Contrasting Perspectives on Beauty from the Parent-Language of Greek and Latin

With the support of a CHS summer fellowship, I advanced my book project, Beauty and the Beautiful in Greek and Indo-European: A Study in Morphology, Etymology, and Conceptual Relations, which will be published in the series Brill’s Studies in Indo-European Languages & Linguistics. This work is designed to put Greek and Indo-European etymology into context from the perspective of both linguistic form and cultural meaning. It specifically deals with the origin of Ancient Greek κάλλος ‘beauty’ and καλός ‘beautiful’ from Proto-Indo-European (PIE). The question of the origin of this word-family is wrapped up in the analysis of patterns of both word-formation and conceptualization. The core argument is that the prehistory of καλός, when properly set in the context of Indo-European word-formation, reveals a particular pathway among several by which the linguistic ancestors of the Greeks conceived of beauty.

Through the gathering of data from other IE languages undertaken at the CHS, I determined that a major node in the network of ideas leading to beauty in the prehistoric speech community ancestral to that of the Greeks was the concept form, which PIE speakers demonstrably – but not exclusively – conceptualized as a covering that enveloped an object and thereby constituted its outward appearance, as, prototypically, the technology of clothing does for the human being. That this was the specific pathway leading to the meaning of the καλός-family is evident from morphological analysis based on vestigial patterns in the form of words both within Greek and its relatives. While the adjective καλός reflects a Proto-Greek stem in *-wó- (*kəl-wó-s), the substantive κάλλος reflects an s-stem *kə́l-yos-. Since the material after the root is associable with nominal stems, namely those in *-u- and *-i- respectively, which could be used as substantives, it may be hypothesized that the adjective *kəl-wó-s ancestral to καλός reflects a derivative, by means of the possessive suffix *-ó- (cf. ἐρυμνός ‘having protection, protected’ ← ἔρυμα ‘protection’), of a u-stem substantive *ḱól-u-/ḱél-u-, whose root is identifiable as *√ḱel ‘cover’ (cf. English helmet, Latin cēlāre ‘conceal’, Greek καλύπτω ‘cover’).

In parallel fashion, there is evidence that alongside this u-stem stood an i-stem *ḱól-i-/ḱél-i- meaning ‘covering’. Because these nouns both meant ‘covering’, they could be used in the figurative sense ‘outward appearance’ and thus ‘form’ as a function of a metonymy covering for form. Since, moreover, the generic concept form is predisposed to represent the specific notion of positively valued appearance (cf. generic shape: specific in shape), it is understandable that, when *ḱól-u-/ḱél-u- and *ḱól-i-/ḱél-i- formed possessive derivatives in *-ó-, the resultant adjectives *ḱl̥-u̯-ó-s and *ḱl̥-i̯-ó-s would both have borne the positive meaning ‘of good form’ and therefore ‘shapely, beautiful’ (cf. Latin fōrma ‘form’ → formōsus ‘beautiful’). While the latter meaning is directly reflected in the adjective καλός, the noun κάλλος ‘beauty’ originated from the substantivization, by means of the suffix *-s- (Ionic στεῖνος ‘narrow space; distress’ ← στεινός ‘narrow’ [Attic στενός]), of the adjective *ḱl̥-i̯-ó-s ‘beautiful’ (→ *ḱĺ̥-i̯-o-s- ‘beautiful-ness’).

A major finding of my time at the CHS constituted a counterpoint to the conception of beauty echoed in καλός. While the etymology of the Greek word for beauty points to the role of external superficies such as, for example, clothing in the conceptualization of form and beauty (cf. Homeric formula εἵματα καλά “fine clothes”), the etymology of Latin pulcher ‘beautiful’ points to a notably different basis for and thus kind of beauty. Observation of how pulcher is used in Old Latin reveals that the kind of property pulcher especially served to express primarily pertained to integral bodies, whether of humans and animals or of physical beings generally. A particularly striking datum is Festus’ pulcher bos appellatur ad eximiam pinguitudinem perductus “a bull is called pulcher when it has been brought to a state of exceptional plumpness”.

While some idea of the phonological preform of pulcher had been effectively secured in previous research, namely, a Proto-Italic *porkro- (vel sim.) later dissimilated to the *polkro- ancestral to pulcher (Old Latin polcer), the morphological analysis of this preform and thus the etymology of its root have been poorly understood. The etymology that best coheres with both the preform *porkro- and the body-focused semantics in Old Latin is based on identification of the *por– of *porkro- with the preverb por- ‘forth’ (e.g. portendō ‘stretch [to show] forth’, cf. literal prōtendō ‘stretch forth’), which is cognate with the παρ– of παρθένος ‘damsel’ < *pr̥-sténo- ‘with breasts [now] forth’), and of the *–kr– of *porkro- with the cr– of crēscō ‘grow’ – an analysis rendered probable by the reflection in Latin of words originating from the collocation of *ḱreh₁– ‘grow’ with effectively the same preverb (e.g. prōcreō ‘produce’, prōcērus ‘tall, lofty, long’ < *‘grown forth’). On the basis of this collocation, PIE speakers created a compound *pr̥-ḱr̥h₁-ó- ‘grown forth’ that would regularly develop to *pr̥-ḱr-ó- within the proto-language.

Crucially, *pr̥-ḱr-ó-s would have developed an aesthetic meaning as a function of an entirely different route to form from the one apparent in *ḱl̥-u̯-ó-s. Since natural growth is the basic way by which a salient class of entities, namely humans and animals, achieve their form (cf. Homeric φυήν ‘in [fine] growth’ [A 115]), a metonymy grown for formed arguably conditioned the emergence of a sense ‘well-formed’ intimately connected with the full-figured condition of the body (cf. Mod. Hebr. barí’ ‘healthy, hale, lusty, bonny; stout, robust’, PDE sense of thick ‘voluptuous’). In contrast, the preform of καλός, as a function of covering for form, was originally used in reference to the entire outward appearance of an entity. This identifiable contrast in conceptualization is a major fruit of the CHS fellowship, which has facilitated the systematization of etymology in reconstructing the various ways by which the linguistic ancestors of the Greeks assigned value and meaning to their experiences.