Old Europe

Nearly all languages today have leaky borders: globalization has led to the phenomenon of words - whether for food items, technological developments, or business practices - slipping across borders and naturalizing themselves in another language.

A unique feature of English is that it has always had leaky borders. Unlike its contemporaries in other parts of the world, English has freely incorporated foreign words from the get-go. This largely accounts for the rich vocabulary of English, and the fact that multiple synonyms, often with subtle nuances of meaning, exist for nearly all common English words. The profligate borrowing habits of English also account for the fact that many English words that are related in meaning have roots in different languages - and that's a topic we'll explore this month. Our focus is Old Europe, and we don't mean the one that Donald Rumsfeld recently disparaged: we're going way back, to ancient Greece and Rome, and to the Germanic group of languages, where English finds its closest relatives.

Bring on the Heat

Here's the pattern: bring the word thermal to the center in the Visual Thesaurus, and you'll see some of its friends, among them thermic and caloric. Thermal (and thermic) derive from the Greek word for heat: thérmē. You probably recognize a number of words, mainly scientific and technical, that share this root: isotherm, thermodynamic, thermometer. Caloric, on the other hand, is from the Latin word for heat: calor. You see this root in another set of heat-related words. The one that everyone knows is calorie: a unit of heat that we normally associate with foods.

All well and good, you say, but where does heat come from? This question brings us to one of the peculiarities, and particular joys, of English: while it is rich in borrowings from Latin and Greek, its basic vocabulary - the words for all of the really indispensable objects and qualities in life - are more likely to be related to German than to either Latin or Greek, because English is a Germanic language: in the same family as German, Dutch, Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian, as well as the earlier languages that these came from. Heat, then, is related to the words than mean heat in the Germanic languages. As we explore some of the Old European connections in English, you will find it useful to turn on German in the display of the Visual Thesaurus: this will light up some of the Germanic furniture we find this month in the Language Lounge. You can quickly turn on German by opening the Visual Thesaurus and pressing Ctrl-4 or Command-4 on Macintosh computers.

It's All Talk

Try this one. Bring monologue to the center and you'll see a handful of related words. One of them is soliloquy. Monologue comes from Greek roots: the one we're interested in is lógos, word, and the related root légein, the Greek verb for speak. Their influence in English is ubiquitous: consider dialog, logorrhea, epilog, to name only a few. Soliloquy, on the other hand, has solid Latin credentials: the root we're interested in is loqui, the Latin verb for speak. It also has many English descendants: circumlocution, interlocutor, colloquium, for example. And as for speak: If you've turned on German in the display, you have probably already spotted a clue as to its origins: you'll see Sprache floating on the edge of the VT screen, which is the German word for speech, and a cognate of the English word. Just for the record, the other roots in monologue and soliloquy - that is, Greek mónos and Latin solus - mean the same thing: "alone."

Here's another one with a twist: bring library to the center. This is a case where the main English word has Latin, rather than Germanic roots: the ultimate source is liber, the Latin word for book. The Germans in this case have also opted not to use a homegrown word for library, but unlike us, they went to Greek rather than Latin: their word for library is Bibliothek, which you will see on your screen. The pertinent root there is biblion, the Greek root for - papyrus roll! (They hadn't sorted out binding in those days). The other German word on your screen, Bücherei (a room for keeping books), gives the clue to the source of our related word: book.

By the Numbers

Now you get the idea and you can explore some of the other word groups on your own. It's a common pattern in English: our technical words borrow from Greek and Latin, but our everyday words are more likely to be Germanic, and looking at the German word will very often give you a clue about where ours comes from. The English words for numbers display some of these relationships. Try, as an example, quadrangle. It brings up a small number of related words and among them you can see all of the connections among the three root languages: quadrangle incorporates the Latin root for four, quattuor. Tetragon, also on your screen, incorporates the Greek word for four, téttares. And the German word on your screen, Viereck, means "four-sided polygon." The pertinent part in Viereck is vier, which you can guess - if you don't already know - is the German word for four, and a cognate of our word.

Here are a few more puzzles you can explore to link the in Greek, Latin, and German cousins to contemporary English words. A little sleuthing in the wordmaps you can link to below will deliver the goods.

1. If you're ready for the big time, have a look at Chronology. the Greek root is chronos, "time." You can probably spot the one Latin-derived word on this wordmap that gives away the Latin root that means "time." The German word for time, zeit (seen in Zeitabfolge) , is a bit more of a puzzle: its cognate in English is not time, but with another word that to some degree marks time. (Don't let this one ebb away from you!)
2. If you rearrange the sounds of chronology, you get the completely different Necrology. Not a frequent word in English, it's another name for an obituary, or for a list of the recently dead. Obituary fills the Latin shoes here, and in the German word for obituary, Todesanzeige, you can probably spot a relationship with our main word for the Grim Reaper.
3. Finally, we'll sound the death-knell on this subject with cacophony. Dissonance is a pretty good synonym of cacophony and they both mean about the same thing: harsh or discordant sound. The "sound" parts are -phony (from Greek phōnē, "voice") and -sonance (from Latin sonare, "sound."). What's with the German? It's tempting to pick up Lärm, which looks a bit like alarm, but our true Germanic friend here is Krach. It means "noise" and is an ancestor of our word crack, an early version of which meant "resound" - as in, the crack of thunder.

You can explore some more of these many patterns in the Visual Thesaurus. Here are a couple of places to help you with the classical end of things.

• You'll find an online Latin-English dictionary at:
  http://www.sunsite.ubc.ca/LatinDictionary/
• You can search for English words occurring in the definitions of Classical Greek-English dictionaries at:
  http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/enggreek?lang=greek