Origin of words

Speech is a completely unique phenomenon that is inherent only in man. With its help you can bring important information, express your opinion, warn. Without exaggeration, we can say that speech is what connects individuals to society, allowing them to interact with each other.

But only people, communicating, can clearly and exhaustively express the essence of what is happening. A unit of speech is a word, that is, a reflection of a concept or phenomenon. And this is not just a combination of sounds. The fact that the origin of words is divine, the Bible says. And the truth, it seems, how else to explain the wonderful gift of expressing the combination of several sounds of concept, action, property and phenomenon?

However, we will not delve into theology, but we will approach the questions of linguistics. All adverbs and dialects should not be considered. Therefore, for example, let's take the origin of Russian words. They are both an old heritage and an example of folk art. Once, according to scientists, there was a single language for the Indo-European people, whose direct descendants were the Slavonic tribes. From them, in turn, there were Russians. With the resettlement of the Slavs in vast territories, gradually their single language disappeared, disintegrating into many dialects, which later were formed into separate languages. At the moment they are so different that their carriers often simply do not understand each other.

The Slavonic vocabulary is mainly of Indo-European roots, but since the Slavs tightly contacted and partially mixed with other peoples, their language was first influenced by the Iranian languages (the consequence of contacts with the Scythians and related tribes) and then Gothic (the reason for the conquest by the Goths). We do not even suspect that the age of some of the words that we use every day is hundreds, or even thousands of years. One simple example. Everybody knows the word "bear". It is from the ancient Slavonic literally translated as "knowing honey", or the eater of honey. It was created by a combination of the roots of two words. And in the same way (root + suffix + root) a huge number of Russian words appeared. More examples - office work, gorgeous, skinhead and many others.

Another way of word creation is adding new suffixes to the word, often with changing the meaning of words. There are many examples. The word "butterfly" comes from the word "woman" - the ancient Slavs believed that women after death turn into butterflies.

There is another way of forming new words - this is imitation of sounds, including sounds of nature (for example, the words "cuckoo", "growl", etc.). Perhaps this method was used by primitive peoples. But how did the words "dog", "lion", "cat" come about - not because of imitating the sounds of nature and not by adding up the roots of words? They have always been used in popular speech. Similar words exist in other European languages - hence, these words are indigenous to the Russian, and their history is rooted in another language, the Proto-Slavic.

It should be said that the theory of the primordial European origin of German, Gaelic, Greek, Slavic, Sanskrit, Latin is not without foundation. For example, in Hindi and Persian there are words very similar to their analogues in the Slavic or Germanic languages.

Very interesting is the origin of obscene words. It should be noted that they were not at all abusive at all. The origin of words, which are called obscene, is very ancient (not counting some who came from other languages). Many will not believe this. But the word, beloved by many, with the letter "b" once meant "stray", came from the word "wander". And only much later it began to mean the same as today. It became foul language under Empress Anna Ioannovna, who banned him.

The words that call the male and female genitals have the pre-Slavic roots, their analogs are in all Slavic languages. Many hundreds of years ago they were not at all obscene. The word from ancient Sanskrit, which transmits the process of coition, is very similar to its Russian counterpart, and hence this word is also very ancient.

So, in general, our language has an ancient history - the origin of words in their majority is rooted in the proto-language of the Indo-Aryan peoples, and maybe even deeper. However, he is still not a direct descendant of Sanskrit, throughout his history he has changed. Therefore, the origin of the words of our language is not fully Indo-European, and partly - Asian, partly - French, Latin, Greek and English.