Westward Ho

The blog Oxford Etymologist is resuming its activities. I expected multiple expressions of grief and anxiety at the announcement that I would be away from my desk for a week, but no one seems to have noticed. Anyway, I am back and ready to finish the series on the four cardinal points. Since it is in the west that the sun sets, I relegated this post to the end of my long story. Despite what I said above, I did hear from two readers. One added a comment to the post “Up North” and summarized his views on the origin of all four words. His summaries are fine, but no one should conclude that they represent the ultimate truth. As I tried to make clear, the etymology of the words in question is debatable. The main dictionary of Indo-European etymology by Julius Pokorny is a source every historical linguist consults, but this does not mean that it contains the final answers to our questions. Pokorny’s data and suggestions should be treated with all the respect they deserve and used as material and stimulus for further research.

The second letter that has recently reached me came from a professional lexicographer. The writer seems to have taken issue with my attitude toward comments on my blog. She wrote that I sneer at amateurs who dabble in etymology and yet admire the person who once wrote a letter to Notes and Queries about the origin of the word oof “money” (see my post for May 21, 2014). Incidentally, I often criticize people’s unprofessional views but never sneer at them. Years of teaching made me very cautious and all but killed my sense of humor. Oof is slang. With a bit of luck, anyone may discover the source of such a word, even though this kind of luck is a rare commodity. But in order to find the origin of words like house, big, read, yet, and thousands of others, one needs a huge stock of special knowledge, so that when someone without such knowledge or after reading one popular book expresses “an opinion,” I, naturally, protest. The same person would never have dared confront a physicist, a biologist, or an engineer on their turf. But we all speak. Doesn’t that mean that we are all natural etymologists? No. I am sorry that a lexicographer, my colleague, could disagree with such a reasonable attitude.

Back to the cardinal points. I wonder whether anyone still reads Charles Kingsley’s novel Westward Ho. But the phrase is familiar from the names of cafes, casinos, and their likes. Ho is an exclamation, meant to call attention to something that appears on the horizon. I too say: “Westward ho” and turn to the origin of the word west.

As understood long ago, the points of the compass may have once been called “morning,” “noon,” “evening,” and the like. Alternatively, they often got their names from the winds. One also seems to find the looked-for etymons in words like front, back, warm, cold, bright, moist, left, and so forth. The English name for the west sounds almost the same all over the Germanic-speaking world, though once again the story began not with a noun but with an adverb of orientation (here, westan “from the west”). The noun was later “abstracted” from it. Not only Germanic but also all the Indo-European words for “west” sound somewhat (!) alike: Greek hésperos, Latin vesper, Irish fescor, Old Slavic vecheru, Lithuanian vâkaras, and so forth. Once, they must have begun with hwe-. This first syllable recurs all over the place, but the remainders diverge. Why do they? With regard to Slavic sever “north”, the idea of taboo has been pressed into service: perhaps people were afraid to call the cold wind by its “real” name and garbled it beyond recognition. The same may be true of some Germanic words that interest us, but this process is doomed to remain guesswork and therefore presents minimal interest. (Elsewhere, taboo is an important factor in the history of words.)

Etymologists always try to reconstruct the oldest form, and in the study of west, it is just such an ancient protoform that evades us. It certainly makes sense to suggest that west refers to something below or perhaps behind us. Compare the English phrase the westering sun. A clever conjecture connected west and Greek ústeros “the hind one,” but it presupposed the vowel alternation e : u (ablaut, mentioned earlier in this series), and this is perhaps the reason it has never been discussed, let alone accepted. Yet it is worthy of consideration, especially in light of the Slavic parallel. Russian vecher “evening” is related to vchera (stress on the second syllable) “yesterday” and, quite probably, to veko “eyelid,” with reference to things behind us or able to close. Lithuanian Vókia “Germany,” literally, a land behind, means “a western land.” (This train of thought is old and almost forgotten.) According to a competing hypothesis, the root of west is Indo-European hews- “to be, stay; live,” with reference to having a rest. This is perhaps too abstract and less appealing than the previous conjecture.

In Pokorny’s dictionary (see the reference to it above), west is derived from the root au– “away, downward,” in accordance with the idea of the great German historical linguist Karl Brugmann. The problem with such short, reconstructed roots is that they tend to multiply. Allegedly, the most ancient Indo-European had eleven (!) roots sounding as au-, including one meaning “wet.” Since rain falls from the sky, couldn’t “wet” and “downward, away, fall, drip, water” be variants of one root? Yes, indeed. Another one of the eleven homonymous roots allegedly meant’ “wind; to blow.” Viktor Levitsky (his name also turned up in the earlier essays) preferred to trace west to the concept of the wind from the west. As we have seen, the names of the cardinal points are closely connected with the names of the winds and often derive from them. But in this case, the proposed tie is rather weak.

To sum up: what is the main takeaway from the four previous essays? The rationale behind coining the words north, south, east, and west often seems rather clear. East and west go back to a common Indo-European root; south and north are more narrowly Germanic. In all four cases, the impulses that resulted in coining the words in question seem to be almost within reach, but every time we think we have captured our prey, it evades us. Though some hypotheses look persuasive, we never or very seldom reach the point at which we may say that we have hit the nail on the head. (This is also true of west.) But such is the way of most etymological riddles. In our case, dictionaries either list a few cognates and stop or cite the protoform suggested by Pokorny (someone who, to cite Plato, seems to have the protection of the wall). Only the most detailed sources present the entire picture. Yes, deep are the roots, but east or west, home is best. Westward ho!

_{Featured image by Jason Mavrommatis via Unsplash.}