on common ancestors, misnomers and A Farewell to Arms

Last night, before class, I took a long hard look at the paper towel dispenser. There was nothing particularly special about it – no sensor, no hand waving, just your typical self-feeding dark brown monstrosity. On the side, however, was a red wheel with a label above it that read:

"Emergency Feed"

I thought to myself: Is this really the appropriate use of the word "emergency"? Can there ever really be a paper towel emergency? And if so, would being unable to dry your hands qualify? Wouldn't "auxiliary" or "supplemental" or "additional" be a more appropriate description?

But this is beside the point.

The point is that yesterday was marked by this linguistic tenor, ranging from a very queer reading of Rope for my afternoon film class:

To last night's discussion of A Farewell To Arms and all the types of reading that permeate the novel: reading bridges, reading horses, reading letters, reading situations.

To the documentary my brother recommended about India, which cleared up this aching curiosity I've had about Sanskrit for the past couple of years:

The similarities between Sanskrit and Latin, Sanskrit and Greek, Sanskrit and German, Sanskrit and English, Sanskrit and [insert your language here], have been well-known and well-documented since at least the 18th century. In my metaphysical pursuits, I've seen numerous teachers deploy this linguistic kinship to great effect, using it to establish an underlying similarity between old and new, familiar and exotic, mundane and transcendent.

Unfortunately, and in spite of its emotional resonance, I've always found this line of persuasion tremendously unsatisfying because it seemed to rely implicitly on a logic of biblical linearity:

Language A begat Language B begat Language C...

This made it difficult to understand how Sanskrit ever got out of the Indian subcontinent. To my knowledge, the people of India had little presence in Europe before the common era, so how could they have any substantial impact on Latin or Germanic languages? Huge linguistic shifts often seem to go hand in hand with war, conquest and conversion, but unlike those of Christianity or Islam, the cultures of India have been largely unmotivated by evangelical concerns. How did it get there?

The documentary had a fascinating answer.

Apparently, Sanskrit didn't come from India – it was brought there by Aryan invaders from Turkmenistan. The path to this knowledge (like all worthwhile paths to knowledge) takes numerous twists and turns, but the short story is this: The Rig Veda (the oldest of the Vedas) has an entire mandala dedicated to a divine concoction known as soma, which the gods were known to consume in "copious" quantities.

The plant needed to make soma, however, doesn't grow in India, and the search for its origin led back to an abandoned Zoroastrian temple, where some mad Russian archaeologist has found urns that contain residue from the presumed soma plant mixed with poppy, cannabis and ephedra – drink of the gods indeed!

When I heard this, it made sense. It wasn't as if Sanskrit begat this begat that, but rather that the Sanskrit used by the Aryans was a common ancestor of both India's classical Sanskrit and Rome's Latin. From this central location, it then spread westward towards Europe and eastward towards India. It's an evolutionary rather than biblical understanding of the genealogy of language, and it does a lot to explain why we have these similar words popping up all over the place.

Now, if I could just get a handle on why some languages use phonetics and others use characters...