Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
[word] as
spura,
'city.'”
5
And the Etruscan language does not seem related to
very much else on the European mainland.)
The unvoiced “p” of
per
or
pur
equates to a voiced “b” in the German
burg
or English suffix
burgh
or “borough,” and some English speakers
pronounce the latter simply as “burr.”
6
During the post-glacial period
the sound has hardly changed since the dispersal of the 'Semitic' ancient
Egyptian and Sanskrit, all the way through into modern English. Far from
England, on the Pacific Ocean is Singapore, which name is formed from
“Singh”
lion
“por”
city. What a perdurable word-idea-cluster this
is, how central to human self-definition. It must have come into people's
heads at the dawn of time and represented our mastery of the environment
in some deeply satisfying way.
Retaining the initial “p” sound, if the final “r” is sounded as an “l”—as
so many languages do conflate these two sounds—a whole other batch of
examples comes into view. The Greeks have their “pol” in “polis” which
spawned the modern words derived from that root (police, policy, polite),
all distinguishing the social refinements and necessities of city life.
7
Even
further afield, the Greek “pol” might have been enunciated as “bol,”
8
which
could yield an alternate pronunciation as “vol,” the likely predecessor of
“ville” (which seems as reasonable an ancestor for this word as “villa,” a kind
of palace). If the initial consonant was softer—or, being unvoiced, was
almost silent—then other, seemingly unrelated words may emerge from the
root. The Bible records that Abraham came from the Chaldees' city of Ur,
which can be presented orthographically as “(p)ur” or “(p)er.” Nor is this
citation the only such transliteration of the sound. The Hebrew for city is
simply “er”—again, basically the same word as all these others. Moving
from the Semitic to the Indo-European languages, we recall that Latin's
“ur(b)” is the root for words like urban, meaning city, and urbane—how a
city dweller carries him or herself to adapt to the man-made situation.
9
Although Roman metropolises, or at least Latinate ones, arrived on the
horizon five to eight millennia too late to have been invented in Italy the
root word for this planned or accumulated construction remains the same.
The linguistic traces are everywhere.
“In cuneiform writing, prefixes called determinatives usually define the
characteristics of the following word but are not themselves pronounced or
translated. However, the use of determinative in the [dispatches from the
senior administrator Abdi-Heba to Pharaoh concerning] Jerusalem in the
[fourteenth century B.C.E.] Armana letters is different from that in other
