WHERE DOES THE WORD ‘TREE’ COME FROM?

Ruth MacGregor (OHS)

The word ‘tree’ is slightly confusing when you think about it – it appears to be completely distinct from the more Latinate versions such as ‘albero’ in italian or ‘arbre’ in French, or even the German word ‘baum’ – and it is. In fact, linguistically it’s more closely related to the Albanian word ‘dru’ or even the English word ‘true’. Although it may have been pronounced slightly differently, the modern word ‘tree’ would have been used as far back as the 12th century as it was the same in Middle English, shown by works such as Geoffrey Chaucer’s ‘The Canterbury Tales’. However, it differs slightly when we reach Old English which was used from approximately 450 to 1150 CE. In Old English, the word ‘tree’ was ‘treow’, which not only meant tree but also ‘trust’ or ‘promise’. This shared linguistic root is why the words ‘tree’ and ‘true’ are so similar, and perhaps explains the common association of trees with concepts such as reliability and steadfastness. This association can be seen even further back, (long before early Germanic tribes brought the predecessors of ‘treow’ to the British Isles), in a language called proto Indo-European (‘PIE’), which, although lacking a written corpus, has been able to be reconstructed enough to theorise that the Indo-Europeans had a word pronounced ‘doru,’ which meant ‘tree’. This word can itself be linked to the PIE word ‘deru’ meaning ‘sturdy’ or ‘strong’, suggesting that the connotations of strength and stability were not lost through the millennia between the probable use of PIE as early as 4500 BCE and the use of Old English as late as 1150 CE. Words for ‘tree’ clearly derived from the ancient ancestor ‘doru’ can be found in a wide range of languages from Sanskrit to Russian but interestingly languages including Welsh and Greek also seem to share this root, except that rather than meaning simply ‘tree’, these derivatives mean the more specific species ‘oak’. This suggests that many of these languages which use the ancestor ‘doru’ may actually be using a word which more accurately means ‘oak’, possibly considered the most generic tree by speakers of PIE as it is the epitome of sturdiness and reliability. Oddly, the languages with Latinate roots for the word tree which tend to begin with the prefix ‘ar-’ (from the Latin, ‘arbor’) also come directly from PIE, however they take their origin from the proto Indo-European prefix ‘arb-’ which expressed the idea of production and growth. Similarly the German and Dutch words ‘baum’ and ‘boom’ respectively derive from the PIE for ‘to grow or swell’ which is believed to have been pronounced ‘bew’, and closely relate to the English word, ‘beam’ which was developed from the language of early Germanic invaders. The variety even within this relatively small selection of languages for a word that stems from a single language is fascinating and almost acts as a microcosm for the dramatic linguistic evolution of communication over time.

Bibliography

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