Hand
Standard etymological reference works will tell you that hand goes back to Proto Germanic handaz, meaning “hand” (the -az is the nominative singular masculine suffix, like -us in Latin), and pretty much nothing remarkable has happened since then — hand has not changed its meaning or its sound in two thousand years. Handaz was apparantly an innovation of Proto Germanic; it has no ancestor in Proto Indo European.
But something decidedly odd was going on in Proto Indo European with regards to this word. Proto Indo European did have a word for hand – men, which is the ancestor of Latin manus and, from Latin, English manual, mandible, manuscript, manage, etc. Why didn’t men get passed down into Proto Germanic? And for that matter, why wasn’t men passed down into any of Proto Indo European’s other daughter languages? For example, Proto Celtic decided to switch to pela, meaning “flat” (related to English palm); and Proto-Slavic dropped the idea entirely — Russian has no word for “hand”, only a word for “forearm”!
I discussed this at length last year in a couple of my first posts, Taboos in Proto Indo European and What did Hand Mean Before it Meant Hand?. I suggested that the Indo European god of the sun was associated with hands — both because of the strength and creative energy of the sun, and because the sun’s rays can be seen as its fingers — and because of this, the word men (hand) became holy — in fact, it became taboo, too holy to say. Because men was no longer available, possibly the ancient Proto Germanic speakers decided to use a euphemism to refer to their own hands; and they may have chosen the Proto Indo European root kandaz, meaning “brilliance” (and ancestor of candle and possibly kindle), so as to make the connection with the sun god clear, but not overt enough to be rude. But in Proto Germanic, a great many sounds had changed; so instead of saying kandaz, they said handaz.
Thus, our word “hand” may be descended from a word referring to the light of the sun.
Be that as it may, it’s instructive to compare the phonosemantics of hand versus the old word men. Men begins with making, manifesting (”m”), proceeds with hard-working connector short “e”, and heads toward a noble goal (”n”). The emphasis here appears to be on solid achievement — very appropriate for hands. (It also says something interesting about the English word men!) Hand, on the other, um, hand, starts off with a primal source, home-energy (”h”), proceeds in a balanced, flat manner (short “a”) toward a noble goal (”n”) and concludes with a doorway / decision — an ending that is also a new beginning. Hand, then, is a word that emphasizes the larger context of goal achievement, from the ultimate source energy to the aftereffects of the action.
