Pan
Pan is a great case of ambiguity — in which a single sequence of sounds has multiple meanings. Its most important meanings are:
- The god Pan, of Greek nationality;
- The prefix meaning “all” (as in panorama and Pan-American);
- The flat kitchen implement; and
- To criticize severely (as in panning a film).
To take these in order:
- The name of the god Pan is Greek, of course, but that is all that’s known for sure. It may be related to the Sanskrit god Pusan, a guardian of cattle and other possessions, whose name meant “nourisher”; Wikipedia mentions the Greek word paon, a pastureman. If this is true, then Pan is cognate with Pagan.
- Interestingly, the prefix pan- itself also has no known origin.
- We can do better with the kitchen implement. This pan descends from the Proto Indo European root pet, meaning “spread”. It came into Greek as patane, “plate”, and was borrowed by Latin as patina — or simply patna among the common people. This latter version was picked up by the Western Germanic tribes as panna; and when some of those tribes moved to England, panna moved too and became panne. During the lingiustic upheavals of the next thousand years, the final syllable was lost, leaving us with pan.
- The final sense, “to criticize”, apparantly was derived from the “kitchen” sense of pan – based on the idea that a panned film or performance is being “cooked”.
It’s examples like Pan/pan-/pan/pan that convince most linguists that the association between sound and meaning is essentially random. What could these four meanings have in common?
In pan, a point location (”p”) is the source of a balanced, flat energy (short “a”) which is directed or narrowed toward a goal (”n”). The general sense seems to be of something distributed evenly or throughout an area (for a purpose).
- For the prefix pan-, meaning “all”, the phonosemantic idea of “distribution thoughout” makes perfect sense. In fact, it makes clear, I think, that the prefix doesn’t exactly mean “all”, but has a more distributional meaning. All, for example, can be used in cases like “he argued the case in all seriousness”, which has no sense of distribution; and it’s impossible to imagine using pan- in that situation.
- The kitchen implement also fits well. A pan, of course, takes a point source of heat and distributes it over a flat surface for cooking.
- Even the “severe criticism” sense of pan can be fit in, arguably, since if a film or performance is panned, the criticism is spread evenly throughout — the entire film/performance is reviewed negatively, and the review is entirely negative.
- And what about Pan? According to Homer, Pan received his name because his flute-playing pleased all the gods, but this sounds like a story made up to explain the similarity between the god’s name and the prefix pan-. Pan is associated with nature, music, strong emotion (panic comes from his name), and sexual energy, but none of these things seem especially distributional in character. I confess I’m out of ideas here — do you have any thoughts?
Thanks to Nio for suggesting this word of the day.
June 6th, 2007 at 7:40 am
I hadn’t even thought of pan as in panning something, to critisize.
Knowing nothing about linguistics, I would think from this description, the human brain/tongue/mouth can only “think” of so many words/sounds. There has to be an end point, regardless of the differences in languages.
Or am I totally off base?
June 6th, 2007 at 9:31 am
Great question, Nio!
The number of possible sounds the human mouth can make is very large; but it is finite, yes. And in theory words could be arbitrarily long — and in some languages they can get very long indeed; but in these cases each “word” is really made up of a bunch of units of meaning mashed together (”mashed” being a technical term… ok, so it’s “affixed”), and each of these units is usually only a syllable or two in length.
So yes — there are only so many words possible in human languages.
Couple that with the fact that some sounds and sound sequences are a lot more common than others. “Pan” is one of those words that’s short, and made up of simple, common sounds, and so I bet most of the languages in the world have a word that sounds a lot like “pan”. The claim of phonosemantics is that all those “pan”s in all those languages have the same core of meaning. That hasn’t been investigated… but it sure would be something, wouldn’t it?
August 23rd, 2007 at 10:36 am
Jeff,
This is very fascinating. I totally agree with your impression that the prefix pan- doesn’t actually mean all-encompassing, but something like all-connecting. Movement from a point of origin to all other possible points, simultaneously.
Where I live we have a fine example of this. Chile is a very long and narrow country, and therefore it has just a single highway covering almost the entire 4000 km length of it. This street is referred to as the “panamericana”. You just get on it, and suddenly, every single city of the country becomes a possible destination (quite literally!)
Santiago, the capital (primary origin or center), divides this street neatly in half, into the “panamericana norte” and the “panamericana sur”. You only have to choose your direction, and half of the country lies readily available before you. When you start traveling on this street, you expand with a lot of possibilities before you, slowly narrowing down the options until you reach your final destination.
August 23rd, 2007 at 11:22 am
Marvelous example, Vitor!
Is the panamericana part of the Pan-American Highway?
Your blog, by the way, is beautiful — and by that I mean your writing. Even though I know just enough Spanish to be able to follow only about 50% of what you’re saying, I can feel the lovely flow of your words regardless.
August 23rd, 2007 at 2:02 pm
I think the panamericana is part of it, but I’m not sure. Regardless, within Chile it is the single most important highway.
wow, you know spanish? that’s awesome! Stick around and subscribe, I haven’t even really gotten started yet with my blog. That way you can also work on your language skills
August 23rd, 2007 at 2:06 pm
You know, Vitor, that’s a great idea! Plus my wife knows Spanish a lot better than me, and I know she’ll love your stuff, too. And it’ll be wonderful to see the Spanish syllables gracing the Google Reader display… Spanish is so lovely.