environmentalresearchweb blog

« Coarse-grained systemic sciences | Main | Energy for global water cycle - we already use a lot of sun…what more do we want? »

The oldest ideas about glaciers

We have made some astounding intellectual advances in the past few millennia, and we do right to honour our fellows who make these forward leaps. It is proper to regard Isaac Newton, for example, as one of the most important human beings ever. But the 1% of inspiration would be nothing without the necessary 99% of perspiration, and most intellectual advances have been anonymous.

The oldest recognizably modern ideas about glaciers are no older than a couple of centuries, but the way for them was paved by a lot of preparatory observation and thought. Although neither the Greeks nor the Romans had a word for glacier, I cannot believe that nobody had observed or thought about glaciers before the eighteenth century.

Ötzi, the Iceman who died at the main drainage divide of the Alps about 5,300 years ago, probably crossed the divide regularly for pastoral purposes. Surely he must have had a word for the thing, now called the Niederjochferner, on which he died. Besides glacier and its relatives, there are several other words for the thing in alpine languages: vedretta and vadret in Romansch and Friulian, ferner in the dialect of the Tyrol, and kees, another Tyrolean dialect word. Several small neighbours of Ötzi’s glacier are called kar. We do not know whether Ötzi used an ancestor of one of these words, but it would have been hard for him to move around and do his work without some such token.

I have not found any information about the history of vadret. The -et may be a diminutive suffix, or a relic of some meaning that has now been lost, but is it naive to wonder whether the vadr- part is a relative of English water? You have to allow a certain slipperiness in the meanings once attached to these tokens. The evidence consists of seeming parallels between the tokens. If you accept the parallelism, you may uncover evidence of thinking. In this case, the implied intellectual achievement is the recognition that ice and water are different aspects of the same thing. Somebody had to be the first to work this out.

Of course the tokens themselves are not unchanging. They gain and lose bits from time to time, which is why the linguistics experts are satisfied that water and Greek hudor, the ancestor of our prefix hydro-, are the same. For some reason speakers of Greek are not keen on the w sound.

kar, kees and ferner seem also to have no known history before the last few centuries, although ferner is interesting because it resembles firn, a German word for compacted snow, and perhaps fonna, Norwegian for an ice cap or snowfield.

Perhaps we can get somewhere by looking for the most basic idea. Latin glacies, ice, is traceable to a reconstructed Indo-European root *gel-, cold, freezing, with descendants in the Italic, Teutonic and possibly Slavic branches of Indo-European. English belongs to the Teutonic branch, and according to The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots modern descendants of *gel- in English include chill, cool and cold itself.

When the root acquired its -k suffix, and what it signified, are unknown. Pokorny, in his monumental 1959 Indogermanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, suggests that it was in fact -g and was simply an example of reduplication of the initial consonant. Pokorny also thinks that *glag became glacies under the influence of other Latin nouns such as facies, appearance, and acies, edge. Some say there is a connection with Greek galaktos, milk, explicable because milk and bubbly ice can resemble each other in colour. If this is correct, which word influenced the other is not clear, and anyway the independent status of Latin *gel- is demonstrated by gelu, frost, and gelidus, frosty, icy cold.

If we have not lost the track, the deepest layer of meaning in the word glacier is the idea of cold. It makes sense to me. Even Isaac Newton showed early promise as a glaciologist. The second sentence of his Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, published in 1687, was about the compaction of snow. It is true that he then lost the track, for which we should be grateful because of the new path he opened up for later glaciologists. But we should also be grateful for all of the thinking that went on before Newton. Somebody had to be first to notice that you only get snow (Indo-European *sneigwh) and ice (Indo-European *eis) where it is cold.

Posted by Graham Cogley on February 15, 2010 3:00 PM | Permalink