Language Lounge
A Monthly Column for Word Lovers
All About (S)eve(n)
250 years ago this month, on May 15th 1756, the tipping point in widespread European conflict came when England declared war on France and her allies, marking the official beginning of what came to be called the Seven Years' War. In commemoration, the Lounge has gone massively rococo with mock Chippendale furniture, and secured perukes for all the gentlemen and ruffs for the ladies. The Visual Thesaurus is celebrating by collecting together and examine all things seven.
Our theme word map, while showing only seven entries (Hmm. Is that spooky?), is much more informative than it may seem at first glance, because it gives us some clues about other places where sevens lurk in English, under the guise of related languages. Heptad, you'll see, is technically a synonym for seven. Being derived from Greek it clues us up about hept- and hebd-, the prefixes behind which Greek-derived seven-words lurk in English. You probably know heptagon (a seven-sided figure) already and perhaps heptane, which designates any of a number of compounds with seven carbon atoms.
If you're wondering why a combo with seven performers isn't called a heptad, or even a heptet for that matter, that would be because someone, long ago, decided that septet (along with its variant septette) tripped more lightly off the tongue. Septet works not only for performers, but for any group of seven things, and tends to be preferred to the more cumbersome though more thoroughly English sevensome. Words in English with the Latin root sept- (=seven) are also reasonably abundant in English. Besides septet we've got September (it was the seventh month in the early Roman calendar), you're probably also familiar with words based on Latin for seventy: septuagenarian, Septuagesima (which falls approximately 70 days before Easter) and Septuagint. The definition for this word doesn't immediately give a clue as to what the seven-connection is: it turns out that the Jewish scholars commissioned with the translation were allegedly seventy in number.
A curious thing about seven is the fact that, while nature doesn't make a great deal of use of it - how many things naturally occur in groups of seven, after all? - human culture seems to never tire of putting seven to work. There's the tonal interval of the seventh, for example, which is ubiquitous and indispensable in Western music. There are the seven seas and the seven continents which someone decided we have, even though an unbiased look at the globe might lead to other conclusions. There's also seventh heaven, which these days is used mainly in informal contexts but has scholarly credentials: in Islam and in the Kabbalah (choose your orthographic variant!), it is held to be an actual place. Other niches that seven has conveniently populated are the seven wonders of the world, the seven ages of man, the seven-year itch, and the seven deadly sins.
Perhaps the greatest monument to seven is our use of it to festoon the dungeon of time with that clever invention, the week, now universally agreed to consist of seven days. You'd think that the word week would have some relation to the word seven, and if you were a speaker of some other languages you'd be right; but in English and most modern European languages, that connection is pretty much lost. Note, however, the funny word hebdomad in the wordmap for week. It's a technical and rarely-used word for week; you'll see the Greek root in it, and in fact the modern Greek word for week, εβδομάδα, can be pretty accurately transliterated as hebdomada. It will look slightly more familiar to you if you've been to Paris anytime recently and bought a weekly pass on the Metro there; said ticket goes by the rather quaint name of coupon hebdomadaire. Modern Greek is the only European language (to our knowledge, but we're happy to be corrected) in which the words for seven and week are etymologically related: seven in Greek these days is επτά, which we can render in a more familiar script as hepta.
When we wander outside the comfort zone of Indo-European, we find some sevens that are still cousins of weeks, and one of these lurks remotely in the VT. Have a look at Shavuot: the Hebrew name for the Feast of (ready for this?) Weeks. Why so called? It's based ultimately on the Hebrew word for week, שכךּע, shābhū. Its cousin can be seen in shivah, the period of mourning for a passed relative in Judaism that lasts seven days; that word is from the Hebrew word for seven, שכעה, shib'āh. As it is in Hebrew, so it is in Arabic: the word for seven is ﺳﺒﻌﺔ - sbâa; the word for week is ﺃﺴﺒﻮﻉ - asbouâ.
If you've got your special phonological radar turned on, you might notice that there is a similarity between the initial consonant sounds in the Semitic (that is, Hebrew and Arabic) words for seven, and the Indo-European ones - perhaps most evident in German sieben. Here's a poser: is it a coincidence, or somehow profoundly meaningful? This is the sort of deep question about language origins that keeps many minds thinking over generations, and perhaps even pays some professors' salaries. There is a considerable body of opinion that the Indo-European forms for seven represent a very early borrowing from Semitic languages; but the hard evidence for this is lost in prehistory, and so it remains a subject for endless speculation.
To return for just a moment to our point of departure: the Seven Years' War, often rather neglected in the study of history, had quite profound consequences for the subsequent demise of French influence in North America, and for the conduct of the American Revolution that shortly followed - which in turn set the stage for the development of English as the world's preeminent language. So we can look back to that distant war and speculate that in a highly conjectural, butterfly-wings-cause-hurricane sort of way, the Anglophone world and its prized accessory, the Visual Thesaurus, are what they are today because of that 250-year-old conflict. The evidence is rather difficult to trace, but comes to light when you poke about: as with sevens lurking in English.
The skinny on the Seven Years' War is probably best examined in the book
Crucible of War: The Seven Years War And The Fate Of The Empire In British North America, 1754-1766, by Fred Anderson. You can find a good review of it at:
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3724/is_200102/ai_n8942125
A seminal paper on the curious fact that short-term memory tends to be able to hold no more than seven items is "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information," by George A. Miller. It's online at
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Papers/Py104/Miller/miller.html
but beware! It's not for the faint-hearted.
If numbers are your bag and you'd like to develop your own sevens-conspiracy a bit further, there's a treat for you at http://www.zompist.com/numbers.shtml, where you can find the words for numbers in just about any language you can think of, and many you never knew about.
And while we're on numbers: you probably remember from grade school the rule for divisibility by 7: double the right-hand digit, subtract it from what remains, and if you get a multiple of 7, the original number is also a seven multiple. But who knew? One enterprising fellow has taken it even further than that, devising a rule for testing divisibility of big numbers by seven:
http://www.divisibilitybyseven.mat.br/
Finally, the seventh chord much-beloved in Western music is, technically, a dominant seventh. Here's a fascinating discussion about its unstoppable success:
