As the Milano Cortina Winter Olympics progresses with the excitement of the flying ski jumpers and downhill skiers we should celebrate the word at the centre of the whole celebration. We often refer to winter sports as snow sports. Snow is a very old word and its origins take us back to our most ancient European ancestors.
The Western European languages
“Snow” is a solid Anglo-Saxon word that has its origins before French and Latin infiltrated English. From Old English we had snāw. Middle English turned it into snou.
Other western European languages have similar words: German has Schnee, Dutch sneeuw, the Scandinavians snjór.
The Proto-Indo-European language
We can trace these words back to a language that is known as Proto-Indo-European (PIE). PIE is an academically reconstructed language that has been developed by “reverse engineering” modern languages based on their commonalities. Thus linguists have reconstructed a PIE root sniegwh — meaning “snow” or “to snow”.
This PIE word is the ancestor of “snow” in other non-Germanic languages—in Latin nix, Greek nipha, Russian sneg, Lithuanian sniegas, Welsh nyf. Even Sanskrit has a cousin — snihyati, “he gets wet”.
PIE is thought to have been spoken roughly 4500–2500 BCE, somewhere on the Eurasian steppe north of the Black and Caspian Seas (moder-day southern Ukraine and southwestern Russia). Archaeology, comparative linguistics and, more recently, ancient DNA studies all point toward substantial population movements from the steppe during the third millennium BCE. Speakers of PIE spread west into Europe and east into Central and South Asia.
Their languages evolved into the Indo-European family — including English, German, Latin, Greek, Celtic languages, Slavic languages, Persian and many of the languages of northern India, including Sanskrit (Sanskrit survives as a religious language in Hinduism and as a major influence on many modern South Asian languages, including Hindi, Bengali and Marathi).
Horse is another word that is thought to have originated in PIE.
Ancient snow sports
So as we are watching the world competing in the “snow sports” of the Winter Olympics we should remember that we are using a word that comes from the cold steppes of Russian and Ukraine maybe five thousand years ago.