Now I am reminded of the Laurie J. Marks “Elemental Logic” series, in which a people had traditional directions “landward/seaward”; the mountains are west and the sea is east. Then someone looked in a very old book and found the directions were wrong: “seaward” was drawn to the west. Which implied something interesting about their ancestors.
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Honestly, while it makes logical sense to go clockwise, listing the cardinal directions north, east, south, and west feels less natural than listing them in opposing pairs north, south, east, and west… also for relative directions, left, right, up, down or left, right, front, back feels more natural than up, left, down, right or front, left, back, right.
SoFrom the sounds of it, humans have a habit of defaulting to informal cartesian or polar coordinates for describing local geography.
Thus also neatly describing the tool used to draw circles. In Portuguese, in fact, that tool is called the “compasso”, while the cardinal-points compass has a totally different name (“bússola”). It does seem like “compass” describes the circle-drawing tool much more cleanly that the navigation device, doesn’t it? By modern standards, at least.
And I was curious and looked it up, looks like bússola comes from the italian bussola which means “small box made of boxwood”, which is… almost disappointing, really, but totally understandable.
[!note]
For this next bit of trivia, I’m going to try to spell each word three ways: the conventional historical-linguistics transcription that you’ll see in books, a tentative pronunciation in IPA, and an English-y rendering of the pronunciation that hopefully screen readers can handle. The first one will be in italics, the second one will be in /slashes/, and the third one will be in “quotes”. If the word is preceded with a *star, that means it’s reconstructed by linguists, not actually attested—and the pronunciation in that case is really just an educated guess.
I recently came across an interesting bit of syntax in Hittite. The Hittite language really doesn’t like embedding clauses inside of other clauses; whenever possible, it just chains them together. In English we might say something like “the man who I met last week married the woman I dated two years ago”. In Hittite, you would say “I met a man last week; I dated a woman two years ago; that man married that woman”.
And this means that sometimes, when you want to modify a verb with another verb, you just…put those verbs next to each other, with exactly the same markings on both of them! In English, if you say “he wasn’t able to open the door”, we mark “wasn’t able” and “to open” differently—they’re different parts of the sentence. In Hittite, you say nu natta tarḫuzzi ḫaši /nu nat.ta tarxʷ.t͡si xa.si/ “noo NAH-tah TARKHW-tsee KHAH-see”—literally “he was not able; he opened it”[1]. Same markings on both. This particular sentence comes from the Telipinu myth, when Tarhunt the Storm-God can’t get a door open. Ironic, given his name!
This word tarḫuzzi /tarxʷ.t͡si/ “TARKHW-tsee” doesn’t just mean “be able to do something”; it can also mean “overpower” (a person) or “conquer” (a city). The basic meaning is something like “be strong enough”. This might sound odd, but consider the English word “capable”, which comes from the same root as “capture”: a Latin word for “seize”. A capable person is really good at seizing things.[2]
If you’ve played The Wise-Woman’s Dog, you might remember the name of the king of the Hittite gods, the Storm-God of Hatti, Tarhunt—Hittite[3] Tarḫunz /tarxʷnt͡s ~ tar.xont͡s/ “TARKHWNTS or TAR-khonts”. This is that same word tarḫuzzi but with an ending -nz /nt͡s/ “nts” that’s found across a lot of Indo-European languages; that ending means something like “-ing”. So Tarhunt is “the being-strong one” or “the overpowering one”.
(This suffix is also the ancestor of “-ing” in English, through a complicated chain of events. You can still see the original N and T sometimes: someone who assists is an assistant, someone who descends is a descendant.)
If we trace tarḫuzzi back to its roots, it seems to go back to a Proto-Indo-European root *terh₂- /terx-/ “teirkh”, which meant something like “overcome (an obstacle)”. With a U added to the end (*terh₂-u- /ter.xu-/ “teir-khu”) it seems to have specifically meant “overcome through force”; we see this same meaning in Sanskrit तूर्वति tūrvati /tu:r.ʋɐ.ti/ “TOOR-vhuh-tee”. Without that U added, it was a more neutral word, for getting past something by any means whatsoever—not necessarily forceful ones. You might get past a river by just walking across a bridge.
