Etymology occasionally hands one a plot that any detective novelist would envy. Take Serbian. The snail there is a puž. A cheerful little word, and at first glance an entirely opaque one. What could it possibly have to do with snails?
Everything, as it turns out. But to see it, one has to undo about fifteen centuries of sound change.
The Vanishing Act
Puž is what remains of the Proto-Slavic root *pьlz- ‘to crawl’—the root that gives Russian its ordinary verb for crawling to this day. Three separate processes conspired to squeeze it into a single syllable:
- The L goes liquid. Hard /ł/ (close to that in all) in the Proto-Slavic root began softening into a semivowel /w/—the same sound English keeps in w, Polish writes as ł, and Belarusian as ў.
- The OU collapses. With the L thus dissolved, the resulting /ow/ duly became a long /uː/. (Old Church Slavonic, following Greek practice, long wrote this vowel as the digraph ОY; over time the O shrank to a little loop on the tail of the У and then vanished altogether—a spelling reform performed by sheer laziness.)
- The Z is palatalised. The final touch: a soft /z’/—the sound of a genteel lisp—hardened forward into Ž /ʒ/, the s of pleasure.
And so the cumbersome pьlz- folded itself neatly into puž. The Serbian snail is, quite simply, the crawler.
The Same Idea, in Another Family Entirely
Here is where it becomes interesting for an English speaker, because English did exactly the same thing—and left the evidence lying about in plain sight.
Our snail is Old English snægl, from a Proto-Germanic *snagila-, which is a diminutive. The base is a Germanic root meaning—yes—‘to creep, to crawl.’ A snail is a little creeper.
Now look who else grew from that root:
- snake — Old English snaca, the creeper proper, without the diminutive;
- sneak — Old English snīcan ‘to creep,’ the same idea applied to human conduct.
So snail, snake and sneak are not three words that merely happen to begin with sn-. They are close relations, all three named for the manner of getting about. The snail is the small one, the snake is the long one, and the sneak is the one you invite to dinner.
The rest of Germanic kept the family too: German Schnecke, Swedish snigel, Dutch dialectal snegel. And if you have ever had a Zimtschnecke with your coffee, you have eaten a cinnamon crawler.
Two Families, One Idea
Slavic and Germanic parted company several thousand years ago and worked out their vocabularies independently. Yet confronted with the same animal, both arrived at the same solution, and both by way of a verb of motion. Serbian says the crawler; English says the little creeper.
Which is, when you think about it, rather a modest achievement on the snail’s part. Of all the qualities available—the shell, the horns, the eyes on stalks, the silver trail, the improbable capacity for being delicious with garlic butter—two whole language families independently settled on the fact that it is slow.
The creature has been trying to live that down ever since.
