The Name of Life

The names of living things seem to run the gamut from words that have been in English and its forebears for thousands of years, to names that are new within living memory. The goal of this post is to sort out what is good and bad among existing names, and to lay down a few basic guides on how we might deal with the vast variety of living things. The higher names, such as those given to larger groups, won’t come into this. Many of those names are much more modern and often restricted to use in biology, moreso the further up you the tree you go. While we might speak of monkeys and apes, few of us speak of catarrhines and platyrrhines. However, I will first work in a few words about what exactly common names should do and their relationship with taxonomy, the lore of naming and sorting living things.

The Swift

Yesterday, as I sat talking to my mother in her kitchen, the evening outside growing ever darker as the last of the sun dipped away, the back door popped open with a start. There, through the doorway, came my stepfather, clumsily elbowing the door open as he held his hands clasped tight. He kicked the door shut behind him with his heel, raised his hands still locked together, and nodded toward them as though to bring them to our heed.

“What do you think I’ve found?”, he said with a schoolboy glee.

Only a letter away…

Sometimes I feel that we can become too focussed on the words which have been borrowed into English. My main grounds for Roots English is that I believe that those at the upper end of society saw English as having low standing next to tongues like French, Latin and Greek (FLaG). The high rate of borrowing from about 1250 til present is through their having to speak a tongue they did not like, and seeking to ‘better’ it through words from FLaG tongues. It’s an interesting thesis, and one that I think can be shown to be true. All we’re doing is reversing the standing of the tongues by putting English first and outtaking what FLaG words we can. However, such a belief should also put us on the lookout for other effects of the FLaG attitude on English. One is the silly and groundless grammar rules that some pedants would have us adhere to.* Another is the respelling of English words to look like they come from FLaG, even to the length of changing them so that they become so.

Darwin done!

My oversetting of the lead–in to the Arising of Kinds is now fulfilled. I think one or two words may be wrong, or clumsy, but overall it is good work. I am most proud of this line:

As many more bodies of each kind are born than can outlive; and as, following from this, the fight for life happens again and again, it follows that any being, if it strain however slightly in any way to the good of itself, under the manifold and sometimes sundry happenings of life, will have a greater likelihood of outliving, and thus be CHOSEN IN THE WILD.

I think it can be near enough understood without any more knowledge than that of the everyday speaker. But it inholds such a great deal of meaning that I am glad to say English can handle it, and can handle it well.

Baseball

Ever keen to root out new words, I wondered where might be the most yieldsome place to plunder. I thought about some of the words I like best—I’m sure we all have such words—and where they came from. If something made a great word once, maybe it could do so again? And it came to me that my most liked word—which I shall let known below—came from baseball.

The New Greeks

The love of FLaG words is something that began early in English. Even if we dismiss the writings of Ælfric as a oneoff, there is still enough to show that borrowings from French were racing ahead by the early 1300s. But it is also something which has lasted long, with a preference for such words still with us—despite the recent growth in English–based terminology in fields such as computing. It is therefore no surprise that many inventions from the 1800s and 1900s bear Greek and Latin names, even though the ancients had never seen such a thing as a telegraph or a sonogram. I find the question of what to do about these words hard, and my answer may be not the one you would expect.

Making new words…the natural way

Most endpoints for Roots English involve the creation of hundreds—or even thousands—of new words. It’s not strictly needed, for somebody can simply choose to use more English words where possible and FLaG words where not, but it is the general approach. Thus any approach to the tongue must have a way of coming up with new words. Often this is done through compounding, putting two or more words together in some way, with the meanings of the input words somehow adding up to the meaning of the new word. I don’t wish to knock that approach—for it is worthy in many ways—but I would like to bring another approach into the light.

Very

Very is a troublesome word. It is one of the most common words in English, well within the top 100, one of only a few FLaG words to achieve such heights*. Getting rid of it would be a real coup for Roots English, if only we could find a word that replaced it and sounded natural while doing so.

Charles Darwin—On the Arising of Kinds

When on board HMS Beagle, as wildlorer, I was much struck with some truths in the spread of living things in South America, and the links in stonelore between the dwellers now and bygone of that mainland. These truths, as will be seen in the latter sheaves of this book, seemed to throw some light on how kinds arise—that riddle of riddles, as it has been called by one of our greatest thinkers. On my coming home, it came to me, in 1837, that something may be made out on this asking by steadily gathering and thinking upon all kinds of truths which might have any bearing on it. After five years’ work I let myself cast thoughts along this line, and drew up some short writs; these I greatened in 1844 into a sketch of the outcomes, which then seemed to me likely: from that time til now I have steadily sought the same goal. I hope that I may be forgiven for bringing forth these words about my own life, as I give them to show that I have not been rash in coming to the belief I have chosen.