If we attach the “-ing” ending to this U-less version of the root, we get something like *tr̥h₂-n̥ts /tr̩.xn̩t͡s/ “TRR-khnnts”. In the Italic branch of the Indo-European language family, that *h₂ /x/ “kh” sound was replaced by a vowel A, and nts got simplified to ns, giving the Latin word trāns /tra:ns/ “TRAHNS”. From the Proto-Indo-European meaning of “overcoming an obstacle” came the Latin meaning of “across, past, on the other side of”—“transit”, for example, is when you go from one side of something to the other—and from the use in chemistry (“on the other side of the molecule”) it entered English scientific terminology.
The same construction happened in Celtic—the Italic and Celtic branches of Indo-European were very closely connected[4]—and is the ancestor of Welsh dros /drɔs/ “DROSS”, meaning “across (a bridge)” or “on behalf of (a person)”. In Latin, without the “-ing” ending, it’s also the second half of “intro”. Over in Ancient Greek, it’s the second half of “nectar”, the food of the gods: the first half means “death” (as in necrosis, necromancy), so nectar is the thing that overcomes death. And in English, it’s the first half of “through”, and also “thorough”. Originally those two were a single word, and you pronounced it with two syllables when stressed and one syllable when unstressed, but over time the pronunciations got so different that they became different words.
I don’t have any real conclusion to all of this. I just think it’s cool how connected all these different words are!
Melchert thinks this construction is not native Hittite, just a contamination from Hattic, but other scholars disagree. I’ve been won over to the “it was native Hittite” side of the debate. ↩︎
The “capable” adjective actually comes from Mediaeval Latin specifically, where “seize” had mostly changed to mean “understand” (like how you might “grasp” a concept in English). So really, a capable person is really good at grasping new ideas, not necessarily seizing people. ↩︎
The name is also attested as Tarhunna, and it’s likely that Tarhunna is originally the Hittite name and Tarhunt is originally the Luwian name, but both forms appear in Hittite-language texts. ↩︎
This theory is also contested. I personally believe in the validity of the Italo-Celtic branch, but many other historical linguists would disagree! ↩︎
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So what I’m hearing is that we need a word “transugender” for people who overcome gender through force.
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You say that Hittite doesn’t like embedding clauses in clauses. How does it handle conditionals like “if you do x then you will have y happen”?
Great question! Specifically what it seems to avoid is center embedding—it’s okay with subordinating one clause to another. For instance, my favorite example sentence I’ve seen in the first chapter of an intro textbook, from a compendium of celestial omens:
mān INA UD.15.KAM dSÎN-aš aki…
when on 15th.day moon dies…
“When the moon dies [i.e. is totally eclipsed] on the 15th of the month…”
…LUGAL.GAL aki
…great.king dies
“…the Great King will die.”
In this case the first clause is subordinate to the second, as marked by the mān “when”. But internally, the clauses look exactly the same—they don’t need different verb forms or anything like that.
The same is true for relative clauses; apart from including a relative pronoun like kuiš “who”, their syntax is exactly the same as a main clause. For instance, if the king has no surviving “first-order sons” (sons of the king’s primary wife):
nu kuiš tān pēda-š DUMU-RU…
then who second rank-of son…
“then the one who [is] a son of the second order…”
…nu LUGAL-uš apāš kišaru
…then king that become.IMP
“…that one must become king.”
They’re both introduced by the same conjunction nu, for example. (The first one lacks a verb, but that’s just because Hittite doesn’t use an explicit verb to say “X is Y”.)
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Thank you! I enjoy learning about languages, but am entirely incapable of learning languages.
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