic people in the 1st c. CE. Of course Tacitus himself had his own political axe to grind and depicted the Germanic peoples as what we might now call “noble barbarians”, as a counter example of, in his opinion, the increasingly over-civilized Romans. For Jefferson, these ancient Germanic peoples were a model of what Americans and their fledgling nation should aspire to. And this admiration for Anglo-Saxonism combined with American nativism would lay the groundwork for increased racism and white supremacy in the English-speaking world. But I mentioned a term there, American nativism—so let’s bring the Cynical Historian back to tell us about its history:

[Joe: Nativism runs strong in the US. Even before the country’s founding, folks like Ben Franklin said, “Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a Colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them, and will never adopt our Language or Customs, any more than they can acquire our Complexion.” Imagine thinking Germans were of a different skin tone. You can see this kind of xenophobia runs deep. When the Irish potato famine struck, a group of hooligans came together to fight those so-called “dirty papists” somehow conspiring to invade America. They were called “know-nothings” because of their secretive fraternal organization, but they preferred “Native Americans.” Yes, that’s where the term native-american first came from, because they were concerned with nativity, as in being born somewhere. Indigeneity is not nativity. Native just means being born in that place. Nativists want policies that discriminate against immigrants or foreigners of any sort and promote the circumstances of natives over them. And the know-nothings were so well organized that they became a political party in the 1850s. American nativism continued through further Orange Riots, Chinese Exclusion, and the quota system. Nowadays it focuses on the Southern border, and nativism is still going strong as ever.]

So in this context of colonialism and the creation of a nation-state, “Anglo-Saxon” became the focus of ethnonationalism, and is inextricably tied to American nativism and Manifest Destiny, as Reginald Horsman demonstrates in his book Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism, and this racial and racist use of the term Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Saxonist has persisted in both the US and Britain, as early medieval scholar Dr. Mary Rambaran-Olm has amply demonstrated. So the history of the academic field “Anglo-Saxon studies” grew up alongside a dark strain of racism, which is why many scholars of Early Medieval England are now distancing themselves from this problematic term, with one academic group, the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists or ISAS recently changing their name to the International Society for the Study of Early Medieval England or ISSEME. The fact is, there never was a cohesive homogeneous group of people called the Anglo-Saxons. The Germanic settlers never completely replaced Celtic peoples who were already living on the island, and there continued to be influxes of other groups such as the Vikings, who after raiding for a number of years eventually decided to stay in northern England, and later the Normans after the Norman Conquest in 1066. The name Anglo-Saxon is indeed a reference to the various Germanic tribes that invaded/migrated to/settled in Britain in the 5th century in the wake of the Roman state abandoning Britain as a province, leaving Britons to fend for themselves. These tribes included most prominently Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, but probably others as well, such as Frisians and Franks. But “Anglo-Saxon” wasn’t, at least initially, what they called themselves. It’s what’s called an exonym, a name for a people that those from outside the community use to refer to them. The opposite of an exonym is an endonym, what a people called themselves. Similarly the name Welsh is an exonym which comes from an Old English word wealh which means “foreigner” or “slave”. The endonym is Cymry. Initially the Germanic settlers referred to themselves by those old tribal names like Saxons and Angles, or more local names such as Kentish and Mercian. The term Anglo-Saxon was first used in Latin in continental sources during the 8th century to distinguish continental Saxons from those in Britain, the “English Saxons”, so it was a marked term, and not a collective compound word to refer a broader cultural unit. It was first recorded in the writings of Paul the Deacon (in Italy). When a more collective self-perception later developed, they referred to themselves in English most commonly as simply Englisc, Angelfolc, or Angelcyn (remember that Old English word cynn from the same root as nation?), not a compound word made up of those old tribal names. From the late 9th century, the line of West Saxon kings was generally referred to as rex Anglorum “king of the English” in Latin. And when they did occasionally use forms such as Anglosaxones (generally only in Latin) it was in the context of West Saxon kings asserting their supremacy over all of Britain. So in early medieval England, Anglo-Saxon was an exonym, not adopted by the English themselves until later, and was a marked form only used in certain specific contexts, not a general term. So why did it later come to be used to describe a unified culture? After the Norman Conquest of England in 1066, the term Anglo-Saxon died out, and was only resurrected in the 16th century to distinguish between pre-conquest England and everything that came after, so again a marked term. Interest in pre-conquest England began in the 1530s in order to provide propaganda to justify Henry VIII’s break with the Roman Church so he could divorce his first wife Catherine of Aragon by trying to demonstrate that the English Church had a separate history that they were simply returning to. This was specifically driven by Archbishop Matthew Parker spawning an interest in and study of Old English materials. In the 17th century antiquarians such as Richard Verstegen and William Camden continued this interest, celebrating the virtues of the Anglo-Saxons and their institutions, such as the church and the laws. The Oxford English Dictionary lists Camden as the reviver of the term Anglo-Saxon. In the 18th century and beyond this celebration shifted from a focus on Anglo-Saxon culture and institutions to a specific focus on race. In 1787 Scottish antiquarian John Pinkerton in his Dissertation on the Origin of the Scythians or Goths argued for Germanic racial supremacy, stating that the Celts were an inferior people who had been driven out of Europe by the Goths, a term he used quite imprecisely. Pinkerton wanted to purge Scotland of its Celtic heritage and had wild theories that the Picts (who those initial Germanic warriors invited to Britain were supposed to defend against) were actually Gothic, and worked out various hare-brained etymologies to claim that Scottish placenames were actually Germanic in origin, such as aber as in Aberdeen supposedly coming from German über. This was all in part a reaction against the Celtomania caused by Macpherson’s Ossian poems, and Pinkerton himself mysteriously “found” what were meant to have been ancient Anglo-Scottish texts to bolster his national mythmaking project. And as we’ve already seen, on the other side of the Atlantic in the fledgling United States the term Anglo-Saxon began to be used for similar purposes. So the origins of the revival of the term lie in propaganda and politicization at the very least, and at worst outright racism and ethnonationalism. And these sentiments are still present in current political discourse such as in the America First Caucus recently floated by such House Republicans as Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz, and Paul Gosar, which in a leaked document stated that “America is a nation with a border, and a culture, strengthened by a common respect for uniquely Anglo-Saxon political traditions” and championed “the architectural, engineering and aesthetic value that befits the progeny of European architecture”, thus calling for an end to immigration from peoples who don’t fit those descriptions. This isn’t so much a nativist dog whistle as a straight forward racist call to action.

