What's In a Name?
I like to dabble in a number of languages. One of the languages that caught my interest recently was Lithuanian. I started looking into it after I saw a tweet describing it as the most conservative living Indo-European language. As I discovered after my first few lessons, this means it is nothing like most other Indo-European languages that I have studied before. The Lithuanian phrase for “what is your name” is koks tavo vardas or koks yra tavo vardas? You can sort of see a similarity with some other Indo-European languages in some of those words, but the word vardas threw me. It was nothing like other words for name that I had seen. So where did vardas come from? It turns out that this was a good example of the conservatism I had seen mentioned before. I looked into it, and I found that the Lithuanian vardas derives from the Proto-Balto-Slavic *warda-, and that is believed to have come from the Proto-Indo-European *werdʰo. The Lithuanian word for name comes from the same place as our word for word.