Light from the East

I received a letter from a correspondent who wrote that she follows the blog and likes it but mentioned that she could not find anything in it on the four cardinal directions (points), namely east, west, north, and south. She asked if I intended to address them. I have never discussed those words because my usual aim is to say something that cannot be found online or in a good dictionary. Though my database on all four words is extensive, none of the articles contains a discovery, not known to recent lexicographers. That said, in what follows I’ll mention a few details, not entirely trivial, and check our readers’ reaction. If no one objects, I may deal with all four points.

East, like the other three terms, is an Old Germanic and even Indo-European word. By chance, a cognate of east did not occur in Gothic, the most ancient recorded Germanic language. Yet in the works of later historians, the Latin plural Ostrogothae occurred, and it was understood as “East Goths,” because those tribes did indeed occupy the eastern part of the territory ruled by the Goths. However, since the Gothic word is expected to begin with Au-, rather than O-, it has been rather plausibly interpreted as meaning “shining, brilliant” (if so, then “shining Goths”!). This display of self-admiration has no bearing on our story, except as a historical curiosity. The daughter of the emperor Theodoric the Great (the future hero of German epics; he is known there as Dietrich von Bern, with Bern referring to Verona, not today’s Bern!) bore the name Ostrogotha. She was, apparently, a shining “Lady of Ours,” as behooved an offspring of such a resplendent king. The male name Ostrogotho also existed.

But even without the Gothic cognate, we can be certain that the root of the oldest Germanic word was aust-. Old English had ēast, an adjective and an adverb, not a noun (it meant “easterly” and “eastwards”), but in Old Norse, the noun austr did turn up. The fact that our word, regardless of phonetic differences, existed all over the map shows how early the people we call the Indo-Europeans coined it. The Germanic forms are so similar that they need no proof of relatedness. Dutch still has oost, and German has Osten. The ancient place name Ōstarrichi “eastern kingdom” is today’s Österreich “Austria.” We detect the root in Classical Greek (dialectal) aúōs “dawn” and the much more familiar Latin Aurora. The first r in Aurora need not bother us: voiced s (that is, z) sometimes became r (this process is called rhotacism). Its traces are visible, for example, in such pairs as English was ~ were and the related verbs raise ~ rear. Rhotacism affected English and many other languages, not only Germanic.

The words east, west, north, and south were needed for orientation and travel on land and at sea. Predictably, the guide for finding one’s way was the sun. But all those four words refer to rather abstract categories, and abstract notions usually go back to concrete, tangible ones. Strictly speaking, east applies to the point where the sun rises at the equinox, but more often it refers to the general direction, and that is why east is associated with dawn, as the names of the goddesses of dawn make clear. Aurora is the personified Dawn.

The Latin word auster has also come down to us but only with the unexpected meaning “south.” The Latin for “east” is oriens. We recognize it in orient(ation) and origin. But why south? Since Latin is in the minority here, its usage appears to have been an innovation. The cause of the new meaning can be only guessed at. Perhaps, as we read, people looked ahead and somehow confused the point at which the sun rises with the point at which it is at its brightest. Unfortunately, this explanation, though reasonable, is tautological. We are told that the speakers of Latin changed the sense “east” for the sense “south” because of reorientation. But we need the cause of the change in one particular language (Latin). Perhaps the premise is wrong. Latin auster, it should be noted, also meant “south wind.” Not improbably, the word acquired the sense “south” later. If so, it may have nothing to do with the Indo-European designation of “east” and joins the melancholy pool of words of unknown etymology.

Austere (austerity) has nothing to do with our discussion (it has a different root), while Easter belongs to it. However, the connection is not absolutely clear. The great Old English church historian Bede (the Venerable Bede: 672/673 – 735), who wrote all his works in Latin, derived the Old English word ēastre (the plural form is ēastron) from the name of a pagan goddess Ēostre ~ Ēastre. Her feast was celebrated at the vernal equinox. Bede’s explanation contains many puzzles. To begin with, such a goddess is never mentioned in any other old text. This gap in Old English and Old High German does not cause surprise, because outside North Germanic, texts dealing with pagan mythology have come down to us in vanishingly few fragments. However, no similar name occurs even in Old Norse (Old Icelandic), though written monuments in that language contain a great number of divine names.

To be sure, Ēostre is a good match for Ēos and Aurora, and both Classical names must have been known to the clerics of the eighth century, but was there such a Germanic goddess? And why should the Christian holiday celebrating the resurrection of Christ have been called after a pagan divinity? Easter is called the same in all the Germanic languages (with the expected phonetic differences: German Ostern, and so forth). This fact does not prove that the goddess, mentioned by Bede, occupied a place in the Old Germanic pantheon. Medieval clerics worked in close contact and often agreed on the uniform terminology of the new faith across the borders. As could be expected, a different etymology of Easter has been proposed. The question is complicated, and I’ll refrain from discussing it here. Though my today’s topic is east, rather than Easter, it won’t harm anyone to know that the seemingly accepted origin of the word Easter is still debatable.

Only one short postscript is in order. The name of the Greek goddess of dawn is relevant to the etymology of east. But the Greek word for “east” (anatolē; stress on ē) has nothing to do with Olympus. It consists of the prefix ana-, which denotes “movement upwards,” and the root meaning “to rise.” Russian vo-stok “east” (stress on the second syllable; the word is perhaps still memorable from the name of the spacecraft of the Soviet era) is a morpheme-by-morpheme translation loan from Greek (such loans are called calques). Later, Anatole became a popular French name. Think of the writer Anatole France, a pseudonym for Jacques Anatole Thibault, and if you have not read his book Penguin Island, read it now, preferably before Election Day in the US. Later, the name reached Russia and became wildly popular in the middle of the twentieth century. But consider the excellent composer Anatoly Lyadov (1855-1914). The name of the handsome young man who seduced Natasha Rostova was still Anatole, not Anatoly. The Greek name of the peninsula Anatolia also belongs to our story.

Here we are with the first installment in the series East, West, North, and South. Comments are welcome.

_{Featured image by Adriansart via Pixabay.}