The salt of the earth and salt in a saltcellar

First of all, my thanks to those who commented on the previous posts. Don’t miss the note about the ancient Romans’ view of babies on the father’s knee and the suggestion that the idiom to pull one’s leg may be of nautical origin. If this suggestion is correct, to pull one’s leg will align itself with to pay through the nose. From what I have read, to pay through the nose is indeed a technical expression coined by sailors. As concerns the Greek origin of the verb moan, I found no confirmation of this idea in the books I consulted.

Now on to today’s topic, but first, an acknowledgment. Below, I’ll use the material of several publications, without referring to them. Such is my usual practice in this blog. When I write a scholarly paper, I supply it with a detailed bibliography, but for a popular exposition like the present one such details will probably only bore the readers. Anyway, I found the names for “salt” all over the world in a 2009 paper by Václav Blažek and some useful information in a 2010 paper by L. P. Dronova, in Peter Schrijver’s 1995 paper, and in Victor Hehn’s 1873 book Das Salz, to mention a few.

In Eurasia, all the forms look similar: sāle, sāl, sol’, and the like. The forms elsewhere usually have a root ranging in meaning from “good” to “sour.” Here is a short list of such “exotic” forms: bera, hmog, jot, kiho, melakh, mbulano, sipo, tabtu, tirdi, and úogo. However, surprises may occur even closer to home. Thus, Latvian (Latvian is of course an Indo-European language!) druskà “salt” means “something small, crumbly.” In dealing with the name of such a product, one never knows whether it goes back to some extremely ancient protoform or is a migratory word, that is, a term traveling from place to place with the object it designates. Of course, in their migration westwards, Indo-European tribes found great deposits of salt on the shores of the Aral and the Caspian Sea. Be that as it may, a common Indo-European name of salt probably existed and looked like s-l, with a vowel between them.

One notices that the word meaning “salt” often resembles the word for “sea.”  Thus, the Latin for “open sea” is salum. As studies of the British Iron Age show (to cite just one example), salt was produced on the coast. Seawater was probably let in in spring and allowed to sit until autumn, when a salt crust was formed. An important observation is in order here: the spread of salt is inseparable from the spread of agriculture, because salt is an indispensable condiment only in the food of those who depend on vegetable products. (See the image of deer salt licks!) By contrast, meat-eaters can do without salt. To give just one example: as late as the nineteenth century, some Bedouins did not use salt.

Germanic also contains some words that point to the connection between salt and sea water. In Old Scandinavian, we find hit eystra salt (literally, “the eastern salt”) for the Baltic Sea. Not improbably, English silt, which is a borrowing from Scandinavian, contains the same root. But English silt means only “sediment,” while in modern Norwegian and Danish dialects, similar words have wider currency, and the related verbs usually mean “to pickle.” German Sülze “pork jelly” belongs here too, although it’s not so much salt, the crystalline compound NaCl, that interests us in this context as its use in food preparation.

Let us return to the ties between salt and agriculture. In the Indo-European language family, the root sal– is widespread in the area in which also the root ar– “plow” is known. (The English adjective arable “fit for tillage” is a borrowing from Old French or directly from Latin, but whatever the source, it gives English speakers an idea of that root. Incidentally, Old English also had the verb arjan “to plow,” and to ear is still known in some dialects.) The point of this short excursus is obvious: plowing presupposes agriculture, and that is why in language, the plow and salt as a food product go together.

A striking detail in the history of the word salt is that its seemingly ubiquitous cognates (so in Greek, Latin, Slavic, Germanic, and Celtic) do not show up in the Indo-Iranian group. They are absent from Sanskrit. If such a word had existed, it would have shown up in Rigveda and Avesta. The perennial question that bothered medieval scholars and often bothers us is whether the absence of a word means the absence of the object it designates. This is not a good place for going into philosophical depths, but the fact remains that a cognate of salt is absent from a most important language group.

The etymology of salt is perhaps known. Of interest are a few words whose phonetic shape resembles that of salt and which refer to the dirty-grey color. Such are English sallow, German Sal(weide) “willow” (Latin salix), and Russian solovei “nightingale” (stress on the last syllable; if so, then “a grey bird”). They have often been compared with salt. (There is no justice in the world: of all the memorable qualities of the nightingale only its color was singled out by the Slavic speakers of long ago!). Thus, salt “grey substance”? It also easy to notice that the root sal– sounds like the Latin word sōl “sun.” According to a bold and rather adventurous hypothesis, salt is related to sōl and meant “the sediment left after the water had evaporated.” 

Whatever the distant origin of salt, an amazing twist in its history deserves our attention. Some close cognates of our word mean “sweet”! Here, Baltic languages (Lithuanian and Lettish) and Slavic provide the most striking evidence. In Russian, slad– means “sweet” and solod means “malt.” The root must have had a rather indeterminate sense, just “something adding good taste to the consumed food,” that is, “condiment.” Ambiguity in this sphere is common. Sweet is probably related to sap. Both salty and sweet must have meant (rather vaguely) “making the food more edible.” Sour goes back to the sense “wet” (but in Lithuanian, the related adjective changed its sense to “salty”!), and bitter is, most probably, from a historical point of view, “biting” (yet the metaphor underlying “bitter” is different in other languages). All our words designating taste are metaphors, whose origin we usually no longer remember. But even knowing the general principle, one cannot help admiring the infinite resourcefulness of language. Language is great, while etymology, we should admit, is sweet and sour, and most of what etymologists say should be taken with a grain of salt.

_{Featured image: Location of the Baltic Sea in the region. Image by Aplaice. CC-BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.}