Babel, page 19
In spite of the many changes, though, there remain many similarities between English and German, in terms of both grammar and vocabulary. Take this sentence:
Der Biber und der Otter leben in fliessendem Wasser; der Biber baut Dämme.
The beaver and the otter live in running water; the beaver builds dams.
The word order is the same, for starters, which would not be the case in all languages (French and Spanish would have ‘in water running’ instead of ‘in running water’) and both sentences contain articles (DER, the). In terms of vocabulary, too, there are obviously kindred words: OTTER and IN stand out, but WASSER is pretty close too, and so is BIBER, though more in sound than in looks (if it were an English word, we would spell it ‘beaber’). DäMME looks even more familiar in the singular, DAMM, and even DER and LEBEN have a resemblance to the and live. All these German words share an origin with their English version in the common ancestor language, Proto-Germanic: in other words, they are cognates (from CO-GNATUS, Latin for ‘born together’).*
If you suspect me of wilfully doctoring the example sentence with the intent of showing a good number of related words, I plead guilty. But in their basic vocabularies, English and German really do have a high proportion of cognates. The two sentences that begin this paragraph are entirely undoctored, and they too contain lots of words that have cognates in German: if, you, me, of, the, with, show, a, good, words, I, in, and, do, have and high have direct cognates, while wilfully can be taken apart into words with German cognates, such as will, full and -ly.
As with German, so with Russian. But since it’s an Indo-European cousin rather than a Germanic sibling of English, the similarities will be fewer and further between; the differences more glaring.
Always suspected they were natural allies? English and Russian – and Trump’s own ancestral German – are all Indo-European relatives.
If we conjure up our linguistic ancestors we will find that communication along the English line collapses much sooner than on the Russian. Go back 500 years and an English speaker would likely find it impossible to make head or tail of anything that anybody’s saying, while a Russian speaker could probably communicate with their ancestors going back several more centuries. But the interesting point is that – if English and Russian are indeed related languages, as all linguists know they are* – we can keep going back through the generations and we will eventually get to a point where our English and Russian linguistic ancestors will understand each other. With English and German this was around the year 1000 CE. But with Russian it takes a lot longer. We cross the point where CE turns into BCE? nothing. We cross the 500 BCE milestone, the 1000 BCE milestone: still nothing. We keep going and going until, somewhere near the 3000 BCE mark, it finally happens: the lines start talking to each other and eventually merge into one – that of the Proto-Indo-Europeans. We have travelled fifty centuries back in time, two hundred generations or so, more than ten times the distance between us and Shakespeare. Just imagine the havoc such a long stretch of history can wreak on the way people – any people, no matter who – speak. Or actually, no need to imagine it: just compare English to Russian. The differences between them are exactly that: the result of fifty centuries of havoc wrought on the two of them.
Here is one Russian sentence, first in Cyrillic, then below in transliteration:
Бобр и выдра живут в проточной воде; бобр строит плотины.
Bobr i vydra zhivut v protochnoy vode; bobr stroit plotiny.
Once more, we are informed that the beaver and the otter live in running water and that the beaver builds dams.
Commenting on the German sentence, I pointed out three grammatical similarities between German and English: the order of subject and predicate, the order of adjective and noun and the presence of articles. You might observe that here again the subject comes first, which is particularly easy to see in the second phrase: BOBR is the Russian word for ‘beaver’. (Admittedly, its resemblance to BEAVER is on the faint side, but having met the German BIBER, we can see it for what it is: an Indo-European cognate.) I should add that the order of subject and predicate in Russian is much less rigidly fixed than it is in English and German, but subject-first is the default.
What about the order of the adjective-and-noun couple in this sentence, ‘running water’ or, in Russian, PROTOCHNOY VODE? Those too are in the same order as in English and German, and again, the reverse order is possible but secondary. (One doesn’t need any knowledge of Russian to guess that VODE, not PROTOCHNOY, means ‘water’. Indeed, it is not miles away from the American English pronunciation /wodder/.)
