Ba humbug

[Andrew K. Rindsberg]

Ken and others,

Your folk-etymological ba-nter is amusing, but bears the same relationship
to etymology as folk-taxonomy does to systematic taxonomy. Whales
(ba-laenas?) are not fish (ba-loney!). Yes, there is at least one
ex-linguist on this list.

My etymological dictionaries are at home, but even Webster's Collegiate
Dictionary has a wealth of salient information.

Latin *basis* comes from Greek *basein*, "to go", which is related to
English *come*. The idea of "going (walking)" drifted into the idea of a
"step", only then to "base".

English *bug* is of obscure origin, but dates back at least to 1622. English
*bad* dates to the 13th century, but isn't traced back further, at least in
this dictionary. These words may not be of great antiquity.

*Babble* is of the same vintage, and may imitate the sound of stuttering.
Similarly, Greek *barbaros* "foreign, ignorant" apparently referred to
people who could not speak Greek well.

*Baobab* has been used in English since 1640, and is probably borrowed from
an African language.

German *Bau* has a lot of meanings but its core meaning seems to be
"building", cf. *Bauhaus*, the famous school of architecture. *Bauplan*
means the plan of a building or other structure, not literally the "ground"
plan.

So *ba-* is definitely polyphyletic. Of course, words that sound alike may
come to be associated together in meaning even if they have no original
relationship. Perhaps *babble* and the *Tower of Babel* are an example of
this.

The rather surprising "genetic" relationship of Greek *basein* to English
*come* is explicable only as part of a larger pattern in which sounds were
regularly changed from Indo-European into Greek, and in different ways into
the Germanic language family (or clade, if you prefer). An older version of
*come* is Old English *cuman*, which records a hint of a w-sound in the *u*.
Compare Old High German *queman* "come". Now pronounce ka, kua, kwa, gwa,
ba, wa, and you may realize how easy it is to drift from one to another. All
it takes is for a few children or foreigners to mispronounce the sounds
systematically and never be corrected. The original "node" may have had
something beginning in gw-, which drifted to *venire* in Latin and to
*basein* in Greek.

A similar word history is attested by English *quick* (originally meaning
"alive", as in the archaic phrase "the quick and the dead"), Old Norse
*kvikr* "alive", Latin *vivus* "alive", Greek *bios* "life". (Latin *v* may
have been pronounced with both lips, somewhat like English *w*, or like
Spanish soft *b* as in *Habana*.)

Modern linguistics can use cladistic methods without genes being involved.
Of course, words can be borrowed from language to language, but cladistics
has an analogous problem with viral material being added to DNA.
Cavalli-Sforza uses the relationships of languages as an independent test of
his gene-based cladistics of migrating human populations. It turns out that
they match pretty well.

Andrew K. Rindsberg
Student member of the Language Universals Project, Stanford University, ca.
1970

Geological Survey of Alabama
P.O. Box 869999
Tuscaloosa, AL 35486-6999
USA