Ok, so much for nationalism then, but what about racism? Where did the word race come from? The short answer is we really don’t know for sure, but there are a number of suggestions. First of all, it’s not related to that other word race, as in “to run”, which comes from Old Norse ras “a running, a rush (of water)”, ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *ers- “to be in motion”. The earliest senses of the non-running word race include things such as “a class of wine”, “a type of person”, and “a breed of horse”. It comes into English from Middle French race or rasse “lineage, race”, from Old Italian razza “race, breed, kind, type, family, descent”. That much seems fairly clear, and given that there are cognates in other Romance languages, such as Catalan raça, Spanish raza, and Portuguese raça, etymologists have looked for a Latin root. Latin radix “root”, though tempting, has been rejected, though it’s plausible that it may have at least influenced the sense of “tribe, nation”. One suggestion is Latin ratio “ratio, reckoning, calculation, reason” from the verb reri “to reckon, calculate, believe, think”, from the PIE root *re(i)- “to reason, count”, a variant of the root *ar- “to fit together”. A more tempting Latin source is that it is a clipping of generatio “a begetting, generating, generation” from which we get English generation, and if so that would make it cognate with the word nation, coming from the verb form generare “to beget, generate” from genus “race, stock, family, birth, descent, origin”, ultimately from the same PIE root *genə- “to give birth, beget”. But given that many early uses of the word race, not just in English but in the Romance languages, often revolved around the sense of “a horse breed”, some etymologists have looked for a horsey root for the word. One suggestion that has gained some acceptance is Old French haraz “horses and mares kept only for breeding”, also source of Modern French haras “stud farm”. But the source of this word is a matter of further uncertainty. Some would derive it from Arabic ra’s “head, beginning, origin” from a Proto-Semitic root meaning “head, top”, which is also the source of the Greek letter name rho (related to the Hebrew letter name resh), and the first element of Rosh Hashanah (literally “head of the year”) and Rastafarianism via the Amharic language of Ethiopia (literally “head or chief to be feared”). Another suggestion is the Arabic word faras “horse”. Another intriguing horsey possibility is that haras is from Old French *har- “grey, grey-haired” from Old Norse harr “grey-haired, hoary” in reference to the greying of stud horses with age. This can be traced back ultimately to the PIE root *kei- referring to various adjectives of colour, generally dark colours like grey or brown, and is also the source of the English words hoar and hoary. Alternatively it might be related to the word hair in reference to the fact that stud horses are no longer regularly saddled, so in other words ridden on hair, that is bareback, coming into Old French from Old Norse har “hair”, ultimately from the PIE root *ghers- “to stand out, to bristle, rise to a point”, not only the source of Old English hær and Modern English hair, but also of such words as horror and abhor (think of the hairs standing up on the back of your neck). Whatever the case, it does seem that the word race has a long pedigree in horse related contexts.

And after all, horses and horse breeding are very important to many cultures. And indeed it seems probable that the reason the Indo-European languages were able to spread so successfully and so broadly across Europe and Asia was the domestication of the horse. The horse was essentially the killer app that allowed the speakers of Proto-Indo-European to migrate and dominate, along with words for the wheel and the waggon technology widespread in the daughter Indo-European languages, including roots like *kw(e)-kwl-o- “wheel” (from which we get English wheel), *rot-a- “wheel” (from which comes Latin rota “wheel” and English roll and rotate), and *aks-lo- “axle” (from which comes English axle). This is what’s called the Kurgan hypothesis, that the original speakers of Proto-Indo-European were nomadic pastoralists located in the steppe region north of the Black Sea where they domesticated the horse. Microabrasions on horse teeth from clamping down on a bit forms this really early evidence of horse riding in the region. The name Kurgan is in reference to the Kurgan culture, who are known about through their archaeological record and are named after the Russian word kurgan “burial mound” (a word which ironically enough is a borrowing from a Turkic root, either *korı- “to protect, defend” or *kur- “to erect (a building), to establish”). They are also known as the Yamnaya culture similarly named after their burial pits from the Russian word yamnaya “related to pits”. Of course there have been other proposals for the original locale of the Indo-Europeans, such as the Anatolian hypothesis, which would have them as sedentary farmers in Anatolia, basically modern day Turkey, and the Out of India Theory, which would have the Indo-European languages radiating out from a homeland in India, but the weight of modern scholarship, not only linguistic, but also archaeological and genetic, supports the Kurgan hypothesis.

The Out of India Theory or Indigenous Aryans Theory rests on the rejection of the notion that the original Indo-Aryan speakers, that is the speakers of the Indic branch of the Indo-European language family, migrated into the subcontinent but were always there, in other words were indigenous, which would therefore imply that India was the original locale of the Proto-Indo-European language. It must be remembered that there are numerous other language families in India, including the Dravidian language family to which the Tamil language belongs, but the language Hindi is descended from Sanskrit, which is indeed Indo-European. This notion of an Indian origin for the Indo-European proto-language, in fact, was one of the original assumptions by the earliest 18th and early 19th c. philologists who developed the comparative method and worked on the Indo-European language family, as it was his work on Sanskrit that led to William Jones proposing the idea of a parent language in the first place. It was initially the custom to use the Sanskrit forms as the proto-forms for Indo-European words. But over time it became increasingly clear that this wasn’t the case, both on linguistic and archaeological grounds, and a host of other locations for the Indo-European homelands have been suggested, with the Kurgan hypothesis being the most widely accepted, though there certainly is no consensus. There are still some Indian scholars who argue for the Indigenous Aryans theory, and it should be noted that there is an important postcolonial anti-imperial aspect to this, with Indian scholars resisting a set of hypotheses developed by 19th c. Europeans which grew up alongside European nationalist and racist motivations. But unfortunately the Indigenous Aryans theory has been taken up and co-opted by Hindu nationalists who want to demonstrate the origins of a Hindu nation-state in ancient times and thus justify the kinds of bigotry that go along with all nationalist projects. The problem is that this theory is tied up with the evidence provided by the ancient Hindu religious texts the Vedas, particularly the oldest, the Rigveda. That text seems to make no mention of a migration, though that alone would be an argument from silence, but much rests on the dating of the Rigveda, which according to the Indigenous Aryans theory would have to be at least a thousand to two thousand years older than the generally accepted range of 1500 to 1000 BCE, or as Max Müller estimated in 1859, about 1200 BCE. You see there is pretty solid early evidence for the existence of Indo-European languages attested in writing having already separated from PIE with Anatolian appearing in 1900 BCE, and Hittite, Palaic, and Luwian shortly after that. Furthermore there are numerous phonological difficulties with the Out of India Theory, such as the vowel sounds in Sanskrit and other IE languages, which only make sense if we assume Sanskrit came from an earlier parent language that was also the source of the other IE languages. I explain the details of this in a brief endnote video linked in the description. Beyond these and other linguistic indicators, there’s the evidence of the horse and the wheel already discussed, especially when looked at in the context of the late arrival of the horse in India, consistent with Aryan migration into the region, along with other paleontological and archaeological evidence tying the existence of PIE roots for things to their existence in the material culture, such as copper, the smelting of iron, and cotton. So while the original location of PIE can’t be demonstrated beyond all doubt and alternate proposals like the Indigenous Aryans Theory shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand, especially in light of the postcolonial context of the history of IE scholarship, this is an example of how ethnonationalism can lead to pseudo-linguistic arguments. The arguments more often come from nationalist readings of religious texts and Hindu nationalist political ideas than any solid linguistic or archaeological evidence. In fact, the theory involves the rejection of some fundamental historical linguistics work including the comparative method. And again, it all comes down to a national myth, the Rigveda, and its co-option for nationalist purposes.

