Speaking in and about tongues

Speaking in and about tongues

First of all, let me thank those who commented on the previous posts and said so many kind words about the blog. Invigorated by this support, I am ready to ask the greatest question that should bother a philologist: Why is the tongue called tongue?

The tongue allows us to speak, and it seems that language historians should know how this word came into being. Perhaps they even solved the riddle (at least, to a certain extent). In any case, they reconstructed several long words that look like the searched-for protoform, the alleged ancestors of many related or seemingly related forms of tongue. Some such forms look fanciful, while others are more realistic. At the moment, this is all one can say about the situation at hand.

First: a digression is perhaps in order. It seems that when our very distant ancestors acquired the gift of articulate speech, their first utterances were short and either sound–imitative or at least sound-symbolic. Boom, crack, tread, and pat look like acceptable early words, while prestidigitation or imperturbability do not. Historical linguists reconstruct ancient roots, all of which are short, even very short. The reality of such roots has been questioned more than once, but their existence is probable. As time went on, short roots, we assume, acquired prefixes and suffixes, added sounds, lost sounds, and changed them according to “laws” or in violation of them, and finally acquired the shape familiar to us. This is the stuff of courses on historical linguistics.

Tongue in cheek. A group of linguists discussing the origin of tongue.
Photo by the Scottish Government. CC-BY-2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

But a strange phenomenon attracts our attention. Some rather old languages are known to modern scholars. Tocharian, Hittite, and Sanskrit, let alone Classical Greek, Latin, and fourth-century Gothic have come down to us. To be sure, they are millennia away from the hypothetical date of the first articulate words. People hardly became glib talkers more than a hundred thousand years ago. For comparison: Hittite inscriptions are about 18,000 years old. We have no means to bridge the gap of ninety or so millennia, though we may, for the sake of the argument, agree that once upon a time one language existed and that (consequently) all the languages spoken today go back to that single primordial ancestor.

Fast forward from Hittie to Modern English. Wherever we look, we observe that words tend to become shorter and shorter. English is of course an extreme case in the Indo-European family (nearly all its old words are monosyllabic: come, go, do, see, and so forth). But abridgement characterizes the history of even the most conservative languages. The famous linguist Otto Jespersen called this change progress. It is more profitable to stay away from such emotional terms and speak only about development. There is no connection between the state of any given society and the structure of its language, but we note that some tribes living under primitive conditions have extremely long words. On the other hand, Old Chinese and Old Vietnamese were monosyllabic languages. To be sure, this could be the result of a long period of evolution.

Our modern word tongue is a short word and has almost the same form all over the Germanic-speaking world: Dutch tong, German Zunge, and their likes. The old forms were similar: compare Old Norse tong and Gothic tuggo (pronounced as tungo). The oldest Germanic form must also have been tungo-, but etymologists, naturally, want to know whether a common oldest Indo-European form can be reconstructed. And did it mean “tongue”? To accomplish this task, it is necessary to look at the name of the tongue in Sanskrit, Greek, Latin and everywhere. The search has been accomplished, but the results produced more questions than answers.

Finger lickin’ good.
Photo by Tom Fisk.

The Latin for “tongue” is lingua, familiar to us from bilingual, linguistics, and other words having this root. By the First Consonant Shift, Germanic t should correspond to non-Germanic d. Lingua certainly does not begin with a d, but fortunately, Latin also has dingua. The relation between these words has been an object of protracted debate. Two suggestions turn up again and again in the attempts to explain the origin of tongue in Latin and elsewhere. It seems that the sound shape of tongue has been influenced by the verb meaning “lick,” which rather regularly begins with the consonant l over a large territory. The tongue certainly licks. Analogy is a constant process, but one can only suggest, not prove, its role in such a case.

A different hypothesis refers to taboo. In days of yore, people were afraid to say certain words. You pronounce eye, and an evil spirit will attack it. Or you say bear, and the bear will come. Therefore, speakers deliberately maimed words (this is what is meant here by taboo). Perhaps the word for “tongue” also fell victim to this practice (hence lingua for dingua?). Unfortunately, I have to repeat what I said about analogy: taboo, unless observed in a modern society, can be suggested but not proved.

Other than that, the names for “tongue” vary greatly all over Indo-European. A few have some similarity to Latin, because they begin with l: for instance, Armenian lezu and Lithuanian liežùvis. Old Irish tengae may hold promise to a non-specialist, but Celtic is not Germanic, and where Germanic has t, Irish is expected to have d (by the just mentioned law of the First Consonant Shift). Or is the Celtic word a borrowing from Germanic? Though Sanskrit jihvā perhaps resembles Russian yazyk (stress on the second syllable), it is miles away from dingua/lingua. The Tocharian forms begin with k. To exacerbate our troubles, Greek glossa “language” looks very much like a square peg in this moderately round hole, and its etymology remain a riddle. I will pass over the numerous fanciful attempts to produce a protoform that allegedly yielded this almost infinite variety. Many dictionaries cite some form like dunghu or dunghawa (my transcription is simplified), with the d ~ l variation by taboo. This reconstruction is not wrong but it is uninspiring.

English bear means “brown.” The beast will never guess the origin of this taboo name.
Image: public domain via Picryl.

It was suggested long ago that the most ancient Indo-European form of the word for “tongue” was a compound, and that is why it was so long. A most ingenious reconstruction deciphers the original form of the word for “tongue” as dnt-ghua (this is again a simplified transcription), a compound consisting of a word for “tooth” (dnt) and a word for “fish.” The meaning emerged as “fish (or muscle) of the teeth.” A tongue does look like some fish! A similar proposal suggests that tongue was indeed a compound but made up of the words for “under” and “the roof of the mouth.”

Not every expert in the field believes that ancient Indo-European had a single protoform for “tongue,” and not everybody accepts the idea of a compound underlying the forms in different languages. The role of taboo in naming the tongue is reasonable, but of necessity, it remains a guess. A tie between the words for “tongue” and “lick” is not improbable, but it cannot be proved either. In this blog column, I have discussed the etymology of kidney, eye, ear, hand, finger, and leg. The riddles were tough but less menacing than the one to which the present post is devoted. There may be a bit of irony in the fact that of the many words whose origin linguists cannot discover, the word tongue proved to be the most intractable.

Featured image: A cow eating grass from a person’s hand. Public domain via Picryl.

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