Sunday 17 February 2002

I'm utterly at a loss to illustrate this, as you can probably understand. (I am also utterly lazy today.)

Earth by any other name

Just a little glimpse into how my mind works, when it works at all. In my "Lightwielder" universe, I refer to the planet Earth as "Jarthu", to subtly remind us that it is not quite our world, despite being very similar. Indeed the name itself is very similar, and there is a small story to tell about that.

Back in High School, I had an almost unhealthy interest in the history of languages, how they have developed through time. I never continued my studies in that direction: I was uncomfortable with the idea of studying something funny and useless (the way young people these days do for years, it seems to me). So instead I studied economy and tax law, stuff like that. At least this has the benefit that I have never been unduly absorbed by my career ...

But some bits and pieces remain of what I found out when I was young.

***

The origin of the Germanic peoples is unclear. We know that the Germanic languages (including English, though it is a borderline case) are fairly closely related to one another, but less so to the surrounding languages of the same family. Despite our long neighborhood with the Celtic (or Gallic) peoples, our languages are strikingly different. And yet we are branches on the same Indo-European family tree.

Evidently the various Germanic languages remained little more than dialects into Roman Iron Age. At this point, the language of northern Europe was what linguists call "ur-Nordic", original or ancient Nordic. This language was the ancestor of all Nordic languages and then some; yet it was fundamentally different from all modern European languages. In sound it must have been more like Finnish, even though the two are barely related at all; less so than English and Sanskrit or Urdu. But the ur-Nordic language was a very singable one: Its alphabet was short, but its words were long and full of vowels. The stress was always on the first part of the word, something that becomes important soon.

Perhaps it was a result of the great migrations around the end of the Roman empire in Europe. Certainly meeting new people would have shaken the belief that language was god-given and immutable, a fact of creation. And learning new sounds may have made possible the change to shorter words but a longer alphabet. In particular, many of the vowels were combined into new sounds, and the whole words collapsed then into a shorter form. This also spelled the end to some of the linguistic unity, for the words did not end up the same way everywhere.

In modern Norwegian, the name for Earth is "Jorda". Actually the -a suffix is just the equivalent of "the" in English, for feminine words. In Norwegian it has become part of the proper name, but let's leave that be for today. Let me instead show you how "jord" is actually the same word as "earth". It is. Unravelling the threads of history, we find that the probable ur-Nordic name will have been "Erthu". In English, the trailing -u was simply combined with the initial E into a combined sound, that you Englishmen somewhat randomly chose to write "Ea". You don't even pronounce it that way.

In Norse, the E and the -u also combined, and we got "jorth" (with a voiced th, and the j pronounced like a short i. Iorth and Earth, not very different contractions of the original word. Then much later, the Nordic languages (except the western islands) dispensed with the "th" sounds entirely, and replaced them with "t" for unvoiced and "d" for voiced th. So "jorth" became "jord", though today the trailing -d is not pronounced either.

***

In the fantasy world of Jarthu (or perhaps I should spell it Iarthu?) there were no dark ages as we know them. The old language, not quite the same but similar to our ur-Nordic, survived in writing. The Black and White books are partly written in this song-like language, though I am not likely to quote from them. It is (barely) understandable to the literate of that culture. Certainly not to us.

This is not as strange as one might think; it is indeed very common to have "holy languages". The Jews around the beginning of the Christian Era spoke mostly Arameic, as far as we know, but their holy books were in Hebraic, a related but older language. (Ironically, Hebrew has survived but Arameic is practically extinct.) The Christian church in the Roman empire preferred initially to have its holy scriptures in Greek; but after the fall of Rome, it became common to use Latin for religious purposes. And when Norway got its own translation of the Bible, many preferred the old Danish translation. Even when I was a young man among "Smith's Friends", we kept quoting a Bible translation that was sorely different from modern Norwegian, even down to the personal pronouns. In all fairness, it was otherwise a good translation. But the fact remains that people seem to like to change their language when they go into holy mode.

And now I have cheerfully written a long entry about nothing, for it's not like I'm ever going to publish that story of mine anyway. Oh well. I would not be surprised if this is one of the few entries I get comments on; most likely from irate linguists who want to point out that I have messed up some detail. Feel free.