Now this horsey theory of the spread of Proto-Indo-European is not all that surprising since the domestication of species has often played important roles in the course of history. Domestication of natural grasses, whose selective breeding turned them into grains like wheat, allowed for the formation of cities in places like Mesopotamia and Egypt — remember those early city states. This is what’s called the agricultural revolution. Now remember the story about the foundation of Athens — Athene won the contest because she gave them domesticated olives. The olive, and specifically olive oil, was important for more than just cooking. It had a huge commercial importance as a cash crop, was used in many other products such as lamp fuel, cosmetics, and medicines, and perhaps most importantly had a crucial religious and ritual importance in the ancient world. In another version of the Athens foundation myth, Poseidon’s gift was not the saltwater spring but the horse, as he was also the god of horses, and as we’ve seen, the domestication of the horse was another civilization-triggering innovation. Indeed many foundation myths involve a figure called the culture hero who brings a superior culture from elsewhere into a place, sometimes a foundational bit of technology, and this might be what lies behind that Old English foundation myth of Hengest and Horsa — remember those horsey brothers — who brought Germanic culture into Britain.

Now the word agriculture, which is what’s really at stake when we’re talking about the domestication of species for human use, comes from Latin agricultura “cultivation of the land” made up of the words ager “field”, from the PIE root *agro- “field” (also the source of English acre), a derivative of the root *ag- “to drive, draw, move” thus from the idea of “a place where cattle are driven”, and the Latin noun cultura “cultivation, care” from the verb colere “to till, tend, care for, cultivate”, from the PIE root *kwel- “to move around, turn about”, which is also the ultimate source of that Proto-Indo-European “wheel” word *kw(e)-kwl-o- from which we get English wheel. And when we talk about the culture of a nation or other defined group of people, this is an agricultural metaphor, and for a discussion of the philosophical underpinnings of this sense of the word, a product of German Romanticism, again see the Cynical Historian’s video. Another word importantly connected with culture is civilization, and the two are often used as close synonyms or in contrast to one another, though the precise distinction between them depends on who you ask. Civilization also ultimately comes from Latin, from civitas, originally meaning “state, community, citizenship” and later “city”, civilis “civil, civic” and civis “citizen”, though the words civilize and civilization were formed later from these roots in French. The root can be traced back to that Proto-Indo-European *kei-. The idea here is “to settle down” as one does in a city instead of being nomadic — think of those two theories of the original Indo-Europeans, either nomadic herders or sedentary farmers. French civilisé “civilized” first appears in the commentary portion of historian, translator, and philosopher Loys Le Roy’s 1568 French translation of Aristotle’s work Politics. In the passage of the original Greek text, Aristotle equates shepherds and other country people with laziness, saying that herding people are the laziest type, and people who settle down to agriculture are more industrious. It’s in Le Roy’s commentary on this passage that he uses the word civilisé “civilized” connecting these different categories of food production to the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates’s theory of climate. Hippocrates believed that one’s natural environment affected one’s entire being, one’s health, and even one’s character. What’s more, if you changed your environment you could change those characteristics. The ancient world had a very different conception of race than we do now, since ours is a product of colonialism and Eurocentrism. According to this theory of climate, physical features like skin colour were the result of the environment, darker in hotter regions and paler in colder regions — the Greeks and Romans saw themselves in the perfect temperate region in between — and if a people relocated then over time those physical characteristics would naturally change. The other thing about temperate regions, and this is what Le Roy and other Europeans from the 15th to 18th century took away from all this, is that they are ideal for certain kinds of agriculture, so places that were conducive to European-style agriculture made you more civilized and places that were more conducive to herding or hunting and gathering made you less civilized. And this way of thinking was the underpinning of the whole colonial project with which European colonizers justified their taking over and taking advantage of all those other parts of the world. And in terms of food, civilized people ate bread, which reflected the experience of European colonizers going to tropical climates and reacting to the local food. And for more detail about the development of the sense of the words civilized and civilization, check out this blog post by Classics scholar Dr. Katherine Blouin called “Civilization: What’s up with that?”. But the point is that European languages including English used the term civilized to refer to themselves in contrast to the “savage” peoples they were encountering around the world. And again and again it comes down to a distinction between the city and the countryside, urban vs rural. The word urban comes from the other Latin word for “city”, urbs, which is usually listed as of unknown origin, though more recent etymologists have proposed a PIE root *u(o)rbh- “enclosure” based on cognates in Hittite and Tocharian, which would originally have been used to refer to an “enclosed area for taking auspices” later broadening in meaning to refer to the area of the settlement. But for our purposes what’s interesting to notice is that the related word urbane, like the words civilized and cultured, can have the meaning “sophisticated, refined”, kind of the opposite of calling people rustics from Latin rus “open land, country”, the opposite of urbs. The word savage, on the other hand, originally meaning “wild, undomesticated” comes from Latin silvaticus “wild” literally “of the woods” from silva “forest, grove”, in other words uncultivated land. Another example of this bias is with the word villain, which originally came from the Latin word villa “country house, farm”, traceable back to the PIE root *weik- “clan, social unit above the household”, which produced the Medieval Latin word villanus “farmhand”, which came into Old French and Anglo-French as vilain “peasant, farmer, commoner, churl, yokel” (think basically villager, also related) and went in English from meaning “base or low-born rustic” to its modern sense of a “scoundrel” or “criminal”. Besides savage, the other word the European colonizers used in opposition to civilized was barbarous, which comes from ancient Greek barbaros “foreign, strange; ignorant” from the PIE root *barbar- echoic of unintelligible speech of foreigners. In other words, for the Greeks you had to be Greek and speak the Greek language to be civilized; everyone else were barbarians making incoherent “bar, bar, bar” noises. Oh and, in case you hadn’t already guessed, the word colonialism comes from the same root that produced the word culture, Latin colere “to till, tend, care for, cultivate”, from that same root that produced the word wheel. And that’s exactly what lay behind the Europeans’ motivation for colonizing the so-called “New World” — they thought the land needed to be cultivated and since it wasn’t it was up for grabs — and behind the US idea of manifest destiny and its need to cultivate and remake the land into something “productive”. But this was a misunderstanding of the relationship between the peoples who already lived there and the land, and the outcome of their colonial activities was genocide for many of the indigenous peoples there. And yes, the words genocide and indigenous both come from that same *genə- “to give birth, beget” root.

