February 26 2018<\/p>\n
Word of the Day: Garrulous<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n Garrulous<\/em> means \u201cexcessively talkative in a rambling, roundabout manner, especially about trivial matters,\u201d according to dictionary.com. Synonyms include prating, babbling, verbose, loquacious<\/em>, and prolix,<\/em> among others. In fact, looking at the list, one might wonder why we have so many words in English to describe someone who talks more than they should (BTW, I am using the singular \u201cthey\u201d intentionally\u2014feel free to write me at pschleifer@swu.edu<\/a> to ask me why).<\/p>\n According to etymonline.com, the word comes into the language in the second decade of the 17th<\/sup> century, so it might very well be one of those \u201cink horn\u201d terms I talked about before. It is \u201cfrom Latin garrulus<\/em> \u2018talkative, chattering,\u2019 from garrire<\/em> \u2018to chatter,\u2019 from PIE root *gar<\/em>– \u2018to call, cry,\u2019 of imitative origin (compare Greek gerys<\/em> \u2018voice, sound,\u2019 Ossetic zar<\/em> \u2018song,\u2019 Welsh garm<\/em>, Old Irish gairm<\/em> \u2018noise, cry\u2019).\u201d<\/p>\n Let me explain. PIE stands for Proto-Indo-European, a reconstructed (hence proto) language from which the Indo-European family of language derives. Reconstructed? Well, yes, because there are no extant examples of Indo-European. Estimates are that the Indo-Europeans were a tribe speaking this single language sometime between 4500 BCE and 2500 BCE, so they could have had writing (we have some clay pieces that date from 5500-5300 BCE that contain script from other languages), but no evidence of Indo-European writing has yet been found.<\/p>\n The Kurgan hypothesis is that the Indo-Europeans lived on the steppes of Eastern Europe, specifically The Pontic\u2013Caspian steppe, north of the Black Sea. The explanations underlying the Kurgan hypothesis rely on the words of the IE language\u2014specifically types of terrain, plant life, food, and other basics of life. These people then spread out from their homeland in a variety of directions. As the descendants of the Kurgans lived out their lives, the language they spoke gradually changed, but it changed differently in different regions. Thus the Romance languages, the ones based on Latin, like Spanish, French, Romanian, and Italian, are related to the Germanic languages, the ones based on proto-Germanic, like German, Swedish, Frisian, and English, which are related to Sanskrit and Urdu, which are related to the Slavic languages, which are related to the Celtic languages\u2026.<\/p>\n