The English word "body" is a bit of a mystery. It's descended from the old English "bodig," but beyond that, no one knows where it came from, and it has no confirmed existing cognates.
Other Indo-European languages tend to use some derivation of the Proto-Indo-European root "kwrep," as in the French "corps," in Spanish, "cuerpo," or the root "leip," which meant to stick or adhere, and gave us the German "Leib," Swedish "liv," and English "life." As we've covered before, Proto-Indo-European is a hypothetical language spoken by people some scholars suggest lived near the Black Sea some 8,000 years ago.
It's the ancestor of hundreds of existing languages, including Spanish, German, Sanskrit, Persian, Swedish, Italian, Armenian, and of course English.
Comparative linguists have been able to deduce a fair bit about Proto-Indo-European culture by discovering common word origins.
For example, since several languages as disparate as Sanskrit, Greek and Dutch have similar words for wheel, it stands to reason that the Proto Indo Europeans had wheeled vehicles, and linguists have reconstructed a PIE root, "k-w-el." However, we don't need comparative linguistics to tell us that the Proto-Indo-Europeans had bodies, body parts would've probably been one of the first things that ancient peoples gave names to.
So not only do we find hundreds of cognates and permutations, but also widespread use in idioms, slang and other figures of speech.
Since our bodies have been with us literally from the beginning, we can learn a lot about language by investigating their etymologies.
I'm Dr. Erica Brozovsky, and this is "Otherwords." Otherwords. Let's start at the top. The top of the body, that is.
Head comes from the old English "heafod," which in turn originated from the PIE root "kaput." Dozens of English words are descended from the Latin version, including "captain," "capital," "decapitate," "chief," "chapter, and "cattle." You might be wondering how one gets from "kaput" to "heafod," since they really don't sound anything alike.
This question is actually behind one of the greatest leaps in the study of linguistics.