The word genocide was coined by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish lawyer of Jewish descent, around 1943 or 44 in reference to the Nazi extermination of Jews, in his work “Axis Rule in Occupied Europe”, from Greek genos “tribe, race, kind” and the suffix -cide, a combining form meaning “a killing” from Latin caedere “to strike down, chop, beat, hew, fell, slay” traceable back to the PIE root *kaə-id- “to strike”, so literally “tribe-killing”. Lemkin would go on to draft the UN Genocide Convention. Indigenous, on the other hand, is a wholly Latin creation which entered English in the 1640s from Late Latin indigenus “born in a country, native” from Latin indigena “sprung from the land, native” or as a noun, “a native”, literally “in-born” or "born in (a place)”, made up of Old Latin indu “in, within” and gignere “to beget, produce”. The first use of the word in English was in a work of popular science called Pseudodoxia Epidemica (meaning essentially Vulgar Errors) in which writer, physician, and polymath Thomas Browne sought to refute the “vulgar” or common errors and superstitions of his age. The particular passage comments on the presence of black people in the Americas who were transported there as slaves and are not indigenous there. But of course there are peoples indigenous to America, who are also referred to typically as Native Americans in the United States, and in Canada collectively as First Nations, and not only does the word nation come from that same root, but also of course the word native, from Old French natif “native, born in; raw, unspoiled” and directly from Latin nativus “innate, produced by birth”, from natus, the past participle of nasci (Old Latin gnasci) “to be born”, related to gignere “beget”. Now of course one can also use the word native to simply mean “born in a place” as in I’m a native Ottawan meaning “I was born in the city of Ottawa” but not that “I’m an indigenous person of the Odawa people”, though this usage of the word native has come to be seen by some as appropriation. Also from Latin nativus comes Old French naif “naive, natural, genuine; just born; foolish, innocent; unspoiled, unworked” which makes its way into English as naive in the 1650s with the sense “natural, simple, unsophisticated, artless” undergoing a gradual process of pejoration from “born, innate, natural, native, rustic” to “lacking judgement, gullible”.

Now sometimes when we talk of a native language, we mean an indigenous language, that is the language of the people who are indigenous to a place. And as with many indigenous peoples, many indigenous languages are endangered by colonialism, with many being partially or fully replaced by the languages of the colonizers. But the term native language can also be used to refer to a person’s first language, the language they learned from birth (literally “birth-language”) regardless of its status as an indigenous language, and this kind of language is labelled by linguists as an L1. A person of course can be bilingual and have two L1s learned from birth. A language learned later in life is labelled an L2. Linguists have historically favoured the evidence collected from native speakers of a language as the most “authentic” representation of that language, though this practise has more recently come under question. The term native speaker has its origins in the nationalism and colonialism of the 19th c. — the Oxford English Dictionary’s earliest citation is from 1859. It could both help establish identity as a member of a nation and imply hierarchy within a colonial structure, marking out colonizers as the “owners” of a language in contrast to the colonized subjects who learned the languages but were thus characterized as “imperfect” or “inferior” speakers, and thus tied to racial judgements as well. The centrality of the native speaker became particularly important in linguistics in the context of the approach to linguistic competence established by Noam Chomsky in the 1960s and 1970s.

Now protecting indigenous languages is important when they are endangered. But not all indigenous languages are endangered, of course. Sometimes dominant languages, which are in no danger of decline, even if they are considered indigenous to a place, can pose a threat to other minority languages, as is often the case in Anglophone places with respect to the native languages of immigrants who are often discouraged from speaking their languages in public places, sometimes violently. Ironically languages such as Welsh, Scots, Gaelic, and Irish, all Celtic languages, have been suppressed by the English speaking majority, though the Celtic languages in the British Isles long predate the arrival of the Germanic language English. The connection between language and ideas of ‘race’ can result in a type of linguistic xenophobia. Taken to its extreme the idea of linguistic purity has led some to attempt to recast the English language by removing all foreign influences, specifically vocabulary from French, Latin, and Greek, such as the efforts of 19th c. Dorset poet, priest, and philologist William Barnes, who coined words such as speech-craft for “grammar”, starlore for “astronomy”, birdlore for “ornithology”, and matewording for “synonym”, or 20th c. Australian-born composer Percy Grainger who coined words such as blend-band for “orchestra”, forthspeaker for “lecturer”, and writ-piece for “article”, calling such language, in very openly racist terms, “blue-eyed” English. In the 1960s, inspired by Barnes, humorist Paul Jennings coined the term Anglish for this sort of writing. In fact, arguments about English linguistic purity go right back the the 16th and 17th centuries, with some writers such as Thomas Elyot and George Pettie feeling free to borrow foreign words into English, while others such as Thomas Wilson and John Cheke criticized this practise, and such foreign borrowings came to be referred to derisively as inkhorn words, seen as redundant and overly pretentious. Nevertheless, such foreign vocabulary kept pouring into English, while many writers, such as Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and George Orwell, continued to champion the use of so-called “pure” vocabulary from the language’s Germanic roots. Of course the converse can be true as well, with those who see their education as a marker of their superiority using what they see as fancier or more elegant Latinate vocabulary in preference over so-called “simpler” vocabulary.

In general, whether favouring language “purity” or more “educated” language, the judging of one variety of a language as superior to another, and criticizing non-standard varieties as incorrect or bad, is called linguistic prescriptivism. The opposite of this is descriptivism, the approach that actual linguists take, describing the way language is used in the world, rather than trying to impose artificial “rules” on speakers, rules such as “don’t end a sentence with a preposition” or “don’t use split infinitives”. Ironically, the prescriptivists of the world, who generally don’t really know what they’re talking about, a prime example of the aphorism “a little knowledge is a dangerous thing”, often cry “that’s not a word, it’s not in the dictionary!”, misunderstanding completely the criteria all modern day lexicographers use to determine what is in the dictionary, namely common usage. Modern dictionaries describe the language as it’s used in the real world, often to the disappointment of prescriptivists when new words and senses are admitted into the dictionary, like the intensifying use of the word literally.

The kinds of linguistic discrimination that go along with prescriptivism are often thinly veiled prejudice and bigotry directed at social groups, such as socioeconomic categories that are perceived as being inferior, or racial groups (as with speakers of African American Vernacular English or AAVE), or even genders (as with the frequent criticism of vocal fry or creaky voice when used by women). Linguists call these different social varieties of language sociolects. When the different varieties of a language are regionally based, they are sometimes referred to as dialects, though this term has come under increasing criticism. For one thing, it implies that there is one “pure” or “perfect” form of a language with various inferior dialects that differ from it, and for another it’s kind of impossible to scientifically define. Many language varieties that we traditionally consider distinct languages, like the Scandinavian languages, are pretty mutually intelligible, whereas many so-called dialects aren’t. A better terminology is to refer to language varieties, which may have differing degrees of mutual intelligibility.

