All The Small Things
A true rhapsody on the evolution of language, and what it teaches us about the human experience
In southwestern Iceland, about 30 miles east of the Icelandic capital of Reykjavik, lies Thingvellir National Park. Within Thingvellir National Park is Thingvallavatn Lake, and next to this lake is Thingvellir itself, which is an open field in which Iceland’s parliament—the Althing—met from about 930 to 1798 AD. The parliament still meets to this day, albeit indoors, in Reykjavik, and is thought to be the oldest active parliament in the world.1
The very first Althing was a meeting, as the name might suggest, of all the things. In Scandinavia and Iceland, a thing was an assembly of free men. There were lots of things. The Althing was the first time all the things came together and met to discuss policy and legislative activity on a national level in Iceland.
Things were also common in English-speaking areas. In fact, things were fairly common among anyone who spoke a language descended from the Proto-Germanic. The word thing did not come to mean “an object” until the 1300s, which may have grown from using the term thing to refer to the matters discussed at a literal thing.
I love this shit. It fascinates me to no end that “thing,” which by at least one measure is the 97th most commonly used word in contemporary American English, used to mean something completely different. There are tons of words and phrases whose usage and meaning have evolved over time, not just in English but in many languages. The shifts are interesting in and of themselves. The stories are entertaining. But more profound is what we can learn about various cultures and humanity itself from linguistic geography. Very few things are as core to the human experience as language.
Take the English language. A quick study of contemporary English vocabulary compared to its Middle or Old ancestors shows an infusion of French (coupons, croissants, and crochet) along with Norse (law, litmus, and loan). In fact, a full 10% of the most common 1000 words in the English language derive from Old Norse—including Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday2. These aren’t just random coincidences, they are the result of real world events and cultural changes. The Danes constantly raided the British Isles and eventually set up a permanent presence. The Norman Conquest in 1066, one of the most significant events in world history, also marks one of, if not the most, dramatic changes for the English language as french-speaking Normans seized power in England.
Meanwhile, Icelandic language is relatively unchanged. Whereas a contemporary English speaker needs formal training to parse Old English, a contemporary Icelandic speaker could read Old Norse with little difficulty. Icelanders also maintain the Norse patronymic naming structure3, meaning they take their father’s first name as a last name. They have no “family name.” For example, the current president of Iceland is Guðni Thorlacius Jóhannesson. His father’s name was Jóhannes Sæmundsson—so Guðni is literally, the son of Jóhannes. Iceland’s first woman president (also the first woman elected head of state in the entire world) was named Vigdis Finnbogadottir. Her dad’s name was Finnbogi Rútur Þorvaldsson. This convention might certainly help explain why around 25% of Icelanders have “Thor” in their name somewhere.
You could dismiss this as nothing more than a random linguistic convention, but you’d be mistaken. In Western society, when a woman takes her husband’s last name, it is a symbolic gesture that indicates leaving one family and joining another. In contemporary society, women often choose to keep their family names for a variety of reasons ranging from professional purposes to challenging patriarchal conventions rooted in the historical context that marriages were first and foremost a way to forge alliances between families. For a woman to keep her father’s name suggests a third dynamic where women never really leave their family of birth.
This demonstrates one kind of cultural-linguistic meta-analysis. Studying the differences in language usage from culture to culture shows us the breadth of the human experience and underscores how much of our reality is culturally determined. There is perhaps no more culturally determined entity than the meanings of words themselves. If you don’t believe me, start trying to use “thing” to refer exclusively to an assembly of free men and let me know how it goes. Words have meaning because a critical mass of people agree on the meaning, which enables a combination of abstract symbols or sounds to communicate information. As culture changes, meaning can change.
The way different cultures use language can affect something as basic as how the passing of time is perceived. In the Amazon Rainforest live an indigenous people who call themselves the Hi'aiti'ihi and who are often referred to as the Pirahã4, which is also the name of the language they speak. Pirahã is a controversial subject among linguists because it’s hard to understand and very minimal. (Some also believe it pokes holes in Noam Chomsky’s Universal Grammar Theory, but that’s a whole other essay). It’s believed to have as few as 10 phonemes, or the sounds that make up the language. By comparison, English has 44. For example, it doesn’t seem to have any words for colors beyond “light” and “dark,” they use the same word for mother and father (in fact, it’s unclear if they acknowledge gender in any way), and their numbers are limited to one, two, and “many.”
But—avoiding the technical explanations—the most interesting aspect of Pirahã is that they have no tenses beyond the present. They are ruthlessly focused on what is happening right now, not what will happen or what has happened.
