“Temba, his arms wide!”
“Darmok.” Star Trek: The Next Generation, season 5, episode 2, 1999.
While I was working on my plague-year project of translating into English the Spanish Golden Age play La vida es sueño by Pedro Calderón de la Barca (ISBN: 979-8702980065), my curiosity was stirred by the pretty Spanish word for a bird: pájaro. I had a predilection to translate pájaro by the English word “sparrow” because they had some similarities of sound and because pájaro reminded me of the Latin passer “sparrow”. I knew passer well because of a beautiful and famous Latin poem by Catullus (Number 2) which begins “Passer, deliciae meae puellae . . .” This poem was known to me and my fellow first-year Latin students more than forty years ago as “The Passer Poem”. One particularly strait-laced professor red-facedly expostulated about the very specific description of the passer in the poem: “It’s only a sparrow!” I remain unconvinced.
Anyway. As it turns out, pájaro is the word that the Latin passer evolved into in the old Roman province of Hispania. As Dr. Buck used to say to us “Spanish is just Latin as it is spoken today in Hispania!” Despite a bit of a similarity in sound, passer is not related to the English word sparrow. Although it is a specific word in Latin, denoting the bird we call a sparrow in English, passer evolved (in Hispania) into a word in Spanish denoting a generic bird, like the word bird in English. “Interesting,” I thought, “the word’s meaning went from specific to general. I wonder . . .” and plunged down an etymological rabbit hole.
So, down through Proto-Italic *passros to the Proto-Indo-European noun *p(e)t-tro-s which meant “bird” as well as something like “one who flies in the manner of a bird.” *P(e)t-tro-s itself derived from a verb, *peth₂, which had meanings such as “to spread out” and “to fly, to spread one’s wings.” “Interesting,” I thought, “the word’s meaning went from general, *p(e)t-tro-s “bird” and *peth₂ ‘to spread out, to fly, to spread one’s wings’, to specific, passer ‘sparrow’, and back to general, pájaro ‘a bird’. I wonder . . . ” and I started to climb back up through a different hole.
It seems the Proto-Indo-European verb *peth₂ made its way along through the branching history of languages and found its way into modern English as something to do with the sea rather than the air of sparrows and other birds. Moving toward the North Sea and the Baltic rather than the Mediterranean, Proto-Indo-European *peth₂, a verb, became the Proto-Germanic *faþmaz, a measure of distance defined by a man’s outstretched arms. *Faþmaz, of course, evolved into the Old English fæþm meaning “outstretched arms, embrace” and figuratively “power, control” as well as the measure of distance. As should be obvious, the Old English word was the father of the Modern English fathom, which still means the unit of measure, usually standardized to six feet (although I have been known to measure out garden twine by the old “man’s outstretched arms” method), but also means “to understand” from the figurative sense of “get to the bottom of” which implies “plumb the depths” which comes directly from the use of a weight on a rope to measure out (in units of the length of a man’s outstretched arms) the depth of the water through which a ship is sailing.†
Pájaro, passer, *passros, *p(e)t-tro-s, *peth₂, *faþmaz, fæþm, fathom, and all the verbal and substantive forms which seamlessly fill the gaps between the Proto-Indo-European verb five or six thousand years ago and the Modern Spanish and the Modern English — one word, so many meanings, all derived from the fundamental image of spreading out one’s forelimbs, whether wings or arms, to fly, to measure, and to embrace.
I will always embrace the study of Etymology, because the stories Etymology tells — in a word (so truly) — stretch out my mind and spread my mental wings and let me take flight in thought, although I will never fully fathom their wonderful breadths, and heights, and depths!
† It must be mentioned that *peth₂ also followed another path as it rolled through the mouths of the generations and spawned the English word feather and cognates with the same meaning in a great many languages. Breadths, and heights, and depths, indeed.
Behind the Hedge 