The People of the Dawn Land, the Wabanakiyik, numbered at least 40,000, living in scattered bands throughout what is now Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine, before the first epidemics hit five hundred years ago. The diseases spread from European settlements in the far south and north of New England, so that the Wabanakiyik were hit long before they encountered Europeans face to face. By the time the English landed in Plymouth, the Wabanakiyik (usually called the Abenaki today) had lost between 50-75% of their population. 150 years of further epidemics, war, and forced migrations, reduced them to around 1,000. Today they have rebounded to 12,000, split between the United States and Canada, but many of them still have not achieved tribal recognition from the US government.

The Wabanakiyik word for “one who squirts” was something like segongw or segonku or seganku, and this was applied to the notorious ungainly black and white animal that visited their gardens at night in search of insects and grubs. The European settlers borrowed the word, spelling it squunk at first.

The word skunk is a remarkable example of sound-meaning correspondence that reaches across language families. Skunk is not related to any other English word, but it looks like a combination of squirt (from about 1470, imitative) and stunk, an irregular nonstandard past participle of stink, which is from Old English stincan. The onset “sk” suggests directed motion from a container; the “unk”, meanwhile, is similar to lung, sung, and tongue, all of which have to do with breathing and the throat. (According to Margaret Magnus’s phonosemantic analysis, the short “u” is “thoughtful and relaxed”, but I suspect it has other meanings.)

Paradise is ultimately of Proto Indo European origin, but its journey to English has taken it on a grand tour of the ancient world. It’s formed from a combination of two PIE roots:

• per, a preposition meaning “through, across, around”, the ancestor of English per (as in three per dollar) and peri- (as in periscope, perimeter, periphery, and period);
• dheigh, “to knead, to form from clay”, ancestor of dairy, figurine, dough, and fiction.

These elements came into Avestan, an Indo European language spoken in Persia (modern Iran) around 1000 BC, as pairi and deza respectively. Avestan pairidaeza literally meant “create a form around; enclosed area”, and was used to refer to enclosed yards, parks, and gardens. Pairidaeza was borrowed into Greek as paradeisos, and originally referred to Persian hunting parks or orchards; but it was used in the Septuagint, the Greek version of the Old Testament, to refer to the Garden of Eden. In the Greek New Testament, paradeisos was used to refer to heaven itself. Paradeisos in turn was borrowed into Latin as paradisus, descended into Old French as paradis, and finally entered English around 1175. Originally in English it referred only to the Garden of Eden, but by 1300 it could mean any heavenly, Eden-like place.

The combination of the “p” and “r” in the first syllable indicates a place associated with strong energies. The vowel — a short “a” usually — indicates a balanced, even area. The second syllable continues the association with balanced energy, but the third introduces a new theme: a doorway that leads to an expansive place, a region of intellectual and creative pursuits, goal-oriented, conducted with flourish. Does sound rather nice, doesn’t it?

From Proto Indo European ego, which is also the ancestor of Latin ego. The Latin ego simply meant “I”, but was picked up by psychoanalysts in the early 20th century to mean one part of the Self. Ego in Proto Indo European became ekan in Proto Germanic, and then ic in Old English (compare ich in German). Then, around 1100, dialects in the north of England began to shorten ic to i, for unknown reasons. This dialect change slowly spread southward. Ich and ek could still be found occasionally in the north, especially before vowels (e.g. I like apples vs. Ich/ek ate an apple), as late as 1400, and in the south as late as the 1700’s. I has been capitalized since about 1250 in order to distinguish it clearly in handwritten manuscripts.

The standard phonosemantic meaning of the long “i” is an expansive, roomy energy, particularly oriented toward mind and art. It may be that this reflects the usual British/American attitude that the self is something oriented toward reason and creativity. Emotions, after all, are things that the “I” has to deal with, control, or experience; they’re not really thought of as part of the “I” itself. Contrast that with the Old English conception of “I” — ic – a light, tense energy that is contained (presumably contained in your body), or the Latin conception of “I” — ego – which is a hard-working, grounded energy. Also, in our own time, there are the varying pronunciations found in dialects, such as the “I” of the Southeastern United States — pronounced more like ah – a balanced, flat energy. These pronunciations may reflect a great deal about self-image in these societies.