Scales

When I was thinking about writing about Scales I had a vague idea of checking on the two or three meanings of the word I could think of from the top of my head and then zeroing in on one of them to concentrate on. Maybe as in fish scales.

It was a bit of a surprise, therefore, when I discovered that there are loads of different meanings such as the aforementioned fish, then balances, music, marks to determine length, magnitude, mathematics etc. But the more interesting aspect of the word, to me, is the differing roots of the same word. I would have thought that Latin and French would have featured predominately. But how about these:

Scales as in a weighing instrument derives from Old Norse skal ‘bowl, drinking cup,’ in plural, ‘weighing scale'.

Scales as in marks laid down at determinate distances along a line, for purposes of measurement or computation comes from the Middle English noun scale, skale, ‘ladder, rung of a ladder,’ from Latin scālae ‘ladder, stairs’.

As for scales on fish or snakes, the derivation is from Old French escale ‘cup, scale, shell pod, husk’ which is from Proto-Germanic.

And this is where I go off piste... because I started to wonder about all the other languages such as Mandarin Chinese, Hindi, Swahili etc that might have roots in other older forms. Which then took me to thinking about whether all languages could be traced back to some original sounds.

This seems to be a highly controversial subject which goes something like this:

Around 50,000 years ago, something happened to our ancestors in Africa. Anatomically modern humans, who had existed for at least 150,000 years prior, suddenly began behaving differently. Until then, their conduct scarcely differed from that of their hominid cousins, the Neanderthals. Both buried their dead; both used stone tools; and as social apes, both had some form of communication, which some think was gestural.

Then something changed as humans began making much better stone tools. They started burying their dead with accoutrements that suggested religion. And perhaps most telling, Homo Sapiens began creating art. Some scientists think that fully modern human language enabled this great leap forward. It enabled abstract thought, the deciding factor in archaic humans becoming me and you. And because some scientists surmise that language arose only once, they believe that before leaving Africa to colonize the world, all humankind spoke one language.

They think that language arose only once because human genetic evidence appears to support some basic assumptions. The human genome indicates that all humanity traces its ancestry to as few as 1,000 individuals who lived between 50,000 and 60,000 years ago. This small founding population may explain how the capacity for language spread so quickly.

One example of this theory which I’ve heard of before is a word roughly corresponding to ‘water,’ which could be rendered in proto-sapiens as ‘AQWA’ which appears in many languages. In Latin it's ‘aqua’, in Japanese ‘aka’ means ‘bilge water’, in Chechen ‘aq’ means ‘to suck, in an African Kung dialect ‘kau’ means "to rain" and in Central American Yucatec, ‘uk’ means ‘to be thirsty’.

The trouble is that all this can’t be proved. But it is fascinating isn’t it?

Belvoir Bay

Scales are balances, so:

On Balance

a half moon bay
mid summer
midday

on the horizon
islands were perfectly matched

that’s when I asked her the question
the perfect spot
at the perfect time
minds and bodies meeting

ten years later
she’s still not replied
my best friend
how good is that

               (First published in Purple Patch)

Thanks for reading, Terry Q.