As for articles, they represent a major difference between the two languages, for Russian has none. Most branches of the Indo-European family love using articles (either ‘a’ or ‘the’, or both), from Germanic, Romance and Iranian to Greek, Albanian and Armenian. Just three branches tend to avoid them, and Slavic is one of them. But it’s not as if the Slavs have carelessly dropped and broken a venerable Indo-European heirloom. On the contrary, the Proto-Indo-European grandmother language didn’t have articles.
The otter and the hydra
In the German beaver example, we saw that the sample sentence was packed with Germanic cognates: most words had siblings. Given that Indo-European is much older, the family members have had much more time to lose items from the common vocabulary. Nonetheless, quite a few have stuck around.
An obvious one is BOBR, which derives from the same ancient word as beaver, namely BHéBHRUS. (Modern linguists have given Proto-Indo-European a horrible spelling, taking advantage of its speakers being long dead. It’s full of asterisks, numbers and superscript letters. I’ve dumped all of those.) An even more evident case is VODE, or rather VODA to call it by its unconjugated name. Water and VODA are both derived from the Proto-Indo-European WóDR or UóDR (w and u are merely spelling variants for the same sound). They are also cognate with the Greek word for ‘water’, HUDōR, an echo of which we hear in our modern word hydrate. (And if you need to hydrate yourself, it’s not wise to drink VODKA, even though the name of the Russian drink consists of VODA for ‘water’ plus a suffix.)
A third interesting word is VYDRA, which is cognate with otter. Not only that, they’re also related to VODA and water. Some 5,000 years ago, the word for ‘water’, WóDR or UóDR, was accompanied by an adjective UDRóS or UDRéH (masculine and feminine respectively), meaning ‘watery’ or ‘aquatic’. Germanic picked the masculine and morphed into OTTER. Slavic took the feminine, which somehow picked up an initial v along the way, becoming VYDRA. Speakers of other Indo-European languages, including Sanskrit and Latin, effected similar changes – but not the Greeks, who reserved their HYDRA for a many-headed water monster quite unlike the playful and graceful otter.
Any other cognates in the sample sentence? Yes, two more, but they border on the implausible. According to linguists, the Russian preposition v traces its origin to the same Proto-Indo-European word as our in, namely HéN. The HéN-IN transition doesn’t overly tax our credulity, but the metamorphosis of HéN into V almost appears like a conjuring trick – albeit an extremely slow one.
The other invisible cognate is ZHIVUT, a form of the verb ZHIT’. Unlikely as it may appear, this is a cognate of quick, an English word that used to mean ‘alive’. Mind-bogglingly, ZHIVUT and quick are also related to biology and revival. They are all modern reflexes of the Proto-Indo-European words GWEIH and GWIHWóS for ‘live’ and ‘alive’.
The rest of our sample sentence about the beaver and the otter doesn’t present any direct cognates, but there too we can find proof of Russian’s Indo-European descent, provided we venture into the Romance branch. The clearest example is the Russian word STROIT for ‘(he) builds’. In Latin, this would be STRUIT, from the verb STRUĕRE, which has given us quite a few English words, including structure and destroy. Also note that STROIT and STRUIT have the same t-ending that we saw in German BAUT.*
In PROTOCHNOY, the first syllable looks suspiciously like the Latin prefix that we see in provoke and pronoun and pro-choice. And true enough, they’re both derived from the same Indo-European prefix. Interestingly, English also has traces of it (other than those borrowed from Latin), namely in forgive and forgather. The middle syllable of PROTOCHNOY, which means ‘flow, run’, also has Indo-European cognates, but nothing we would recognise in English.
PLOTINA (the basic form of PLOTINY) ‘dam’, is derived from PLOT, a Slavic word for ‘fence’, plus a suffix, so a dam in Russian is literally something like a ‘fenceling’ or a ‘fencedom’. The old Slavs must have had fences that were ‘plaited things’, for the word is related to the verb PLESTI, meaning ‘plait, interweave’, a steadfast Indo-European term whose oldest form was PLEḱ-. The Germanic family has maintained the word as well – German, for instance, has FLECHTEN – but the Old English FLEOHTAN got lost somewhere along the way. Still, the loanword that replaced it, plait, from French PLEIT, is another cognate of Russian and German words.
