A Meaningless Title

Cerberus, the name of the three-headed dog that guards the river Styx, is the Latin form of the Greek 'Kerebos'. Some etymologists speculate that name is related to the Sanskrit word ‘karbarah/karvara’, and may be either derived from it or share a common root from the proto-Indo European language.

And what does that word translate as? ‘Spotted’.

Because, after all, even if you’re the god of the underworld, Spot is still a good name for your dog...

Reading Kate Burridge’s Weeds in the Garden of Words, a collection of oddities in the English language. Some interesting stuff on irregularities, pronunciation shifts, and changing attitudes regarding ‘unacceptable’ slang and sentence constructions.

One bit I found especially interesting concerns taboo words, and resulting pronunciation shifts. The example she offers is ‘coney’, the original English word for rabbit. It was originally pronounced to rhyme with ‘money’. It dropped out of use in the nineteenth century due to a perceived similarity to ‘cunt’ – ‘rabbit’ originally referred only to the young of the animal, not the adults. Before rabbit took its place, there were efforts to alter coney to allow it to remain acceptable, by changing the pronunciation to rhyme with ‘phoney’. The word ‘bunny’ may also have been originally a euphemism from the suddenly unacceptable ‘coney’.

This is interesting, because it’s an example of an intentional pronunciation shift, rather than the usual more gradual and undirected changes.

What was even more interesting, though, was that Burridge noted that this sort of euphemistic alteration of words that sound similar to taboo words is common in most languages, and offered the example of the Austronesian languages, specifically those of the Solomon Islands. Many cultures in this area have a strong taboo against using the name of the deceased. Since names are often derived from common vocabulary words, when a person dies, a great many words are suddenly similar to a taboo word. Apparently, this results in the languages of the Solomon Islands having an unusually high turnover of vocabulary and pronunciation, with new euphemistic pronunciations coming into use regularly to replace words rendered semi-taboo by a recent death.

Alright, so in English, we have two ‘voices’, the active voice and the passive voice. Ancient Greek has both, but it also has a third voice – the ‘middle’ voice. Middle voice verbs resemble passive verbs, but act more like active verbs. Since the middle voice doesn’t exist in English, they’re hard to translate, but generally a verb in the middle voice either implies that the action is being done to oneself (eg ‘I free myself’), or – and this is pretty neat – that the action is being done for one’s own benefit. The verb that means “To carry”, for example, when used in the middle voice has the implied meaning of “To win (eg, a trophy)”. The verb "To fight" only exists in the middle; presumably because once you're in a fight, you're acting to preserve your own life - it does have the interesting implication that one cannot selflessly fight in the defense of others in Ancient Greek; there's always the implication of self-interest.

I find it kinda interesting to have a form of a verb that’s concerned with the subject’s motivation as well as their actions – it’s an unusual concept; there aren’t, to my knowledge, any major modern languages that have a middle voice. Still, I kinda like it, though it is a pain to learn.

Still not sure why the course I'm taking teaches the middle voice before the passive voice, though – it seems to me it would be easier to teach the grammatical forms that also exist in English before moving on to largely untranslatable oddities…