Of course the most famous example of trying to distinguish between a language and a dialect is the adage “a language is a dialect with an army and a navy”, though it is not entirely clear who first stated it. The earliest published instance is in Yiddish by sociolinguist Max Weinreich, who wrote that he first heard it from one of the auditors at a lecture he gave in New York in 1945 about Yiddish in the post-war world, and though Weinreich didn’t invent the aphorism, he certainly popularized it and is the one most closely associated with it. One suggestion is that it might have been coined by French linguist Antoine Meillet, though there is no recorded evidence of this. Meillet was an expert in the study of Indo-European languages, specializing in Armenian, and is famous for another adage: “anyone wishing to hear how Indo-Europeans spoke should come and listen to a Lithuanian peasant”, reflecting the fact that the Lithuanian language is the most conservative still surviving Indo-European language, preserving many archaic features of Proto-Indo-European that have been lost in other languages. He’s also famous for having developed the concept of grammaticalisation in historical linguistics, a process by which content words, words with lexical meaning, become function words or morphemes, which convey grammatical information, like affixes and auxiliaries — for instance Old English willan meaning “to want, to wish” becoming (mostly) a marker of future time as Modern English will. Meillet also came up with the idea of oral formulaic theory, proposing that formulaic composition was a distinctive feature of orally transmitted epic, like Homeric epic and all those other early national epics, and wrote: “Homeric epic is entirely composed of formulae handed down from poet to poet. An examination of any passage will quickly reveal that it is made up of lines and fragments of lines which are reproduced word for word in one or several other passages. Even those lines of which the parts happen not to recur in any other passage have the same formulaic character, and it is doubtless pure chance that they are not attested elsewhere.” So Meillet put his student Milman Parry onto the idea, suggesting he examine a living oral poetry tradition, which he did, the South Slavic tradition in Bosnia, and along with his student Albert Lord, Parry revolutionized Homeric scholarship. Another suggestion for the ultimate origin of the dialect/language aphorism, though again anecdotally, is the French army general and colonial administrator Hubert Lyautey, apparently at a meeting of the Académie Française. Lyautey is also known for developing some influential ideas about colonialism and colonial administration, the Lyautey system of colonial rule, which favoured using pre-established local governing bodies, as well as politique des races, dealing separately with each tribe, similar to the British policy of divide and rule, and what came to be known as tache d’huile (literally “oil stain”, drawing on the metaphor of the spreading of a spot of oil), a gradual expansion of pacified areas followed by positive social and economic development like markets, schools and medical centres, in order to convert former insurgents into allies, which influenced later theories of counterinsurgency.

Now as it happens, the later linguist Randolph Quirk somewhat modified the aphorism to “A language is a dialect with an army and a flag”, and he too has a place in our story. Quirk is most famously known for founding the first linguistic corpus, the Survey of English Usage. A corpus is a compilation of linguistic data put together for the purpose of linguistic analysis. The Survey of English Usage was originally compiled before modern computing, making use of reel-to-reel recordings, paper transcriptions, and index cards, but it was eventually computerized, and other computerized corpora such as the Brown Corpus of Present-Day American English have been created, which allow for computer analysis of the data. Corpora are fundamental for descriptive linguistics, and are now also used to construct dictionaries. From the Survey of English Usage, Quirk and his collaborators produced A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language, a truly descriptive grammar that reflected how the English language was actually used in all its variation, unlike prescriptive grammars and usage guides which attempt to tell you how you should use English, according to those classist and racist biases we looked at before. Remember, for descriptivists there is no one correct English, there are many equally valid varieties, which all come from the same earlier root.

So getting back to languages and dialects then, the relationships between these varieties are usually expressed using two metaphors, the familial metaphor, with which we talk about language families and parent languages, and the tree metaphor, in which we talk about languages coming from the same root and branching out into subgroups like the Germanic branch and so forth. But these metaphors, though sometimes useful, can also be potentially misleading. First of all, it should be remembered that when we talk about language groups like language families, it does not necessarily imply that the all the speakers of the languages in that family are in other ways related, such as ethnically or even culturally. There are a number of different ways a language can spread besides the wholesale migration of a people. For instance, a relatively small number of speakers of a language could move into an already occupied region and pass on their language to the local population through political dominance or cultural prestige. So when linguists talk about a genetic relationship between languages, this isn’t genetic in the biological sense, it’s drawing on that family metaphor of language. By the way, the words genetic and gene come from that same root as nation *genə- “to give birth”, as you might expect, from Greek gignomai “to be born; become; happen”. From the word genesis (though similar constructions existed in other languages such as post-classical Latin geneticus, in reference to the Book of Genesis, German genetisch and French génétique after philosopher Johanne von Herder’s use of the word in German with the general sense “of or relating to origin or development”), the English word genetic was coined in its heredity sense by Thomas Carlyle, a proponent of trait theory and Anglo-Saxonism, believing that the Anglo-Saxon race was superior to all others. Charles Darwin used the word genetic in a more specifically biological sense “resulting from common origin” and after the work of Gregor Mendel and the development of gene theory, biologist William Bateson coined the modern sense of the word in 1905. The word gene was first used in English in 1911 after the Danish botanist and geneticist Wilhelm Ludvig Johannsen coined it in German in opposition to Darwin’s now obsolete model of heritable traits being passed on by tiny particles called pangenes, ultimately from Greek genea “generation, race”.

Now the tree metaphor of language also has its connections with Darwin and evolutionary theory. It was the 19th century linguist August Schleicher who was not only the first to propose the tree model, but also the evolutionary idea of language. He claimed that he came to his ideas of the evolution of languages before he had even heard of Darwin’s ideas, but in any case he began to arrange languages into genealogical trees inspired by the phylogenetic trees used to show the evolutionary process. Schleicher was also the first to attempt to compose a text in the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European language, now known as Schleicher’s fable, a short dialogue between sheep and horses about which of them was the most hard done by by the humans who had domesticated them. Over the years, other Indo-Europeanists have updated the text to take into account newer theories about the reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European. In any case, it turns out that this tree model doesn’t tell the whole story of language development anyway, as it doesn’t account for things like lateral transmission due to borrowing from one language to another or language contact and the fact that languages don’t always develop from single isolated dialects but a from a range of dialects present at the same time. Languages aren’t distinct abstractions, but instead are shared and spoken by speech communities of numerous people, who may all use the language in slightly different ways. And while sometimes languages diverge into distinct dialects divided by geography, often they exist in a dialect continuum in which each dialect continues to interact with those around them. Furthermore, divergence and descent is not the only way linguistic features can be transmitted. A linguistic region called a Sprachbund can have areal features, linguistic features that are shared by a number of different languages including ones that aren’t even related within a geographical area of contact and influence. Since biological species do not crossbreed, this kind of language influence is more like the lateral transfer of genetic information between microbes. As a result of these limitations of the tree model, Schleicher’s student Johannes Schmidt proposed a wave model in which linguistic innovations spread like concentric circles from a central point with lessening influence, much like the ripples formed when a pebble is dropped into water. Also there is the more recent model of linkages which consists of a network of related dialects or languages which forms from gradual diffusion of a proto-language (or rather dialect continuum), thus language innovations can be shared between neighbouring dialects even though they are diverging from one another. But it’s interesting to note that these natural processes of language spread, interaction, and influence have in more recent times been affected by the advent of the nation-state, with its artificial largely impermeable borders, as is the case for instance with the varieties of Korean spoken in North Korea and South Korea. And of course there can be other more subtle factors which influence the ways different language varieties interact with each other, often studied by sociolinguists.