The inability to express actions in the past or future is, speaking for myself, nearly impossible to grapple with. I admit that I’m not sure I even comprehend what that means. It challenges the entire way I perceive, interpret and make sense of the world. They have no creation myths, they don’t store food for the future, and reject modern construction and building techniques. When asked where everything came from, a common response is "Everything is the same, things always are."
And again, the foreignness, the unfamiliarity—that’s the point. It shows the extreme malleability of the human experience and reminds us how much of what may seem inevitable and eternal is in fact nothing more than cultural convention. It can all change and likely will. By some accounts, the Pirahã are among the happiest people in the world and are equally confused by our “modern” ways of life. They don’t even have a word for anxiety, and don’t believe in coercion. Missionaries who set out to teach them “civilized ways” are said to have eventually realized they should be learning from the Pirahã, not the other way around.
Now, let’s see if we can make this about me, or specifically, my last name, Ragazzo. It would be impossible for me to talk about language without a brief jaunt to Southern Italy, specifically a city called Tursi in a province named Matera in the region of Basilicata. This is where the Ragazzo part of my family comes from. Ragazzo means “boy” in Italian. It’s also used colloquially to mean “boyfriend.” A teacher might use the plural “ragazzi” to refer to a class of students. It’s a peculiar last name. When I was in Italy, Italians told me it was weird and suggested maybe it had been given to my family when they emigrated to the United States.
But it wasn’t. I know this to be true for several reasons not worth exploring right now. What I want to focus on is that although Ragazzo means “boy” now, I don’t think that’s what the name meant when it was adopted as our family name. Here’s my humble theory.
See, the thing about Tursi is that it was ruled by Arab Muslims (called Saracens5 by Westerners) in the 9th century. The city’s website to this day mentions how this era can be felt in the dialect and customs in parts of Tursi. Interestingly, the word “Ragazzo” is believed to ultimately come from an Arabic word, raqqāṣ, meaning “messenger” or “courier.”
It’s important to keep in mind that Italian is a relatively new language. It’s essentially a dialect that spread out from Tuscany beginning in the 12th century. Before that it was all Latin on the peninsula. Raqqāṣ seems to have been Latinized and written as ragatius. It wasn’t until around the 14th century that the English word “boy” took on the common meaning we have today of a young male, likely before puberty. And this trend seems like it was not limited to one language. Quoting from the Online Etymological Dictionary entry for “boy”:
“Words for "boy" double as "servant, attendant" across the Indo-European map—compare Italian ragazzo, French garçon, Greek pais, Middle English knave, Old Church Slavonic otroku—and often it is difficult to say which meaning came first.”
It makes a helluva lot more sense that my ancestors were servants and the name stuck, in the way many people today carry English last names that correspond to trades like “Wright,” “Fletcher,” or “Cooper.”6
All right, one more little fun language thing and then we can call it a day. And fair warning: this is some galaxy brain stuff. Remember I said the Saracens ruled Tursi for a while? Well, it’s believed to have been originally founded hundreds of years earlier by Goths, Germanic people who may have had a similar pantheon of gods to the Norse (The pre-Christian English worshiped “Woden” who you may know as Odin). Tursi in Greek looks like this: Θυρσοi and, when Romanized, like this: Thursoí. Looks a lot like Thursday. What does Thursday mean? Thor’s day. We’re back to Old Norse.
Thanks to Professor Jackson Crawford, Resident Scholar at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Center of the American West, and his lecture series on Norse Mythology and Justin M. Jacobs, Associate Professor of History at American University, for his lecture on Thingvellir. Their lectures helped shape this essay immensely.
The days of the week are all derived from the Roman seven-day week. Tuesday through Thursday were named after Roman gods and then modified to match Norse “equivalents”. If you speak a latinate language you’ll recognize this. In Italian, for example, Thursday is giovedì or “Jove’s Day” (Jove is an alternate name for the Roman Jupiter or Greek “Zeus”), which became Thor’s Day (Thursday). Sun Day and Moon Day (Monday) were retained. We also have Saturday, or Saturn’s Day, in English whereas the Norse had “Bath Day.”
There are several naming structures in the world. It’s a subject unto itself. For more on patronymic naming conventions, go here.
This is NOT where the vicious Amazonian fish, the Piranha, derives its name. That is explained here: https://www.etymonline.com/word/piranha
“Wright” = worker. Playwright, cartwright, wheelwright—these are equivalent to “one who works on a play, cart, wheel, etc.” Fletchers make arrows. Coopers make barrels.
Excellent post. Thanks. Note that the Piraha language does not conflict with Chomsky's UG theory. Piraha children exposed to Portuguese learn it automatically, which confirms the UG theory.