νᾶνος (nanos) Greek ‘dwarf’

By using ultra-fine polymer fibers researchers have been able to regrow damaged or missing organs and limbs on small animals.

 A nanoscaffold forms a substructure for healing muscle, bone, and nerve tissue, this scaffold being composed of a grid or scaffold or reticulum (net) of fibers hundreds of times thinner than a human hair. Fluid containing the tiny fibers is injected between the severed nerve endings to build a nanoscaffold. The net-like grid of such fibers can be seeded with human growth cells and perhaps even with architectural chemical instructions on how and where to grow! With the help of this initial support grid, the nerves grow back together more quickly and more efficiently and more densely. The very title of the one of the earliest journal articles to use the term (2002) summarizes the tale: Nano-Fibrous Scaffolding Architecture Enhances Protein Adsorption and Cell Attachment, Kyung Mi Woo, Victor J. Chen, and Peter X. Ma, University of Michigan.

An early synonym for nanoscaffold is also explanatory: artificial extracellular matrices. The original idea was that these artificial nano-fibrous polymer strands and nets and lattices would mimic the structure of natural collagen fibers (fibroblasts). And they do! The fibrous reticulum is more porous, has more tiny holes for cell attachment and protein adsorption than natural fibroblasts provide. To quote the journal abstract, “results demonstrate that the biomimetic nano-fibrous architecture serves as superior scaffolding for tissue engineering.”

American Cave Salamander (Eurycea lucifuga)

 

One piece of research that set scientists thinking of nanoscaffolding was analysis of a salamander’s tail. No matter how many times a tale is lost or cut off, a salamander’s tail grows back. But a human toe chopped off does not grow back. Why?

When first amputated, human and salamander bodies respond similarly. Yet shortly after such an excision, human and salamander healing processes differ. A human stump bleeds and the wound or amputated part develops a scar whose tough horny tissue inhibits the human body’s ability to regenerate the body part and the healing process terminates with abundant scar tissue.

A salamander’s tail stump does not scar over. Instead salamander blood vessels contract quickly and a layer of thin skin is rapidly produced to cover the wound. After a few days, this new skin layer signals cells called apical epithelial caps (AEC) that are essential for regrowth. Fibroblasts move in to form a structural framework for new tissue and eventually to form a blastema, thus forming a new limb.

In 2006, a team of neuroscientists recreated in mice a traumatic brain injury by severing the optic nerve causing the mice to experience blindness. The scientists injected nanoscaffold particles and watched as the nerves regrew and the mice’s sight was restored.

Researchers from the University of Sheffield in England used nanoscaffolding in 2006 to repair skin damage in people with third degree burns. An American soldier’s lost fingertip has been regrown including the bone, the nail and the tissue.

American Christian Bigotry Harms the Pursuit of Knowledge

By the way, some of this was stem cell research, the kind banned and forbidden by the George Bush administration, at the behest of Bush's born-again, anti-science evangelical bigots and rightwing religious nincompoops. Among the many advantages of the Obama presidency will be the lifting of these ignorant, medieval prohibitions on scientific research. America is sending back to their holy-roller churches the brain-dead born-agains who imagine that their god wants paraplegics never to walk again. A vindictive old deity, you would agree. But one, sadly, that perfectly matches the portrait we read of him in the Christians’ Old Testament.

Scientific Use of Nano-

Nano-, the chiefly scientific prefix is common in 20th century technical terms like nanotechnology, nanoplankton, nanolitre, nanobacterium, nanorobot and nanotube.

Precise Metric Use of Nano-

In the nomenclature of the metric system, the prefix nano- has a specific mathematical meaning, namely, ‘one billionth part of’, so that a nanosecond is one billionth of a second and a nanolitre is a teeny droplet indeed, being one billionth of a litre.

 

My New Etymology of nanos and Derivatives

 νᾶνος Greek nanos ‘dwarf’

Some dictionaries claim nanos is akin to other ancient Greek words like nanna, nenna ‘aunt.’

The Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary enunciates a relationship with our English word nun:

“Etymology: Middle English, from Old English nunne, from Late Latin nonna nun, child's nurse; of baby-talk origin like Greek nanna, nenna female relative, aunt, Welsh nain grandmother, Albanian nanë mother, child's nurse, Russian nyanya child's attendant, Sanskrit nana mother, little mother.”

