All the way back: “South”

The previous story was devoted to the word north. I wanted to follow with something about Halloween (ghosts, witches, pumpkins, mopsticks, or Celtic mythology), but last week was too early, and this week is too late: October 31 did not fall on a Wednesday. Therefore, I am picking up where I left off on 10/31.

South is a word of “disputed etymology.” Several hypotheses of its origin exist, but none is fully convincing. Those who have read the story of north may remember that the original meaning of that term of direction is supposed to mean either “left” or “below.” “Left” is the preferred candidate, which (as I indicated) does not mean that the truth has been found. Anyway, people are supposed to be rational beings. It is no wonder that Heinrich Schröder, a distinguished historical linguist, one of those who traced the idea of “north” to the concept “left,” reasoned so: since north once upon a time meant “left,” south should be expected to mean “right.” (I cannot miss this chance and will meander a bit. Heinrich Schröder, 1863-1937, wrote numerous inspirational works. His son, 1893-1979, Franz Rolf Schröder, followed in his father’s footsteps and also left his mark on Germanic philology. However, like many of his colleagues, he joined the National Socialist Party and was not allowed to teach after 1945. Sadly, numerous scholars yielded to that fatal temptation. Last week, I mentioned the great Dutch philologist Jan de Vries, an outstanding researcher and an ardent Nazi. The public, aware of every step of popular rappers and comedians, knows nothing about even the most distinguished linguists. Therefore, I hope to be forgiven for this digression.)

As pointed out last week, the oldest words for the four cardinal points often came down to us as parts of adverbs meaning northward, southward, and so forth. Apparently, people were more interested in having words designating the influence of the north, east, south, and west and in terms of orientation than in coining the names gracing our dictionaries. For Schröder south was just the opposite of north, but why should we assume that both words were coined at the same time and by the same speakers, motivated by similar impulses? They may have been independent creations!

Also, in his paper, Schröder cited several examples of “right” being related to “south” in the languages of the world, but none of them is Old Germanic. His son developed this subject and defended his father’s hypothesis. The root of the Germanic word for “south” must have sounded approximately like sunth-. Old High German sund– is almost that ancient form. (In today’s German, south is Süden, under the influence of Dutch zuid.) The sounds u and w regularly alternated in the past. H. Schröder compared sunth– with Old English swīthra “right,” and interpreted “right” as “the direction toward the east.” All this is rather plausible, except that one would have preferred a closer similarity between the two words.

Here are a few other ingenious suggestions about the origin of the word south. The form sunth– has the vowel u in the root. In my posts, I occasionally refer to the idea of ablaut. Ablaut means “alternation of vowels,” for instance, in ride ~ rode ~ ridden or come ~ came. Sometimes a syllable may do without a vowel. Thus, we have two syllables but only one vowel in English isn’t, because n performs the role of a missing syllabic vowel. This situation has been called “the zero grade of ablaut.” In older Germanic, the zero grade often developed into the vowel u. The form sunth-, cited above, has u before n, that is, the zero grade, with u being a filler for this “zero.” The older root was snt. Next, we are reminded of the indispensable s-mobile, or “movable s-,” which like the wind itself, “blowth where it listeth” (in our case, emerges in front of the root for no predictable reason). If the root snth had movable s, the remainder (nth) can perhaps be compared with Greek nótos “south, south wind.” I have little enthusiasm for this reconstruction, but the truth is hidden, and every more or less reasonable suggestion counts.

Like many others, the American etymologist Francis A. Wood looked for the answer in a different direction. Yet, he also cited the Latin word auster “south wind” but traced it to some ancient root like awes or ēwes, with the primary meaning “wave, roll, rise,” allegedly descriptive of both fire and water. In English, ooze (from wōs) emerged as part of this group. South has of course a different root, but Wood compared it with English sound “an inlet of the ocean” and ended up with the by now familiar root snt. South, he suggested, once meant “a wind that brings moisture.” No one seems to share Wood’s idea, though in the guessing game we have viewed, it does not look less realistic than some other conjectures. Before Wood, German scholars also compared south and sound “body of water” but interpreted the adverbs with this root as meaning “from the direction of the southern sea,” that is, “from the Mediterranean Sea.” Heinrich Schröder, who did not know Wood’s paper (it appeared only two years before his own) and who, as we have seen, had a different opinion, considered the derivation by his German colleagues “not worse than the others.” He was probably right.

However, the hypothesis that won the day (though that day did not last too long) was much simpler. It derived south from the word for the sun, Germanic sunnōn-. South, according to this interpretation, meant “the sunny side.” In today’s etymological dictionaries, we usually find only a list of hypotheses, but if some solution is favored, it is the south/sun one. Our contemporaries keep adding ever new suggestions. Perhaps the root sunthra is related to Latin super (with reference to the “upper curve” of the ecliptic) or tothe present participle of the verb meaning “to be” (like German seiend “being”; then south means “being here; true”), or tothe Old Germanic word sinth– “way, road” (among the immediately recognizable cognates of sinth, the verb send comes to mind). And so it goes.

What a sad story! Even though the last chapter (west) has not yet been told, we can see how helpless we are while trying to guess the process of word creation in the remotest past. Yet we need not be surprised. Hundreds of words that appeared in the memory of the people still living are equally obscure. By way of comfort, one thing is more or less certain. As already stated, the names of the cardinal points seem to have emerged not as nouns but as adverbs denoting the direction of the winds or the sun. People (navigators?) needed terms meaning “from the north” (south, east, west). Some connection between those ancient terms and the sun is quite probable. It is the details that escape us, and the god of etymology is in the details.

Next week, I’ll be engaged elsewhere. The story of west will appear in two weeks, or in a fortnight, if you prefer. If everything goes per plan, in the coming days, the world will have enough entertainment (“fun”) without the blog “Oxford Etymologist.”

_{Featured image by Antarctica Bound via Flickr. CC BY-ND 2.0}