Russian ushanka hats were often made from beaver in the nineteenth century, but luckily for the bobry they now tend to be rabbit or fake fur.
That leaves us with the smallest Russian word in the whole sentence, I. A word that means ‘and’ and sounds like /i/ – surely that’s cognate with the Spanish word Y? Not so: Spanish Y comes from Latin ET, as in ET CETERA. The Russian I, in contrast, is derived from an Indo-European word, EI, whose further connections in Latin and English would take us into even deeper etymological waters.
Black as sazha
We can safely conclude that the above ten-word line of Russian text brings home how closely the language is related to its Indo-European cousins. And the funny thing is, once you become conscious of such parallels, they start cropping up all over the place. This is true not only for numerous Russian words (see the box below for another collection) but also for Russian grammar.
I mentioned that the third-person singular endings of Latin STRUIT, Russian STROIT and German BAUT share a common origin. Now let’s look at all the endings:
Quite an impressive amount of similarity, I would say, especially between Russian and Latin, but also with Germanic varieties, especially the older ones. English, admittedly, is a bit underrepresented, due to its small number of remaining verb endings.
To compensate, let’s look at passive participles, forms such as thrown and bent. In English they come either with an n or with a t (or a d of course, as in stayed, which shares the same origin as the t). German has both types too: GEWORFEN and GEBEUGT (‘thrown’ and ‘bent’). Both endings have Indo-European roots, and both are reflected in Russian: the same words translate as BROSHENNY and GNUTY.
Another feature of Indo-European languages is that they change their vowels a lot in ways that most other languages don’t. Some of these vowel changes, such as the irregular plural of MAN and WOMAN, are modern: we can’t blame the Proto-Indo-Europeans, because MEN and WOMEN only emerged thousands of years after they’d left the scene. But in their day, they had some bewildering vowel changes of their own. A short /e/ – which was an extremely common sound – could under certain conditions change into a long /ē/, a short /o/ or a long /ō/ – or it might disappear altogether. These five varieties (specialists call them ‘grades’) could occur in both nouns and verbs.
A good example is SED-, a root with the meaning ‘sit’:
❖ The basic e-variety produced not only English sit (why i instead of e? long-term havoc!), but also Russian SEST’ (‘sit down’) and Latin SEDēRE (‘sit’).
❖ The o-variety produced the Germanic past tense, SOT, which in modern English has become sat.
❖ The ē-variety, SēD-, resulted in the noun seat as well as its Latin cognate, SēDēS.
❖ The ō-VARIETY is the origin of English soot and possibly of Russian SAžA (though it more likely derives from the o-variety), the connection being that the black stuff ‘sits’ on surfaces.
❖ And the vowelless variety SD- has landed in our word nest: the Proto-Indo-European word NISDOS refers to a place where a bird sits (SD) down (NI). Russian has turned this into GNEZDO, Latin into NIDUS.
It’s not easy to find examples such as SED, where all five varieties have left their mark on English and other modern languages, but the phenomenon as such – variously called ablaut, vowel alternation or vowel gradation – is common as muck. In English, it’s the culprit behind such headaches as sing – sang – sung – song. In Latin, ablaut produced irregular verbs such as FACERE – FECI – FACTUM, which in turn saddled Spanish with HACER – HICE – HECHO (both mean ‘do, make’). In Russian too, ablaut has messed up a few verbal conjugations including BRAT’ (‘take’), which in many forms adds an e, as in BERU (‘I take’). Ablaut’s main activity in Russian, however, has consisted in creating new words. One example from many are the triplets DUKH, DOKHNUT’ and DYSHAT’, where the first means ‘spirit’, the second is slang for ’to die’ (to breathe one’s last) and the last one means ‘to breathe’.