Now there are various types of language blending that can occur with language contact, but important to our discussion of nations and nationalism are creoles. The topic of creoles is currently a hotly debated one in the field of linguistics with no real consensus as to what a creole actually is, how it forms, and what are the hallmarks of a creole, a complex debate we can’t really get into here, but we should come to a basic understanding of some terms, at least how they are traditionally defined. First of all patois, of uncertain and debated etymology perhaps from Old French patoier “handle clumsily, to paw” from pate “a paw” from Vulgar Latin *patta, and thus a “clumsy” manner of speaking, is not a technical linguistics term, but is used loosely to refer to forms of a language that are considered non-standard dialects, pidgins, and creoles. A pidgin is a simplified, mixed language used among people who have no common language, and is a reduced language combining features from two or more languages and thus does not possess all the features of a full language, having a simplified grammar and limited vocabulary,used for special purposes such as trade. A pidgin is thus not the native language of any speech community and is learned as a second language by all users. The word pidgin originally referred to Chinese Pidgin English, a pidgin used by Chinese speakers to communicate with English speakers that developed between the 17th and 19th centuries, and came from the pidgin pronunciation of the English word business. By contrast, a creole is a fully formed, complex, and consistent language that possesses all the features of any other language, and is learned as a first language of a speech community. Broadly speaking a creole language is a pidgin that has acquired native speakers, though again the exact process of the formation of a creole is a hotly debated topic among linguists. The word creole, which originally referred to white colonists born in the tropical European colonies, comes from French créole and other Romance language cognates such as Spanish criollo and Portuguese crioulo, ultimately from Latin creare “to make, bring forth, produce, beget” from the PIE root *ker- “to grow”, which also gives us words like create, creature, crescent, and cereal. Tok Pisin is a creole language spoken in Papua New Guinea whose name comes literally from English “talk pidgin”, but note it is a fully formed creole language, not a pidgin. Now a pidgin generally arises in situations where two or more very different language groups come into contact, and generally there is a power imbalance between the two groups. Since the two groups are too widely separated culturally and linguistically to have a common lingua franca, a term referring to a language which isn’t the native language of either group but is known to both, to fall back on, they develop a pidgin to communicate. The pidgin generally draws the vocabulary from the superstrate, or language of the dominant group, and the grammar, simplified though it is, from the substrate, and as we’ve seen this pidgin could eventually develop into a creole, when it becomes adopted by a community as a native language and children learn it as a first language. Decreolization occurs when there is continued access to the superstrate language and the creole becomes more and more like the superstrate language. This is the case for instance with Jamaican Creole, which is generally referred to locally as Patois, and continues to acquire elements of English, its superstrate language. Now even pidgins can be remarkably expressive, and do follow distinct rules of grammar and syntax. Pidgins have come to have negative connotations, largely because they are often associated with European colonial empires, but pidgins can be very useful in situations where there are speakers of many mutually unintelligible languages, since they are easier to learn than a full standard dialect of a language.

The relationship between a creole speaker and their language can be complex and often fraught. In former colonies, European colonizers generally forbade enslaved people from speaking their own languages, so subsequently creoles developed based on the enslavers’ European language, such as Jamaican Creole. From the colonizer perspective these new varieties were seen as substandard, broken. And later speakers and writers, such as Canadian M. NourbeSe Philip originally from Trinidad & Tobago, sometimes felt ambivalent about using the language that evoked their ancestors’ oppressors, but no longer had access to their ancestral languages, and have further wrestled with the decision of whether to write in some standard or prestige variety or their own local variety. But some postcolonial writers have embraced their language varieties as being able to express local experiences and truths, such as Louise Bennette, who wrote in Jamaican Creole, and the poet and historian from Barbados Kamau Brathwaite, who coined the term Nation Language as a more positive term than dialect.

It has been theorized that Proto-Germanic, the proto-language that Old English, Old Norse, Old High German, Gothic and so forth came from, arose as a pidgin when migrating Indo-Europeans encountered an otherwise unknown substrate language somewhere in northern Europe. After all, the Germanic languages have rather stripped-down noun case and verb tense systems compared to other Indo-European languages. Some scholars have even described Modern English as a creole, formed from the contact of Old English, Old Norse, and Anglo-Norman French, though again, as with many topics in dialectology there is no consensus about this classification. Nevertheless, the contact between these languages, with heavy Norse settlement particularly in the north of England, a region called the Danelaw, and the installation of Anglo-Norman speakers in all the elite positions in society after the Norman Invasion, did lead to a number of particular changes to the English language, with the function words in English remaining mainly from the substrate Old English but a large amount of vocabulary borrowed from the superstrate French, as well as the sorts of simplifications such as the loss of inflectional endings that you would expect in a pidgin. Though Old English and Old Norse were related languages in the Germanic branch and thus shared many roots, their inflectional systems had developed differently, so to aid in mutual intelligibility it would have been useful to just ignore the inflectional endings and focus on the roots, which led to weakening of the inflectional system in favour of the word order system to show grammatical information. Thus not only did the nouns no longer show grammatical case (whether a noun was the subject or object and so forth in a sentence) or clearly indicate their grammatical gender (a property that Old English, Old Norse, and Latin had and that Modern French still has), but similarly other words that modify nouns, like adjectives and demonstratives, were also no longer able to show such grammatical information, meaning that word order became the only way to tell what a word was doing in the sentence. And though Anglo-Norman French had grammatical gender, the genders more often than not didn’t line up between the languages: French lune “moon” is feminine, la lune, but Old English mona is masculine, se mona; French soleil “sun” is masculine, le soleil, but Old English sunne is feminine, seo sunne, again making this an area of confusion and leading to the loss of gender marking. So Modern English no longer has any grammatical gender and only a vestige of case marking, found only on pronouns as in I, me, my, he, him, his, and so forth.

