Etymology: The Truth in Trees

By Valentin Kostelnik

Thousands of years ago, the proto-Germanic people, who built much of the language we speak today, lived in the endless beech forests of northern Europe. As they began writing, they would carve letters into soft beech bark, and, over time, any object with writing on it became known as a “beech.” Eventually, the sound “beech” morphed into “book.” Side note: books are typically made out of paper which is, sensibly, named after the Egyptian plant papyrus. This combination just shows how English is an incredible mishmash of language groups from all across the world, such that we read European “beeches” made out of Egyptian “papyrus.”

Similarly, further south in Spain, in those warmer climates where oaks and Latin-based languages dominate, people have stripped the thick bark of oaks to produce cork for thousands of years. Oaks and cork are so intertwined, even today most cork comes from oak trees, that the Latin word for oak, quercus, morphed into the modern word “cork.” Try saying them now, fast: cork, quercus, corcus, corkus.

Some etymologies fit like puzzle pieces and help the world make sense, while others only reveal the random absurdity that still governs all. Have you ever wondered why a mile, perhaps the most vital measurement in the U.S., is a seemingly random 5,280 feet? Mile and “mil”–as in millimeter– mean the same thing: a thousand. The story goes back to fifth-century England, which was under military occupation by the Roman Empire. Originally, “mile” was a Roman military term referring to 1,000 steps of a soldier, which is an easy way to track distance on the march, but is utterly meaningless in any other measurement system. Note: if you test this, you will likely march further than a mile in 1,000 paces, because the average height of a Roman was far less than the modern average. I find it delightfully ridiculous that even today we use miles, a term from the fifth century, to describe things like how far your car travels per gallon of gas or to define a light year (5.88 trillion miles).

Returning to those beautiful Germanic forests, we find the origin of one of the most vital words in the English language: “truth.” Think of all the meanings attached to “truth:” reliable, steadfast, solid, real. Naming an object is easy: you just point at the thing and make a sound. But how do you name an abstract concept?

Personally, the sight of an old and solidly growing tree has always made me feel more stable. It is as if seeing an object so fixed in the world as an ancient oak gives me something to lean against, something to rely upon, and it seems the proto-Germans of Northern Europe felt something comparable. Over time, the word “deru,” meaning tree, became synonymous with reality and stability until it eventually morphed into “true.” From “deru” also come the words treaty, truce, trust, durable, dendrology, and many more.

Imagine a group of people in the dark woods of Northern Europe 1,000 years ago. The trees make up most of their world, are incredibly old, and appear to humans infinitely solid and wise. These are the Celtic cultures the Romans found so strange and darkly mystical. The leaders in these cultures were the druids, the high priests of northern Europe, who served as judges, healers, political leaders, and storytellers. Caesar tells us that the druids wrote nothing down and each spent 20 years learning the stories of their people; the druids were repositories of cultural knowledge. In their time, it was believed that they also had the power of foresight and were known as seers (“see-ers”). The word druid comes from “deru” plus “wid,” meaning to see or to know. So a druid is literally “one who knows the trees.”

This ancient society revered trees so much that they used the same word for tree and truth. Their highest religious figures were “those who knew the trees.” Echoes of their beliefs remain with us today, in the shape of the very words we speak. It’s true! If you consider language a well-built Vermont farmhouse, then these Germanic words are the Monkton quartzite foundation stones in the basement. We might not think about them every day, but we rely on them continually.

The wonder of etymology is that all words are like this! Nestled in the sounds and subtle meanings of every word are stories, layered atop one another. Like trees, words have rings denoting their age. Young words– robot, internet, Google– have only a few rings, while older words like “truth” and “book” have so many layers they become impossible to count. I find it wonderful that these layers have a direct effect on our daily life through the words we speak to each other. When we want to say something is resilient, we say it is “durable,” to mean it is “as tough as a tree.” As strange as it seems, when Kindle offers e-books, they are offering us electronic beech bark. When I say I ran two miles, I really mean I ran the distance a fifth-century Roman man could walk in 2,000 paces. When two countries at war make peace, we say they signed a “treaty” or a “truce” to craft a peace as resilient as a tree.

I believe etymology can offer us two things: first, it provides a daily delight, and second, it can ground our confused and increasingly electronic lives and root them in our rich past. That we have always found solace and meaning in the natural world is revealed in the ancient roots of the words we use to describe fundamental human concepts like “truth.” I believe that knowing the history of the words we use can help ground us with our ancestors and in nature, because so often the origins of our words lie in the wild. Not only that, but knowing these surprising stories behind words we take for granted is just plain fun! H

Art by Mia Weyant