From meaning to moaning

Few people realize how troublesome the word mean is. We have mean as in meaning (“what do you mean?”); mean “ignoble, base” (as in such a mean fellow), and mean, as in the meantime and meanwhile. The last of those three mentioned has a Romance root, related to median and medium, and need not bother us. But the first two seem to be related, though it is not clear how. We may argue that they are. Yet we should remember that as a famous linguist said a century or so ago, a connection can be found between any two concepts, even between an inkwell and freedom of will. He was right. Semantic bridges are easy to reconstruct and equally easy to demolish.

From the phonetic point of view, the verb mean and the adjective mean go back to identical forms. As just stated, it is hard to decide whether we are dealing with the same word or with two homonyms. I will join the majority of today’s etymologists and try to explain why the sought-for connection may and perhaps does exist. The situation in English is the same as elsewhere in Germanic: Dutch, German, and Scandinavian. For instance, in German, we find a similarly incongruous combination: meinen “to mean,” gemein (ge– is a prefix) “shared, common,” and “base, perfidious.” Even the German noun Meineid “perjury” (that is, “a false oath”; Eid “oath”) turns up. If we accept the hypothesis that “common,” “base, abject,” and “to mean, signify” are connected, we should try to find some explanation for this union in the customs of old communities and then move from some concrete sense to the most abstract one. “To mean, signify” is, of course, an abstract concept.

As usual, we should look for the cognates (related forms) of the verb mean in other Indo-European languages. They turn up in Slavic and Baltic, where the sought-for verbs mean “to change, exchange, barter.” (Take note!) For instance, we find the Russian verb meniat (stress on the second syllable; the vowel was once long) “to (ex)change,” but the gloss for a closely related form in Sanskrit is “to barter” and (!) “deception.” No surprise: trade is impossible without occasional fraud.

I would like to add a detail not mentioned in dictionaries. The famous French scholar Claude Lévi-Strauss based his model of old societies on the idea of exchange. In the remote past (in medieval Europe, until approximately the fifteenth century), money did not exist. People did not buy or sell things: they exchanged them. Hence the culture of reciprocal gift giving and the curse laid on a buried treasure (a motif known from the mythology and folklore of all Eurasia). This is the point: treasure should move from hand to hand, rather than lying intact. Consequently, at one time, exchange was more than a detail of societal life: it determined life’s entire structure. Today, it often remains unclear how far historians should go in ascribing the events of the past to the system of exchange. Lévi-Strauss tended to make too much of it, but no one will probably doubt that trade (exchange, barter) presupposed both honest dealers and swindlers.

The most ancient Germanic form of the adjective mean was main-, as in Gothic ga-main-s “common” and (!) “unclean.” Was the implication “pawed over”? (Gothic, a Germanic language, is known to us from a fourth-century translation of the New Testament from Greek.) The sense “unclean” also comes to the fore in the Gothic verb –mainjan “to defile.” All kinds of unexpected references in the words that interest us did not bother Old Germanic speakers. Nor do they bother us. We say: “what do you mean?” and “such a mean person”—and experience no discomfort. This is the same thing with all homonyms: unless a pun is intended, the context makes everything clear.

Of some interest is also Latin mūnus “duty, public office,” familiar to us from commune and also related to the root of English mean. As explained long ago, the semantic development of the Latin word is based on the institution of hospitality, because a public official had the responsibility, in exchange for his honored position, to give games and public spectacles. Whenever we look, we find the root of mean with positive connotations (as in “duty”) and their opposite, often submerged in generalities (“to transform; exchange”) or appearing in words of negative semantics (“to falsify”; so again, in Gothic). “Change” is a broad concept: its reference may be neutral, but it need not be. We have witnessed a striking development from “change, exchange” to “declare; have an opinion,” and finally, to “intend” and “signify.”

This essay has two messages. First, we observed a close connection between language history and the history of society. Words name things, and no one doubts that the connection exists, and that is why historical linguists study material culture. Last week, I referred to the old periodical Wörter und Sachen (“Words and Things”). Obviously, one cannot discover the etymology of the word plow, without knowing what plow means and what one looks like. Yet time and again, we run into the most ridiculous etymologies of fish names by the people who have never seen the fish in question.

Second, language develops according to its own capricious laws. Any action may be beneficial or detrimental, and the result of the sematic development of words cannot be predicted. “Trade” and “exchange” did not have to produce so many offshoots, but they turned up, and we do our best to account for them. In German, one of the offshoots of meinen “to mean” probably gave birth to the old word for “love.” Of course, why not? If “exchange” can produce “perfidy” and “fraud,” why cannot it produce “love”? Medieval German literature is famous (among other things) for its love poetry, known as Minnesang. German meinen has survived with the sense “to mean,” but at one time it was also a synonym of “to love.” We began our journey with a word for “exchange.” Isn’t love (Minne) an exchange of feelings between the one who loves and the one loved?

The most bizarre possible cognate of mean is English moan, which at one time even existed in the form mean. From a phonetic point of view, the match is perfect. It is the senses that again look incompatible. Yet by this time, it must have become clear that given freedom of will, a semantic bridge can always be constructed between almost any two points. If “exchange” can beget “love,” why not “suffering and grief”? We don’t moan when we are happy. Opinions on the etymology of moan are divided, and I have touched on it, mainly to emphasize how intricate and interesting the study of historical semantics is. Our colleges have all but abolished courses like Old English and Old Norse. No one loves us, specialists in such areas, except the public. Why then doesn’t the public fight for the restitution of historical linguistics?

It would be interesting to hear what our readers think about such things. Perhaps between the two Wednesdays, we will have an exchange of comments. Exchange, let it be remembered, is the root of societal life, be it the Stock Exchange, suffering, or love.

_{Featured image: Orr, John William, Engraver. Indian princess presenting a necklace of pearls to de Soto / J.W. Orr, N.Y. [Published] Photograph. Retrieved from the Library of Congress. No known restrictions.}