Welcome to the Endless Knot!
In this special episode we’re joining TeamTrees to try to plant 20 million trees!
And so since this all about tree planting, let’s see if we can find a family connection
between trees and planting via etymology!
Tree planting for the purpose of reforestation is one of the strategies to mitigate climate
change because trees take carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, out of the atmosphere, converting
it into oxygen, and trapping the carbon in the form of biomass.
So the idea is to create or recreate forests.
The word forest literally means “outdoors”, coming from Latin foris “outside”, from
the Proto-Indo-European root *dhwer- meaning “door”, also the source of the English
word door.
It probably came to refer to a bunch of trees from the Medieval Latin phrase forestem silvam
“the outside woods” referring to forest outside of the fenced off woodland that was
reserved for royalty, initially in this case Charlemagne.
You weren’t allowed to hunt in his private woods!
That Latin word silva meaning “tree, woodland”, by the way, probably comes from the Proto-Indo-European
root *widhu- “tree, wood”, which is also, through the Germanic branch, the source of
Old English wudu and Modern English wood.
The main Latin word for tree, arbor, from which we get Arbor Day and arboriculture,
comes ultimately from the root *eredh- “high”, also the source of the words arduous and orthodontist.
So unlike wood and silva, the sense development of arbor is figurative.
As for the word tree itself, it also comes to refer to trees in a figurative way.
Tree, from Old English treow, comes ultimately from the Proto-Indo-European root *deru- meaning
“to be firm, solid, steadfast”, and what is a tree if not firm, solid, and steadfast!
And that’s why this root led to a number of words having to do with trees or objects
made of wood, including trough, a wooden vessel, dryad, a Greek mythological tree nymph, druid,
a Celtic religious figure connected with tree worship, and dendrochronology, dating tree
rings, which is one way of tracking climate change.
But there are also a number of words in English that are connected to the literal meaning
of *deru-, such as truce, a kind of solid pledge, trust, a solid or firm confidence
you might have in someone, and tryst, originally meaning “a place where one waits trustingly”,
but now used in the sense of a lovers’ tryst, which ironically might indicate an extra-marital
affair.
But another important word, or really two words now, that we get from this root are
truth and troth.
In Old English these were the same word, treowþ, which had a somewhat broader range of senses,
“faith, loyalty, truth”.
Think of Superman’s truth, justice, and the American way.
Troth now has the specific sense of a “pledge”, and is mainly known from the specific contexts
of plighting one’s troth and betrothal, in other words an engagement.
So a betrothal is a pledge, and this is also etymologically true of an engagement, which
comes from Old French engagier “to pledge, engage”, through the Germanic Frankish language,
ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *wadh- meaning “a pledge, to pledge”, from which
we also get the words wed and wedding.
Marriage and marry come through Old French from Latin maritare “to wed, marry, give
in marriage” from maritus “married man, husband”, which may come from the Proto-Indo-European
root *mari- “young man” or “young woman”.
Marriage is also known as wedlock (and the lock part, by the way, is not connected to
the word lock, but is instead a suffix denoting activity from Proto-Indo-European *leig- “to
leap, tremble”, also the source of the word lark, though I would suggest that marriage
is more than a lark), and as matrimony, which is not related to marry, but instead comes
from Latin matrimonium, from the Latin word mater “mother”, thus indicating the primary
purpose of marriage, for the Romans at least.
Now given that producing legitimate offspring has historically been one of the most important
aspects of marriage, typically cultures have rules about marrying outside of one’s own
kin group or other social group, what’s called exogamy, to avoid inbreeding, though
some cultures have rules about the opposite, endogamy, in which one has to marry within
one’s social group, such as within one’s ethnic group, caste, or religion.
Now the degree of closeness in terms of a exogamous marriage differs from culture to
culture, and indeed different cultures have different systems of kinship terminology not
only for this purpose, but also to reflect different social roles relatives are expected
to play within the family structure of any given culture.
The anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan identified six distinct patterns of kinship terminologies.
For instance, in English speaking societies there is no distinction between aunts and
uncles on the mother’s side or the father’s side, and the word cousin is even broader,
being applied to any gender, but other cultures have finer distinctions than those, and conversely
other systems use the terms equivalent to brother and sister to include cousins as well.
And rules about exogamy can cover not only what we might consider close family, but also
larger kin groups, clans, and even whole tribes.
In some cases linguistic exogamy is required in which one must marry a speaker of a different
language.
The word family comes from Latin familia, which included not only the blood relations
within a household, but also all the slaves, freedmen, and other members of that household,
and in fact the word familia comes from famulus “serving, serviceable” from the Proto-Indo-European
root *dhe- “to set, put”.
The word kin is a Germanic word, from Old English cynn, which could refer not only to
one’s family or relatives, but also a whole people, and comes ultimately from the Proto-Indo-European
root *genə- “to give birth, beget”, which is also the source of the word gens, which
is the Latin word to refer to one’s blood relations, though only through the male line.
As for tribe, it comes from Latin tribus which originally referred to the original three
tribes of Rome, the Tites, the Ramnes, and the Luceres, coming ultimately from the same
root as the word three, Proto-Indo-European *trei- “three”, plus the root of the verb
to be, *bheuə-, though a connection with the root *treb- “dwelling” has also been
suggested.
Related to the word tribus is tribunus, originally the head of a tribe, from which we get the
word tribune, and tribuere “to give out amongst the tribes”, from which we get the
words contribute, distribute, retribution, and tribute.
And finally the word clan comes, unsurprisingly, from Gaelic.
Scots Gaelic clann originally meant “offspring”, coming to refer, in the Highlands, to a tribe
holding land in common under the leadership of a chieftain.
Now the Goidelic branch of Celtic had no initial /p/ sound, so what was originally a /p/ became
Gaelic /c/ in the word clann.
This word was a borrowing from Latin planta in the sense of an “offshoot”, from which
of course we get the word plant, and indeed the word plant in non-Goidelic Middle Welsh
means “children”.
Latin planta means “sprout, shoot, twig, graft” but also the “sole of the foot”
because when planting you press down with the sole of your foot.
Planta comes from Proto-Indo-European *plat- “to spread”, also source of the word flat,
ultimately from the root *pelə- “flat, to spread”, also source of the word planet,
through Greek planasthai “to wander”, because planets were the asteres planetai,
the “wandering stars”.
So since we only have one planet to live on we had better act as one true global family
and make a pledge to plant some trees.
Thanks for watching!
If you’d like to donate, head over to teamtrees.org where one dollar plants one tree.
Think of your family trees!
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