I mill the grain- the case of the near-perfect preservation of a 6,000 year old sentence.

One of the greatest pleasures working on this project has been finding cases where languages didn’t just keep single words—sometimes an entire sentence survives intact across six thousand years and a dozen sound changes. You just have to know how to look.

When you first start learning Ukrainian or Polish, what jumps out at you is probably not “wow, look how similar to English this is!” Foreign writing systems—whether it’s Cyrillic (which humorist Lewis Grizzard claimed looked like ‘KAOPECTATE’ written over and over again) or Polish cluster-fests like Przemyśl Główny and przychodziliśmy—feel nothing like Spanish 101 class where you could say “Buenos días, yo estudio en la universidad” or German class- “wir trinken Milch und Tee” and feel like you were Mr. World Traveller from day one.

But in fact- they’re all family. Slavic too. Underneath the learning curve of the alphabet, are friends old and new- shared roots that can help you connect to Slavic like never before, because Slavic and English are in fact related- in some cases sharing more roots with each other than with Latin. They are genuinely, linguistically related, of shared origin from ancient Indo-European. 

We talk a lot about cognates, but ‘shared origin’ ranges from distant cousins to identical twins. Take Ukrainian розпізнати and English recognize. They’re loose cognates—both built on the Indo-European root *ǵnō- ('to know'). They aren't exact matches because each language added its own prefix machinery to the core stem. Still, the root survives beneath all that scaffolding

An example of a much tighter cognate is English know itself- and Ukrainian знати or Polish znać. These are both bare verbs with the most basic meaning, both tracing straight back to Indo-european ǵnō- to know.

One of the reasons Ukrainian and Polish can be harder to learn is the alphabet question. There are actually a HUGE amount of cognates between Polish and English and Ukrainian and English, yet it takes just a *bit* of training to see them. That’s what the Learn by the Roots book series is for.

Anyways, what I wanted to share today is one of the coolest cases I've found  where not just a word, but a whole short sentence has survived and stayed close to intact across much of the Indo-European family. 

Our Indo-European ancestors had roots mel- to crush, grind and gṛǝno- grain (you’ll see them with some endings added up ahead, don’t be surprised) and their word for I would be éǵh₂om. 

Linguists can make a confident, well-supported guess at how they'd have said "I mill the grain" — something close to éǵh₂om melō ǵr̥h₂nom. Over six thousand years old, and it's still a recognizable sentence to hundreds of millions of descendants. 

In the book, and here on the blog, I use color-coding to make these family relationships visible at a glance — to help you connect Slavic to your own language, and to each other. Let's walk the sentence across the family and see what survived.  These are screenshots so you can see the same kind of color system I use to help you see.

Right from the beginning, Indo-European used verbs with different endings to show you who was doing it. Subject pronouns (the I / éǵh₂om /я here) wouldn’t have been included, unless the speaker wanted to mark a contrast- say, I am milling the grain, not you, not John, not Jim-Bob, etc. The -ō at the end of mel- is how you know the speaker means ‘I’- same as Ukrainian -ю, Polish -ę. In fact, most Indo-European languages still require these verb changes- English is remarkably short on them but they’re basically obligatory the moment you learn another language.

In Germanic languages, which is where English comes from, this éǵh₂om melō ǵr̥h₂nom survives well. 

In this case, it should be noted both English grain and corn are from this Indo-European ǵr̥h₂nom. Grain came from Latin, which makes sense when we jump to the next list, and corn is native Germanic. In American English it came to only mean the kernels from Zea mays (aka maize) but it was historically just the word for all grains. 

In Romance, we see where borrowed English grain came from- and we see how most of Romance uses an -o ending whenever it’s an “I” talking about things.

The Celtic branch- normally sold on its ephemeral other-worldliness, retains it well too. Their verb system went all haywire (can’t get into it now) but the roots are still visible and obvious.

Some honorable mentions kept one of the words, but due to semantic shift, perhaps replaced the other. In some languages a new word drifted in to replace grain- this is a phenomenon called semantic shift where the semantics- the meaning- has shifted.

 

Generally, with semantic shift, a word's meaning narrows or expands over time. That’s exactly what happened to English corn, which originally meant any grain before American English narrowed it to maize (Zea mays). Languages around the world do this continuously, in a cycle, as regular as the tides. A general term may become more specific- a more specific term may become more general. It’s part of natural language change.

Interestingly, this is very common for grains- if the people of one place overwhelmingly grow and eat only one grain, they may use the species-word to be the general word for all grains, or the general word for grain will be synonymous with the one species. Again, like the tides that wash the sands, it's endless.

In a couple languages, the word for grain stayed, straight from Indo-European ǵr̥h₂nom, but the verb is different. Again, this is a case of semantic shifting, where some other verb- something that was once broader, or narrower in meaning, edged in to be the word. The original may have 'deceased' or shifted to its own shade of meaning somewhere else.

You may notice the verb still begins with an m-. Remarkably enough, often a semantic shift may happen that still uses a close cousin that may also have some shared Indo-European history. Indo-European melō to crush, grind was part of a wider family of words beginning with m- about macerating, mushing, masticating things into being softer or wetter or both. The book will also use these kinds of things to help you connect words.

My goal by the end is to have you seeing Polish-English and Ukrainian-English cognates everywhere. Wool and wełna and вовна, wolves and wilki and вовки, eating, jedzenie and їдальня, potions and piwo and пиво, and many others.

In the books (and downloadable PDFs), a dedicated color-coding system maps these structural links automatically—helping you spot ancient connections between Ukrainian and English, or Polish and English without getting bogged down in linguistic jargon. 

Follow the link for the Learn Ukrainian by the Roots Volume I- the top 200 roots, or:

this link for Learn Polish by the Roots Volume I, (top 200 roots).