Posted October 4, 2007 With buoyant Soviet ballyhoo and much galactic vaunting, Sputnik was launched on 4 October, 1957. It was the first artificial satellite. ‘Them there pesky Russkies’ had beaten the Americans to space, and paranoia held hourly parades through Washington for years afterward — until the Yankees beat the Russkies to the moon. Here’s a brief note on the etymology of the Russian word sputnik, a note you will not find in the OED or anywhere else. There is even a common word in English related to the word sputnik. Let’s begin with a bit of Russian word building. путь ‘poot’ a Russian word for road, course, path or way. Although it is news to the Oxford English Dictionary, poot is cognate with our English word path. They both probably stem from an Proto-Indo-European verbal root *pend ‘to go, to travel.’ Other modern etymologists suggest that English path may descend from the same PIE root as our word foot. To that Slavic word for path, we will add the most common Russian agent-noun suffix, -nik. It’s like adding –er in English or –ator in Latin, as in the words traveler or gladiator. A traveler is one who travels; a gladiator is one who uses a Roman short sword called a gladius; a pootnik is one who uses a poot, that is, one who travels a path. путник pootnik ‘wayfarer, traveler’ If we want to make a word that suggests the idea of people doing an activity together, we have many verbal ploys in Western languages. One of these is to add something to the word that means ‘together.’ A common way to do this in Latin is to put the preposition cum in front of the word. Cum means ‘with’ or ‘together with’ in Latin and in many, many words derived from Latin in European languages and English, words like incontinent, comfort, coitus, con brio, connaître, conquistador, convince and concierge. Panis is the Latin word for bread. Someone who eats bread with you is thus your companion. He or she may even accompany you on the road. The prime meaning of accompany is ‘to go along with a companion.’ Russians can do the same thing. The Russian word meaning ‘with’ is s or so (in the Cyrillic alphabet of modern Russian: c or co). Adding that s as a prefix to pootnik, we get: Спутник spootnik, sputnik ‘fellow traveller’ A special meaning of the word developed in Soviet astronomical nomenclature where a heavenly body associated with a larger celestial object like a planet could be a fellow traveler or — a satellite. Another apparent newsflash to the Oxford English Dictionary is that the word sputnik is NOT a modern coinage. The word first appears, in the form supotiniku in an ancestor language of modern Russian, a language called in English: Old Church Slavonic. There it is used to translate a Greek word from the New Testament that means ‘companion on a journey.’ Later in Russian history, but before space exporation in the 1950s, the Russian word sputnik meaning “fellow traveller” came to be a term by which one member of the Communist Party referred to another member. The translation of this sense of sputnik entered English too, and in the United States during the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s, the phrase fellow traveller became the label for any American citizen suspected of Communist sympathies. A “fellow traveler” was a pariah during the anticommunist witchhunts fomented by the Cold War and by the satanic schemings of the hysterically sick American senator from Wisconsin, the vile Joseph McCarthy and his diseased henchmen like Roy Cohn and Richard Nixon, legal vultures who perched at inquisitorial desks during HUAC meetings. Slimes like Cohn and Nixon were naturally less in evidence later during the Army-McCarthy hearings which brought McCarthy’s evil reign of fear to an end, as the hate-perfused prairie shit-sack leaked and oozed and shrank into leprous ignominy live on television, so that all of America was forced to share their shame in having given birth to such a bullying monster. Not too long after his public disgrace, it is said McCarthy died of a broken heart. Sometimes there is divine justice. In truth, McCarthy fell dead with a splatt! on his linoleum floor because of sadness, sadness that he had no more young lives to maim and destroy. I personally hope McCarthy is screaming in hell as burly Commie faggots ream his anus hourly with firey pitchforks. The word Sputnik introduced the Russian agent-noun suffic -nik into English and it blasted to instant popularity. There were even neat satirical takes on the word. Awhile after Sputnik, a satellite with a little dog, Laika, zoomed over the USSR. American reporters dubbed it Muttnik. A month later the US Navy's satellite launch failed miserably and it was labeled Kaputtnik!
Cyrillic Alphabet? One of the good, succinct definitions is in Merriam-Webster: “ the alphabet based principally on the Greek uncials that was originally used for writing Old Church Slavonic and that in its modern form with minor variations among the different languages is the alphabet used for Russian and many other Slavic languages and for some non-Slavic languages of the Soviet Union.” Brothers Saint Cyril and Saint Methodius, monks from Thessaloniki, are usually credited with the alphabet's development. The brothers Cyril and Methodius were half-Bulgarians, half Greeks, who were born in Greece at the beginning of ninth century. It is now generally believed that they did not in fact create the Cyrllic alphabet, but did innovative work on an earlier alphabet which they called glagolitsa (from Bulgarian glagol – 'verb'). The Glagolitic letters represented better than any Roman alphabet unique Slavic words and pronunciations. The aim of their alphabet was to enable then new Slavic Christians and Slavonic peoples to understand the Christian Bible, until then largely available only in Greek, Latin and Hebrew. Russian is, of course, an Indo-European language and there are thousands upon thousands of Russian words that have distant relatives in English. Keep it in mind as you scan the skies and perhaps study a few Russian words.
© 2007 William Gordon Casselman
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