But why do these grammatical categories exist if they create so many problems and are so difficult? Why do languages have all these inflections and endings in the first place if it’s so easy for them to be just dropped as English has done? Well in fact both processes can happen. Linguists organize languages in this regard according to two types: synthetic languages which tend to use inflections like word endings or sound changes within a word like vowel alternation to convey grammatical information, and analytic languages which use helper words and word order to convey grammatical information. Synthetic, which means literally in Greek “put together”, means the language tends to combine all the bits of information together into one word, and analysis, which means literally “loosen up”, means the language tends to break up all the bits of information into separate words. In reality no language is entirely synthetic or analytic but all exist somewhere on a continuum between those extremes. English has seen a movement from synthesis towards analysis over its history, even more so taking into account the loss of inflection from Proto-Indo-European to Proto-Germanic to Old English, and this can be seen in a number of other European languages as well. But the reverse process happens too. Though Proto-Indo-European seems to have had no future tense, Latin developed one by combining what were originally separate words, a verb such as amare “to love” with a present tense form of *bhu the verb “to be” to produce an archaic Latin form that was something like *am-a-bhwo eventually becoming the standard Latin form amabo “I will love”. Even more surprising is that although Latin already had a future, a completely new future tense was formed out of a periphrastic construction in Vulgar Latin combining the infinitive of a verb like amare “to love” with a present tense form of the verb habeo “to have”, and so Latin amare habeo became amareo and eventually Modern French aimerai “I will love”. There has been some research to work out why a language would move in one direction or another, and there is some indication that the size of the speech community and number of adult second language learners in a situation of intralinguistic contact may be part of the reason. So with English the inflectional system eroded: why have the verb show person when the pronoun already does that: I run, we run, you run — but with the third person it stuck around for some reason — he runs; and English had already lost many of the eight cases of Proto-Indo-European with just four left, nominative for subjects, accusative for direct objects, genitive to show possession, and dative for indirect objects, but word order and prepositions can do most of that work so the nouns lost most of their endings with only the genitive ’s surviving, as in the book’s cover, and the preposition of can often do that job too as in the cover of the book. Our old friend Meillet is connected to this too — not only is grammaticalisation part of this process with lexical words like Latin habeo and English have being converted to auxiliaries to help verbs convey their grammatical information, but he also worked on what’s called linguistic syncretism, which is when two inflected forms come to look identical as nominative and accusative nouns were often already doing in Old English, and this can be a stepping stone on the way to losing distinct inflected forms, with one form doing both jobs. His doctoral thesis was titled Research on the Use of the Genitive-Accusative in Old Slavonic looking at the fact that sometimes the accusative takes on a form that is identical to the genitive. The word genitive too is connected to our story, as, you guessed it, the word genitive comes from that same root as nation, from Latin genetivus “of generation, of birth”, from genitus the past participle of gignere “to produce, give birth to”, ultimately from *genə-. Now given that the most common function of the genitive case is to show possession, you might think that it received its name from the idea of being the source of something, the book’s cover. But in fact Latin (casus) genetivus “genitive case” is a translation of Greek genike (ptosis) “the general or generic (case)”, expressing race or kind, from Greek genikos “belonging to the family”, from genos “family, race, birth, descent”, the same Greek word that was used to coin the word genocide, which ultimately comes from the same PIE root as genetivus. As our friend Max Müller, who was the first to give what became the standard estimation of the date of the Rigveda, put it: “The Latin genitivus is a mere blunder, for the Greek word genike could never mean genitivus… It meant casus generalis, the general case, or rather the case which expresses the genus or kind.” So the Roman grammarians blew it, misunderstanding the meaning of the Greek term. The genitive case implies categorization and really makes a noun function like an adjective, limiting another noun to one subset of all the possible referents: the red cover, the new cover, the book’s cover — all of these phrases specify the particular cover you’re referring to from a larger set of covers, so they’re ways of categorizing things.

Ok, maybe that explains why grammatical categories like case exist and why the ’s hung around in English when the other case endings disappeared, but what about grammatical gender? Why do languages have genders that go beyond natural gender like male and female you might ask? Well in spite of the headaches it might have caused you when learning a language that has grammatical gender, like Latin, German, French, or Spanish, grammatical gender exists in language to make it easier to learn. As you may have guessed, the word gender comes from the same root as nation, through Old French gendre and genre “kind, species; character; gender” from Latin genus “race, stock, family”. So gender really just means kind or type, and in the grammatical sense just refers to different categories of nouns, which don’t necessarily have anything to do with biological sex. Human beings like to organize things into categories because it makes them easier to learn and memorize. So grammatical gender can be a way of telling you which of those inflectional endings to use.

Of course not all languages have gender. Although Wikipedia states that about one quarter of the world’s languages have grammatical gender, according to Greville Corbett in the Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, in a sample of 256 languages, a little over half, 144 to be precise, were found to have no gender system. Fifty languages in this sample had a gender system with at least two genders (and two-gender systems were particularly common). 26 of the languages had three genders, 12 four genders, and systems with 5 or more genders were very uncommon.

So, what are the gender categories that languages use to divide up their nouns? Well, a masculine-feminine division is common, in which the gender categories mostly line up with biological sex where possible, with all the other nouns then fitting into one of the two, sometimes apparently quite arbitrarily. Such languages include the Romance languages, the Baltic languages, the Celtic languages, the Hindustani languages, and many Afroasiatic languages, including the Semitic branch and the Berber languages. Similarly there are languages with a three-part division of masculine-feminine-neuter, which again mainly fall in line with biological sex, though with some exceptions, with the remaining nouns falling into one of the three genders. Many Indo-European languages, apart from the ones already mentioned, work this way, including Sanskrit, Latin, Greek, the Germanic languages (excepting of course English), and the Slavic languages. But also common is the animate-inanimate system in which mainly humans and animals fall into the animate gender and everything else into inanimate. Interestingly, Proto-Indo-European seems to have originally used an animate-inanimate gender system, even though many Indo-European languages no longer use that system, as the Anatolian branch, which was the earliest branch to split off, uses this system, including the Hittite language, the earliest attested Indo-European language. The feminine gender and its morphology may therefore have developed at a later time, and may have started off as an abstract noun class. What are called a-stems, like the Latin 1st declension (as in puella “girl”), shows up in Anatolian, but only as abstract nouns, not feminine ones. This abstract noun category then later developed the capacity to mark feminine gender, after the Anatolian languages split off from the rest of Proto-Indo-European, leaving all the other Indo-European languages with the three gender system, masculine-feminine-neuter, and many kept that system. In these languages there is a high degree of correlation between grammatical gender and the noun class morphology, in other words the endings. Later on many of the languages reduced the grammatical gender system down to only two, masculine and feminine, as was the case with most of the Romance languages. Some of the Indo-European languages instead merged the feminine and masculine into a common gender but kept the neuter, as in Swedish and Danish. And some languages lost grammatical gender, like English, which only has traces remaining of grammatical gender as in pronouns like he, she, they, and it, or other languages without grammatical gender at all, like Armenian, Bengali, Persian, Assamese, Ossetic, Odia, Khowar, and Kalasha. There are of course other languages and language families besides Indo-European that are based on the animate-inanimate system, such as the language isolate Basque, and Ojibwe of the Algonquian language family in North America. And there are other less common grammatical gender systems as well, such as human/non-human or rational/non-rational found in the Dravidian languages of the Indian subcontinent. Famously there’s the four gender system of the Dyirbal language of Australia — I – most animate objects, men; II – women, water, fire, violence, and exceptional animals; III – edible fruit and vegetables; IV – miscellaneous (including things not classifiable in the first three) — which inspired the title of cognitive linguist George Lakoff’s book about categories and cognitive metaphor called Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things.

