Our last trek into the world of words was quite meandering, wasn’t it? Well fittingly, the etymology of the word sun is in no way mysterious like the shrouded linguistic origins of its counterpart, the moon. You can follow an unbroken chain right the way up from sun, sole, sol, sonne, and a host of other modern words to the Proto-Indo-European *sóh₂wl̥. Far from a let do
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wn, the directness of this history is fascinating in itself, and even more fascinating are the few instances of a more roundabout origin of a word for “sun”.
A couple of interesting exceptions exist among Indo European languages. According to Ranko Matasović, the Goidelic tongues derive their words for sun, Scottish Gaelic and Irish grian, from Proto-Celtic *gʷrensnā, which he in turn derives from the PIE root *gʷʰer- “to be hot”.1 Albanian also interestingly derives its word for sun diell from the PIE word *ǵʰelh₃wos “yellow”.
Interestingly, like with the euphemisms for the original PIE word *h₂ŕ̥tḱos “bear”, Proto-Germanic *berô and Proto-Slavic *medvědь meaning “brown one” and “honey-eater” respectively, this calling the sun “yellow” is a tabooistic avoidance of speaking its true name.2 People feared that by speaking the name of the bear, they might draw its presence and spoke around it, gradually leading to the total loss of words descended from *h₂ŕ̥tḱos in these languages. Perhaps the sun was too glorious to the ancient Illyrians3 to speak of directly and so his true name was lost to them!
While these exceptions come from more secondary characteristics than just “being the sun”, they’re neither of them particularly obscure. Where the moon is fleeting, arcane and unknowable, the sun is direct, constant and dependable. Its cycle is, while briefer, paradoxically far more constant: that of the day and the night, extrapolated directly into the seasons and the year. The moon, by contrast, seems to undergo phases of its own within this broader cosmic turning, just as men ourselves do. The sun is an overwhelming and overbearing cosmic absolute that dominates our understanding.
In the rare instances when its name is not simply an axiom, like in one account of the etymology of the Chinese 太陽 , tàiyáng, “highest form of yang”, it embodies absolute and cosmic values that are often attributed to it. Indeed, such qualities find their highest expression in the sun, being referred to as “solar” in themselves.4
Instead of descending from some higher linguistic lineage, the sun is itself the proud progenitor of a host of later words. The word south ever so fittingly descends from Proto-Germanic *sunþraz, “towards the sun”.5
Victorian naturalist scholarship on religion tended heavily towards viewing the totality of mythology as poetic encoding of solar phenomena, to the degree that they are often called “solarists”.6 Later scholars would reject this view for reasons such as how, as we saw in the Wordlore article on god, sky deities generally form the original supreme beings of different pantheons. There is a tendency in the history of religions for a sun-god to dominate during a period of “high civilisation”, specifically during imperial epochs (e.g. Sol Invictus, Ra, Quetzalcoatl).7 The Supreme Being becomes “solarised” during these eras, he becomes a fecundator and “limited creator”.8
It’s quite remarkable at times to see how starkly linguistics reflects observable phenomena and their natures. Perhaps it shouldn’t be, but picking up on correspondences like this has always been thrilling to me. When we look back in history and see references made by people in the past to events that we are aware of from completely separate sources, it’s strangely incredible to me that these events that I know took place in the same world actually cohere into a concrete whole. It’s like when you find out that Aristotle taught Alexander the Great, the two seemingly separate worlds of history and philosophy clash together and show themselves as intertwined, as all things truly are.
Language, when explored in this journey-like way, can reveal that excitement like few things can. That eureka of rediscovering that you are in a world, not a compartmentalised procession of hermetic categories. The resilience of the sun as being named only for itself is no accident, nor is the comparative mystery of the names of the moon. These are instantiations of truth, revealed through language.
We must banish the view of language as a set of “labels”, as more or less arbitrary. This reductionism would see as incidental everything I have discussed above, not worth noting beyond sociological purposes of studying the cultural attitudes of speakers of a given language. An approach to language that lets it “speak itself”9 is needed to capture that distinct sense of joy; the reunion with the font of things. The example of the Albanian sun-taboo should not only demonstrate an isolated cultural curiosity to us, but something essential and inherent to the nature of the sun, as the speakers of languages that tabooised the bear understood and poetically described the reality of the honey-eater, better than any naturalist’s designation of ursus arctos of the family ursidae ever could.
Ranko Matasović, Etymological Dictionary Of Proto Celtic, p147.
Vladimir Orel, Albanian Etymological Dictionary, p65.
Whether the Albanian language descends from Illyrian is still debated.
In the works of Julius Evola, for example.
In turn from PIE *sh₂ún-teros, from *sóh₂w-l̥ ~ *sh₂w-én-s (“the sun”) + *-teros (directional suffix).
Most notably Max Müller.
Mircea Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion, p124.
Mircea Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion, p130-4.
From Heidegger’s On the Way to Language.