Learning Turkish goes on rewarding me with marvellous revelations. The latest unit of the textbook produced a trio of new words: heykel “sculpture, statue,” heykeltıraş “sculptor,” and yontmak “to sculpt.”
Out of the cradle of civilisation
Begin with heykel. It came into Turkish from the Arabic هَيْكَل (haykal), and its semantics are gloriously overloaded: “temple” (Haykal Süleyman, the Temple of Solomon), “altar,” “structure,” “framework”—and, in modern usage, the chassis of a motor car.
Dig further and the word turns out to be West Semitic, having entered Arabic by way of Akkadian from Sumerian 𒂍𒃲 (é-gal)—“great house,” a temple or a palace.
So a Turkish schoolchild learning the word for “statue” is handling, without knowing it, a piece of vocabulary older than the alphabet.
Craft & technique
Heykeltıraş is heykel + tıraş, the latter from Persian تراش (tarâş), “to shave, to scrape.” (Turkish still uses it for exactly that: a barber gives you a tıraş.)
And that Persian word is a relation of some very respectable English company. It goes back to the Proto-Indo-European root *tetḱ-, “to cut, to hew, to fashion with an axe”—which also produced the Greek τέχνη, “craft, skill,” whence our technique, technical and technology; and Latin textilis, “woven,” whence textile and text itself.
Which is worth pausing over. Technology, textiles and texts are all, etymologically, things that have been cut and joined. The carpenter and the essayist are in the same trade.
The Turkic approach
The verb yontmak, by contrast, is purely Turkic. It means “to give shape by cutting, planing, chipping away,” and comes from Proto-Turkic *yōn-, “planing, whittling.”
So sculpture in Turkish revolves entirely around the hand of the stonemason, the carpenter, the whittler. No abstraction anywhere: you take a thing and you take bits off it.
What English does with it
Our own sculpture comes from Latin sculpō, “to carve, to cut,” from scalpō, “to scratch, to scrape”—which is also, as you will have suspected, the source of scalp and scalpel. Behind it stands the Proto-Indo-European *(s)kelH-, “to cut,” a root of considerable productivity: from it come shell (the thing split off), shield (the board cut from a tree), and skull.
But the interesting English word here is not sculpture. It is carve.
Carve is Old English ceorfan, and it goes back to the Proto-Indo-European *gerbʰ-, “to scratch, to incise.” And the Greek reflex of that same root is γράφω—which began as “I scratch” and ended as “I write.” Every -graphy in the language, every graph, graphic and paragraph, is a scratch mark.
Nor is that an isolated accident. Our verb write is Old English wrītan, whose first meaning was “to score, to incise, to cut a figure into a surface”; its German cousin ritzen still means simply “to scratch.” The Anglo-Saxons wrote by carving, because at first the only writing they had was runes cut into wood and stone.
So in English—as in Persian, as in Greek—the sculptor and the writer are not doing analogous things. They are doing the same thing, and the language never troubled to distinguish them.
The same method everywhere
Which is where all these roads meet. Michelangelo said it and everybody quotes him: the sculptor merely removes everything that is not the statue.
The languages agree. Whether you scrape, shave, plane, chip, scratch or incise, the operation is subtraction—and the word for it turns out, more often than not, to be the word for writing.
There is the great power of the Word for you. Though how else could it have been, when it was precisely the Word that was there in the beginning?