In addition to categorization and memorization, there are some other useful roles of grammatical gender. It’s easy to express the natural gender of animate beings in languages that have explicit inflections for gender, and grammatical gender can be useful in the syntax of a language by often disambiguating the possible antecedents of personal or demonstrative pronouns. Gender can also sometimes distinguish between homophones if they belong to different gender categories, and in more literary contexts gender can be used for the personification of inanimate nouns. And that last one can have cognitive implications too. In studies by various researchers, including cognitive scientist Lera Boroditsky, the grammatical gender of a noun can affect the way we talk about and even think about things in the world around us, influencing the way we describe them. For instance when German speakers were asked to describe a bridge, in German the feminine gendered Brücke, they more often used the words meaning “beautiful”, “elegant”, “pretty”, and “slender”, while Spanish speakers, whose word for bridge is the masculine gendered puente, used words meaning “big”, “dangerous”, “strong”, and “sturdy” more often. So our socially programmed stereotypes can actually cause us to see the world in different ways, and that can affect our judgement. So grammatical gender categories, much like the gender categories of people, are culturally created, and can thus differ from culture to culture. There is nothing inherently masculine or feminine about a bridge. There is no reason that grammatical genders need to be divided into masculine and feminine, just like there is no reason human gender needs to be restricted to a simple binary.

Now I mentioned that English only has the vestiges of a gender system left, really only visible in the pronoun system (leaving aside some old fashioned forms like the French-derived blonde with an <e> feminine form). This sort of makes sense, since pronouns tend to be fairly stable and resistant to change in languages because they are so frequently used. If you use a word over and over again you’re not likely to forget the normal way of saying it. But as it turns out, English pronouns have undergone some fairly important changes over the course of the language’s history. The Old English for “he” is he, spelled exactly the same and pronounced only slightly differently due to the large-scale sound change called the Great Vowel Shift. The Old English for “it” is hit, just losing that initial /h/, which is only a thin little wispy sound anyway. But the Old English for “she” was the very different hēo. So how did this change come about? Well there are a number of theories but no real consensus. Either there’s an unusual sound shift that changed hēo to she, or somehow she came from feminine form of the definite article sēo, or it’s something else entirely. Each of these theories has its benefits and drawbacks, and the exact origin of she remains a puzzle, but if you want a fuller explanation, you can watch the brief endnote video linked in the description. On the other hand, a pronoun change that happened in English that we can explain is the importation of they. You see in Old English the word for “they” was one of those <h> words, in this case hīe or hī, but because this too was so similar to the other pronoun forms there was a need for it to be disambiguated, so this time English speakers in the North of England borrowed the Scandinavian form þeir from all the Viking settlers in the Danelaw region, which came into English as thei “they”, and it slowly spread south and became standard. For a while the two forms lived side-by-side, and Geoffrey Chaucer was able to use the new they form to mark out some of his characters as Northerners, but eventually the old forms died out. Or at least they mostly did — in Modern English when you say ‘em as in let ‘em have it, you’re actually using the vestiges of Middle English hem meaning “them”. When you think about it, you’re much less likely to drop that distinctive [θ] sound as opposed to that thin wispy [h] sound that also dropped off the beginning of Old English hit giving us it. The other notable thing about the pronoun they is that it is unmarked for gender. In fact this was already true of Old English hīe or hī, as opposed to Old Norse, Latin, French, and many other Indo-European languages which have separate forms for masculine plural, feminine plural, and neuter plural. But what’s more, they, which first appeared in English in the 12th century, was by the 14th century or perhaps earlier being used as a gender non-specific pronoun in the singular as well as the plural, as in a sentence like “Someone left their book on the table” and “Each student should bring their book to class”. If the gender is unknown, unspecified, or not defined, the pronoun they can be used with a singular antecedent, and has been used this way for well over six hundred years, and this gender non-specific use of the pronoun has more recently been extended further to refer to individuals whose gender identity does not conform to a gender binary of male and female, such as trans and non-binary people. Though some grammarians over the course of history, those prescriptivists again, have objected to the use of singular they on the grounds that it isn’t grammatical — though it should be pointed out that these objections don’t appear before the 18th century, well over three hundred years after singular they first appeared in English — that’s actually pretty normal for English. Historically the second person singular pronoun was þu in Old English which became thou by Early Modern English, and the second person plural pronoun was ye with you as the objective case, with ye eventually dropping out and you taking over the subjective case as in Modern English. But that plural you came to be used in the singular, initially to show respect following the model of singular vous in French, but eventually replacing thou altogether. So the second person pronoun doesn’t mark for number, it’s the same for singular and plural, as is the case with the less common use of plural forms for singular in the royal we and the editorial we. What’s more, in the pronoun system of English gender is more often not marked — there are no separate gendered forms for first person pronouns like I or me in the singular and we or us in the plural, or for 2nd person pronouns like you singular or plural, or for third person plural they or them. The third person singular pronouns are the only ones that it’s even possible to mark for gender, so an extension of they to act as a non-gendered or non-binary singular pronoun is in keeping with the English pronominal system. And what this comes down to, not only singular they, but indeed this whole discussion, including the concepts of nation, and culture, and language, and all of it, is a question of identity, and the need for people to define themselves both on the individual level and on the group level. And rather than really being a grammatical or linguistic issue, it’s more a question of being respectful and kind. And that’s fitting, because the word kind comes from that same Proto-Indo-European root *genə- “to give birth, beget” that lies behind the word nation, appearing in Old English as gecynd meaning “kind, nature, race” related to that word cynn “family, race”, but also as an adjective meaning “natural, native, innate”, becoming Middle English kinde and Modern English kind, with the original sense of “with the feeling of relatives for each other”, with a sense shift of “with natural feelings” to “well-disposed” to “benign, compassionate, loving, full of tenderness”. So, let’s take that etymology as a reminder that though we humans like to put everything into categories, those categories — nation, race, gender, and so on — are all socially constructed and always malleable, so we should strive to be kind to all kinds of people, wherever they fit.

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