All fine and dandy as a source route for aunt and granny terms, but I don’t think nanos fits here. This is not the origin of a word meaning ‘dwarf.’ I posit that the etymology of nanos is a primitive reduplication form, a simple doubling of a negative particle. In my view of its origin, nanos is a rejective, abusive compound. In other words, a dwarf to primitive speakers of Indo-European was a no-no of human form (in Proto-Indo-European *ne-ne or *na-na) hence an eventual Hellenic reflex like nanos.

Is there any proof for my supposition? None — except for the meagre cogency of semantic logic. Were our ancestral aunts and grannies all dwarves, living under toadstools and riding wee beetles like teeny fairy folk? Could the ancients not distinguish between the shrinkage of old age and dwarfism? I imagine they could. Were little people routinely vilified in unenlightened eras of human life as stubby no-nos? Of course they were!

I suggest that the Latin word for dwarf, nanus is not a cognate but a direct borrowing of the Greek etymon.

Latin for Dwarf = Nanus

The Latin word spread through the Romance languages of Europe early, giving us forms like:

French nain ‘dwarf’

Italian nano ( thus “Snow White and the Seven Dwarves” in Italian is Biancaneve e i sette nani. Snow White in Italian is White (bianca) Snow (neve).

Spanish enano

Dos enanos, two dwarfs, appear in Velazquez’ most analyzed painting, Las Meninas (Spanish, ‘the maids of honour’) one of the earliest meditations (1656 CE) in paint on the blurred line between reality and illusion. Dwarves populated many a European court during the 16th and 17th centuries, not always, as here, as playmates for royal children, but also as tokens of good luck and as deformed curiosities of nature. Due to courtly inbreedings, the incidence of achondroplasia, the most common form of dwarfism, was high, and often dwarves were the unwanted spawn of royal women, too misshapen ever to be allowed legal inheritance or public admission to the recognized family.

 

Portugues anão

Maltese nanu (Was Robin Williams listening?)

Sardinian nannu

 

A Latin Proverb about Little People

inter pygmaeos regnat nanus.

My translation: “Among pygmies, even a dwarf is king.”

Its semantic match is found in a similar proverb: In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. It is a nifty putdown of a bad leader.

Although the word Pygmy today refers to short-statured tribal peoples who live in central Africa and also in southeast Asia, the word Pygmy is first found in Greek mythology. The Greek word pygme was a measurement term, the length of the arm from elbow to wrist, hence a very short measure of length, around 13 inches.

Pygmies riding goats battle those pesky cranes on an ancient Greek vase.

The mythological Greek Pygmies were especially famous for their battle with the cranes, as described in Homer. Depictions of their battle were very commonplace, particularly on pottery. No reason for the widespread popularity of this Greek story has been adduced by classicists.

Pugnacious Pygmies

 

On an Attic red-figure vase, a pygmy clubs to death a vicious crane.

 

In 1601 Philemon Holland published a delightful translation of Pliny's Natural History. The Historia naturalis by Gaius Plinius Secundus, 23-79 CE, was the famous enclycopedist's attempt to "romanize" the extant scientific knowledge of the day, to take it from Greek and make it at home in Latin. In his Natural History, Pliny gives his version of the pygmies and the cranes:

“And these pretie people Homer also reporteth to be much troubled and annoied by cranes. The speech goeth, that in the Spring time they set out all of them in battell array, mounted upon the backe of rammes and goats, armed with bowes and arrowes, and so downe to the sea side they march, wheere they make foule worke among the egges and young cranelings newly hatched, which they destroy without all pitie. Thus for three moneths this their journey and expedition continueth, and then they make an end of their valiant service: for otherwise if they should continue any longer, they were never able to withstand the new flights of this foule, growne to some strength and bignesse. As for their houses and cottages, made they are of clay or mud, fouls feathers, and birds egge shels.”

 

 

Although there is no cogent extant explanation for the story of the pygmies’ battle with the cranes, it may have been a mightily garbled and botched attempt at telling the story of European crane migration, a lively little tale that became mingled with the supposition that cranes were large enough to pluck pygmy babies from their reed cradles and gobble the wee babes up with unseemly delight.

 

The popularity of the crane-pygmy story continued well into medieval times, as the two woodcuts show.

With a distasteful crane bashing, here ends today’s nanoetymology.