How the other half speaks
So far, I’ve looked for similarities between English and Russian that stand out. Or rather, that can be made to stand out – ZHIVUT and quick conceal their common provenance rather effectively until you delve into their respective CVs. However, there are also quite a few things that do not at all strike us as characteristically Indo-European until we compare English and Russian with languages that belong to other families.
For example, phonology. Consider the Russian word STRELA, meaning ‘arrow’. Unremarkable, isn’t it? You may or may not know the archaic English word STREAL, which has the same meaning. ‘Okay, another cognate’, you yawn – what else is new? Well, syllables beginning with three consonants, that’s what. We think nothing of them: when I presented Russian STROIT and Latin STRUIT, relating them to English structure, you didn’t bat an eyelid. But outside the Indo-European family, this is a rarity: fewer than one in ten non-Indo-European languages will have it. (Even inside the firm, some don’t like it: Spanish doesn’t have ‘STRUCTURA’, but ESTRUCTURA, where the second syllable begins with a more manageable tr.) It’s true that Russian takes things a bit further still, as witness words like SKHVATKI and VZGLYAD. But by global standards, STRONG is just as, well, strange.
Moscow’s bus terminal. Like the Russian language, the word avtovokzal (bus station) is more closely connected to English than it seems: avto is a respelling of auto(mobile), vokzal is a phonetic rendering of Vauxhall. One of the first Russian train stations was near a pleasure garden of that name.
For a second faint family feature, consider once more the verbal conjugation. We so easily take for granted that both English and Russian conjugate their verbs, but many languages in East Asia don’t. Also, they conjugate them mostly with suffixes, whereas many in Africa much prefer prefixes. And finally, the conjugation depends on the subject, never on the object or other parts of the sentence. There are not a few languages – Basque is a European example – where the conjugation can also depend on the direct object, the indirect object or other parties concerned.
Yet another similarity: both English and Russian are much given to using prepositions. You will find them in nearly every sentence. In many non-Indo-European languages, prepositions are much rarer, if they exist at all. Moreover, both English and Russian make their prepositions serve additionally as prefixes, using them to great effect for the formation of nouns, adjectives and verbs. In English, we have off(spring), over(joyed), up(date) and thousands of similar cases. Open a Russian dictionary and you’ll find similar numbers of words beginning with v (‘in’), OT (‘from’), OB or O (‘about, against’), BEZ (‘without’), et cetera. Latin and Greek did the very same thing, as shown by in(vent), pre(dict), sus(pend), peri(scope) and meta(phor), words that we borrowed from them. This procedure of turning prepositions into prefixes is not unheard of in unrelated languages elsewhere, but it’s far from ubiquitous.
Perhaps more than anything else, it’s the contrasts between the languages inside and outside the Indo-European family that show us how similar ‘we’ are: English and German, English and Russian, even English and Bengali if you look closely enough. And, of course, that may well be just as true for families of flesh and blood.
* ‘Born together’ is not the same as ‘borrowed together’. The word bank exists in English, German, Russian and many other languages, but it’s not a cognate. Bank originated in fourteenth-century Italian, from where it gradually spread across Europe. It doesn’t stop many language-teaching publications from calling this and similar cases ‘cognates’.
* All linguists except Nikolay Yakovlevich Marr (1864–1934) and his school of thought. I’ve written about him in an article about crackpot linguistics. See bit.ly/Aeon_TalkingGibberish
* I’m cutting corners here. The full story is as follows: Russian and the other East Slavic languages used to have a t’-ending. (This t’ sounds similar to the t as pronounced in tiara.) Russian at some point dropped this ending. Later on, Russian acquired the t-ending mentioned in the main text, probably as a result of this verb form frequently being followed by the word tŭ, an old word for ‘this’ or ‘that’. So the t-ending we now see in Russian is not, strictly speaking, of the same origin as the t’s in Latin and German. But Russian did formerly have an ending that was cognate with these, some Russian dialects still do and so does closely related Ukrainian. In a word, I’m lying the truth.
