We have so much in common!
I try to keep up with the news, at least in a few areas.
One reflection that accompanies reading or watching the news these days is that since the fall of the Wall, plenty of new ones, both physical and intangible, have been created between various peoples.
It is so refreshing in this divided human landscape to find some new connection to others. Languages are a potent source of such connection.
In my previous post, I wrote about one such connection – the exchange of knowledge and ideas between Europe and the Arabic-speaking areas. I mentioned how the tide of this information stream first went one way and then reversed.
This one is about a surprising discovery of another such connection.
In my spare time, I like to read historical fiction. One of my favourite authors in this genre is Bernard Cornwell.
Recently, when I was listening to the 7th volume of The Last Kingdom series – The Pagan Lord, I had a small eureka moment when the narrator reached this fragment:
“Why am I called a hlaford?’ ‘Because you guard the loaf, lord,’ he said, ‘and a hlaford’s duty is to feed his people.’ I grunted approval of his answer. Hlaford is a lord, the man who guards the hlaf, the loaf. My duty was to keep my people alive through winter’s harshness, and if that took gold, then gold must be spent.”
In that moment, something in my head “clicked,” and I couldn’t resist doing some further research. Somehow, I always thought that there are few words more intrinsically Polish than our word for bread – “chleb,” with the characteristic Polish spelling of the initial “ch,” which is read as a long guttural “H.”
Well, I couldn’t have been more wrong!
Would you recognize this Old English text:
”Urne gedæghwamlican hlaf syle us todæg.”?
It is the original version of what we know today as: “Give us this day our daily bread.”
While the German version of this prayer, even in Luther’s translation, uses “Brot,” in Old German, there was a word “Laib” (loaf), which in early Old High German had the form “hleib,” which referred to – well, to “bread.” It is preserved to this day in the form of “Laib Brot” (loaf of bread).
So suddenly, the Polish “chleb” is not so intrinsically Polish anymore.
On the other hand, this “discovery” turns it into something we share with people from many other cultures and times.
A reminder of how much we have in common, even with people who at the moment seem to threaten us one way or another.