One of the quickest ways to absorb everyday digital vocabulary is to switch your devices over to the language you’re learning. That’s how I picked up a fair amount of Turkish, paylaşmak — “to share” — among the rest. You know the one: the little button for sending someone a link, a picture, a file.
My Turkish grammar has reached what I’d call the Jabberwocky stage: I can see the shape of a word before I know what its root means. Carroll’s ballad is the finest demonstration in English of how much of a sentence lives in its grammar rather than its vocabulary. The toves are slithy — that’s an adjective, no argument about it, and there are several toves, and they are busy doing two things at once in a place. Not one of those content words means anything, and yet you could be examined on who did what to whom and you would pass. English tells you all of it through inflection, word order and the handful of function words holding the frame together.
Turkish and I are at roughly that stage: I parse the suffixes confidently and take my chances with the roots. Which means paylaşmak comes apart without trouble:
- the root pay- “share” +
- -la- (a suffix forming verbs from nouns and adjectives) = paylamak, which in the modern language means “to scold” — apparently there’s more than one way to give someone their share +
- -ş- (the reciprocal suffix, turning the action back on one another — English gets at this with each other: not embracing oneself but embracing each other) +
- -mak (the infinitive suffix)
— which gives us “to share.” And here is where an English speaker has to be told something a Turkish speaker never notices: pay is pronounced /paj/. The word rhymes with English pie and not, despite the spelling being identical letter for letter, with English pay. Hold on to that, because the whole business turns on it.
The word caught my attention because Russian has pay as well — dated but alive in legal usage, meaning a share or stake in a partnership. It’s a Turkic loan; when and by which route nobody can say for certain, though it turns up in writing no earlier than the eighteenth century and most likely came in with the Tatar merchants who handled Russia’s trade with the East. That much is a footnote. The interesting part is where the Turkic word came from, and what it accidentally collides with on the way.
One trail leads to Persian: Turkish pay from پای برابر pây-berâber “equally,” literally “on an equal foot,” from the older پای pây “foot” — which, you’ll note, also rhymes with pie. And that takes us all the way back to Proto-Indo-European *pṓds — *pedés, the ancestor of English foot — feet, Greek πούς — ποδός and Latin pēs — pedis. You have been standing on that root your whole life: it is under your pedestrian, your pedal, your pedicure, your podium, your tripod and your octopus. Persian and English are cousins here, several thousand years removed, and the foot is the family silver.
A rival hypothesis takes Turkic pay back instead to Middle Chinese 派, a word about branching and splitting off — the arm of a river, a faction breaking from a school. In modern Mandarin that character is pài. Which, once again, sounds like pie.
So here is the pile-up. English pay “to remit” is spelled exactly like Turkish pay and is pronounced differently, and it isn’t related — it comes from French, from Latin pācāre “to satisfy, to pacify,” which is a lovely thing to find sitting next to a word for sharing, and a complete coincidence. English pie is spelled differently and is pronounced exactly like Turkish pay, and it isn’t related either — its origins are genuinely obscure. And Chinese, having its own perfectly good 派 sitting in the dictionary at pài, reaches for that very character when it needs to write a foreign word that sounds the same: it spells the number pi with it, and it spells the American dessert with it too. The character at the heart of one etymological hypothesis about “share” is also the character on a menu next to a slice of apple.
So that’s how the pie crumbles. And since we’re all commanded to share, I’m dividing it up with you. Hope you enjoyed your slice.
