All in One Piece
This post owes its existence to a Russian-language Telegram channel called Azokhen Vey, whose author recently described a Latin lesson spent on the Gospel episode of Peter walking on the water. Peter, as one does, begins to sink, and cries out not a brisk salve! but the rather more long-winded salvum me fac—“make me safe.” Why not the shorter word? Because salve means “hello.” A Roman who chose the wrong verb while drowning would have found himself in that well-known comic by Anton Gudim, in which a hand reaching desperately out of the sea is met not with rescue, but with a cheerful high five.
The joke is excellent. What caught my attention, however, was that in Latin “hello” and “save me” grow from the same root. And that root, it turns out, has wandered a great deal further than Latin.
Good health, or else
Latin salvus means “whole, unharmed, safe.” From it come salus, “health, welfare, salvation”; salvere, “to be well”; and salutare, “to greet”—that is, to wish someone good health.
Salve is simply the imperative of salvere: “be well!” Grammatically it is an order; in practice nobody expects to be obeyed. It is a wish, worn so smooth by use that it has become a mere “hello.” I have written before about how an imperative stops commanding and starts wishing, with Turkish as the case in point. The Turks, incidentally, apply the same logic to gratitude: sağ ol, “be healthy,” means “thank you.”
So had Peter cried salve!, his grammar would have been impeccable. He would merely have wished his Master good health, rather than asking for a little of his own.
Safe and sound
English helped itself to this root through French, and not once but several times:
- Old French sauf, from salvus, gave us safe;
- salvare, by way of French sauver, gave us save, and ecclesiastical Latin added salvation;
- salutare gave us salute;
- Italian salva, a “salute of guns,” returned to English as salvo—so an artillery barrage is, etymologically speaking, a very loud “good afternoon.”
The Spanish, raising a glass or hearing a sneeze, say ¡Salud!—“health!” The circle closes: wholeness, health, good wishes.
A man of solid worth
Now for the unexpected turn. From the same Indo-European root Latin also formed solidus, “whole, firm, compact”—whence solid and consolidate, the latter meaning, quite literally, “to make into one whole.”
But solidus was also a coin. Constantine the Great introduced the gold solidus, a full-weight piece of reassuring heft, and for centuries it set the standard of monetary respectability. In Italy its descendant shrank into the humble soldo—the coin, if you recall, for which Pinocchio sold his spelling book, four soldi the lot. And soldo was also pay. A man who serves for pay is a soldato, and so English acquired the soldier.
A soldier, then, is etymologically “a man on a salary,” and the salary is “a whole coin.” Safe and sound, as a soldier ought ideally to remain.
The whole lot
In Greek an initial s- regularly turns into h-, and the Indo-European *solwos duly became ὅλος, “whole, entire.” From it come words one would hardly expect to meet at the same dinner party:
- holocaust: ὁλόκαυστος, “wholly burnt,” the Septuagint’s term for a sacrifice consumed entirely by fire;
- catholic: καθ’ ὅλου, “throughout the whole,” that is, universal;
- hologram: “the whole written down,” an image in which every fragment contains the whole.
Salvation, greeting, soldiery, burnt offerings, and laser pictures: one family, and not an especially harmonious one.
The looking-glass
The most charming part of the story is that it happened twice. Indo-European had a second root meaning “whole,” *kailo-, and from it English has whole, heal, health, hale, hail, and holy. Polish, for good measure, has cały, “whole”—and całować, “to kiss.” The Slavs kept the whole set. Croatian has cijel, “whole,” and iscijeliti, “to heal”; and Polish, from the same root, has całować, “to kiss.” A kiss, it seems, was originally a wish for one’s good health.
The logic is identical: wholeness, health, salvation, greeting, sanctity. Hail! is related to whole exactly as salve is related to salvus. Two quite different roots travelled the same road, as though humanity were simply incapable of thinking otherwise: to wish your neighbour well is to wish him to remain in one piece.
English has even repeated the trick in its farewells. Goodbye is a contraction of “God be with ye”—another wish, so thoroughly worn down that nobody notices it any more.
Make me whole
Back to Peter. Salvum me fac is not merely “save me”; it is, quite literally, “make me whole.” The phrase contains health, rescue, and the very wholeness from which soldiers, solid citizens, and holograms would one day spring.
And the comic is still funny. A drowning man waves; from the shore comes a hearty “Salve!”—“Be well!” The sentiment is unimpeachable. One could only wish for a hand to go with it.
