Year in, year out

Year in, year out

As promised last week, the topic of this post is the history of the word year. It is hard to tell what hampers etymological discovery more. Consider two situations. If a word is relatively late and has no cognates, language historians are usually lost. This is what happens in dealing with slang and rare (isolated) regional words. For example, someone must have coined dweeb and nerd. Though the clues to their origin are lost, intelligent guessing is encouraged. In contrast (this is the second situation), some words are ancient and have numerous congeners (cognates). Now it is the embarrassment of riches that makes us stop dead in our tracks. Such is the case of year, a word with multiple related forms in and outside Germanic.

In our oldest texts, this word seems to have meant what it means today, but in the remotest past, who, we wonder, needed it? We understand why people coined words for “day,” “night,” “winter,” “spring,” “summer,” and “fall” (“autumn”). Given four seasons, each was used differently for cattle breeding and agriculture. But year? Why have a special name for the entire cycle? Though the oldest (that is, medieval) German poetry is almost lost, one famous song (“Hildebrandslied”) has come down to us, and in it, Hildebrand, its younger protagonist, says that he spent sixty summers and winters abroad (which probably means “thirty years,” that is, “thirty winters and thirty summers,” the sum being equal to sixty). Germanic people counted years by winters, and following the tradition, Sonnet 2 by Shakespeare opens with the warning: “When forty winters shall besiege thy brow….” Since there is only one winter in a year, the implication is obvious. By contrast, the Russian for “how old are you?” is “How many summers are yours?” (“Skol’ko tebe let?”; leto “summer.”) The Slavs measure time by summers. Both systems make perfect sense.

Those who read this blog with some regularity won’t be surprised that our first reference will be to Gothic, a language that preserved the oldest long text in a medieval Germanic dialect. The fourth-century Gothic Bible was translated from Greek, and for Greek étos, the Gothic text has jer, an obvious cognate of English year. But when the reference was to several years, the translator(s), for whatever reason, used wintrus “winter”! Moreover, when the translators came across Greek éniautós “of one year old,” the unexpected Gothic word aþn (read: athn) turned up, and apparently, it was not too exotic a term, because at-aþni “year” (again in the plural) has also been recorded, indeed once. Aþn is an obvious cognate of Latin annus “year” (from the root of annus English has annual, among a few others).  Was it another everyday word for “year”? The origin of Latin annus is obscure. It seems to refer to the idea of regular change, and unexpectedly, in this case, classical scholars refer to the rare Gothic words for support, that is, lean on a broken reed. The case remains unresolved.

We may wonder why Gothic speakers needed three synonyms meaning “year.” To be sure, the translators suggested three different Gothic words for three Greek words in the original, but they did not invent or coin them. Nor was their translation of the Bible literal or slavish. The natural reference among the Goths, as among all the Germanic speakers, must have been to “winters,” but for “several (many) years” they preferred other words. We are confused. (Compare the beautiful English dialectal word twinter: “a domestic animal of two years [winters] old.”)

As regards our subject, the question is predictable. We want to know what Gothic jer, Old English gēar, Old Icelandic ár, and the rest of them meant originally. What is their etymology? Parallels from non-Germanic languages provide little help. Thus, Russian god “year” is related to English gather and together. The word seems to refer to regulating time, joining things, and the like. The main Slavic word for “year” is rok, whose basic sense must also have been “order.” In Modern Slavic, among the cognates of rok, we find “speech” (that is, “something ordered”), “allotted time,” and even “fate.” Neither those senses nor the senses in several other languages make the distant origin of year more transparent.

Etymologists have suggested two solutions. One of them has the support of Greek óra “time, season; spring” and óros “year,” safe congeners of year. We have seen that when Goths wanted to say “many years,” they referred to winters, rather than springs. But even if we disregard this discrepancy, the picture will not look quite neat, because Gothic jer, a poor synonym for “winter,” also sometimes occurred in the plural! One could say “many years” and “many winters.” We don’t know how Gothic differentiated between those plurals. That nicety aside, language historians look for ancient roots, and words like Sanskrit átati “goes” provided them with such a root. A year emerged from that comparison as a unit that “goes, passes.” However, this etymology has a hitch. When we look for the reconstructed (ancient) roots of our words, we usually find some concrete entitles. For instance, hammer is related to a word for “stone.” This makes perfect sense. “Go,” by contrast, is a vague general concept, and one could expect that it appeared as the result of later generalizations. Hence a search for a competing hypothesis.

Here is an interesting detail: though Old Icelandic ár did mean “year,” first and foremost, it referred to “fruitful season, economic prosperity.” One made sacrifices “til árs ok friðar,” that is, to a fruitful (!) year and peace. A poem in Old English contained the same message. Likewise, Greek ōra referred to several units of time (hour, day, and season), but its main senses were “prime, fruitful season; spring.” Slavic yar- also referred, first and foremost, to “spring.” Students of Slavic etymology traditionally compare this word with year. One notes that some scholars hardly ever bother to refute or even discuss the idea that “year” signifies “spring,” while others either stay on the fence or take the tie between year and yar (and spring) almost for granted.

This is not a rare situation. The literature on word origins is so full of incompatible hypotheses, and the authority of the best scholars is so strong that many excellent ideas are overlooked or ignored. Hence the benefits of etymological dictionaries that give a complete survey of all conflicting views. English dictionaries, at least beginning with Skeat’s, find the connection between “year” and “spring” probable but formulate their conclusions most cautiously. The original OED remained in this case non-committal.

Obviously, we will never know for sure how the word year was coined millennia ago. But if I were to choose, I would vote for the idea of “spring,” rather than for “pass, go” as its semantic base. I am pleased to report that Elmar Seebold, the latest editor of the most authoritative dictionary of German etymology, though hesitatingly, decided to support the “spring” version of the origin of the word year. By contrast, in the latest edition of the great Gothic dictionary, “year” is said to denote “moving, passing.” I respectfully disagree. Long live spring!

_{Featured image by Adam Chang via Unsplash.}

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