When I say the word “monster” you might think  of this or this or even this .

We might use   it to describe something huge or intimidating,  but what most of us don’t think about is where   the word came from.

As far as our brains  are concerned, word origins are irrelevant.

All that matters is that you think of  the same thing I do when I speak it.

So why do we bother searching for the origins of  words?

To answer that question (and many more),   I’m excited to introduce Otherwords,   a show all about language, hosted by sociolinguist  and certified word nerd Dr. Erica Brozovsky.

Thanks, Dr. Z!

The study of the  origins of words, known as etymology,   goes way deeper than just opening a  dictionary.

Just like living creatures,   words don’t pop up fully-formed.

They evolve over  thousands of years, with ancestors that stretch   back to the earliest Homo sapiens.

Tracing the  history of a word shows us how human ideas change   over time, and reveals connections between  cultures that would otherwise be forgotten.

So let’s follow this monster’s  footprints into the prehistoric past,   across multiple continents and several languages,  to a place that only exists in theory... “Monster” entered the English lexicon as a  version of the French monstre sometime between   the 11th and 13th centuries, as a result  of the Norman Occupation of England.

When   William the Conqueror invaded England and  installed a bunch of French nobles to rule it,   they brought a lot of French words with  them.

This is one of the reasons why   English, though technically a Germanic  language, is filled with Latin words.

Because the invaders were the new aristocracy  in England, their fancy Latin words tended to   be things related to government, academia, and  technology.

To this day, English words for simple   or domestic things are usually Germanic in origin,  like house, food and bread, while words that are   more “intellectual” are usually from Latin, like  representative, dissertation, and combustion.

This class distinction was so dramatic that  when peasants raised livestock on their farms,   they used the Anglo-Saxon words pig, sheep, and  cow.

But when the meat was served to the nobles,   they switched to the French:  pork, mutton, and beef.

But how did France get words from Rome?

You can thank Julius Caesar for that.

Around 55 B.C., he invaded what is now  France, which at the time was occupied   by a Celtic-speaking people known as the Gauls.

Over time, a colloquial version of Latin called   Vulgar Latin mixed with the Gallic language  to create what we now know as French.

In fact,   all the romance languages, including Italian,  Spanish and Portuguese, evolved from Vulgar Latin.

Like most French words, monstre has a Latin root:  monstrum, which meant evil omen.

At the time,   the appearance of strange creatures  or animals with birth defects was   considered a warning that something bad was  about to happen.

It may seem silly today,   but you can kind of see how, long before  anyone understood genetic mutation or prenatal   development, having a two-headed goat pop up  on your farm might make you feel like someone   was trying to tell you something--and  that something probably wasn’t good.

Monstrum was derived from the Latin verb monere,  which meant “to warn, remind or instruct.”   A lot of other English words are derived from  monere, like premonition, admonish, demonstrate   and monitor.

When words share an original  root like this, we call them cognates.

Cognate comes from the Latin for “born together,”   essentially implying that these words are  siblings.

Incidentally, since they share   a common parent, the words nation, nature  and pregnancy are all cognates of cognate.

Some people think that the Roman goddess Juno  Moneta was also named after monere, because,   as the protectress of the city’s funds, she  “warned” against economic instability.

Her name is   where we get the words money and mint, so if true,  we can add them to the list of monster’s cognates.

It seems like the word monster has changed a lot  since its origins in Ancient Rome, but maybe not   as much as you’d think.

Today, we don’t explicitly associate monsters with  bad omens, but it is there if you look for it.

I mean, what is Godzilla but a warning about  the dangers of atomic power?

Mary Shelley   used Frankenstein’s monster as a warning about  scientific hubris, and even George Romero used   zombies to warn us about social ills like racism,  commercialism, and inequality.

Somehow, the   notion of scary beasts being harbingers of worse  things to come is still somewhere in our psyche.

That’s why I named my show Monstrum, because  when you spend your life studying monsters, you   start to see that underneath the teeth and claws  and fur are human fears about very real things.

Okay, so we’ve established that the scary,  mythical beast we now call “monster,” was   originally monere, a warning or a lesson.

But is  that the end of the road?

After all, monere didn’t   come out of nowhere.

It, too, must have ancestors.

But to find them, we have to travel back before   the written word, which means we don’t have much  hard evidence, and have to rely instead on theory.

In the late 18th century, the British philologist  William Jones noticed striking similarities   between seemingly unrelated languages  like English, Greek, Celtic and Sanskrit.

The similarities were too frequent to be  coincidental, and often followed similar patterns.

He theorized that several of the major language  groups were actually descended from the same   grandparent language, which linguists  today call Proto-Indo-European, or PIE.

There are several theories about where and when  PIE was spoken, but the most popular puts it   just north of the Black Sea, about 4500 to 2500  B.C.

As these ancient people spread throughout   Europe and Asia, their dialects diverged  and mixed with local populations to become   early versions of several large language groups.

Today, there are over 400 spoken languages   that descended from Proto-Indo-European,  comprising 3.2 billion native speakers.

To be clear, there is no direct evidence of PIE.

It exists only in theory, though that theory is   pretty widely accepted.

Not a whole lot is known  about its speakers, but if we look at which words   modern Indo-European languages have in common,  we can guess what kind of world they lived in…   what food they ate, what terrain they inhabited,   what technologies they used.

And by tracing  the pronunciations of words over time,   linguists can even triangulate back  to what PIE may have sounded like.

The Latin monere is most likely a derivative  of the Proto-Indo-European root men-, which   meant “to think.” There are thousands of words  around the world that descend from this source,   like the Russian mnit, the Sanskrit manayati, and  plenty in English like mental, memory, and mania.

Now maybe it feels like we’ve gone too far back in  time to discover anything that would be relevant   to us today.

But I think it makes sense that  “monster” and “mind” are cognates.

These are   creatures that spring from our imagination,  inspired by fear or anger or guilt.

Most popular   monsters of fiction are metaphors for something  psychological, whether it’s the sexual anxiety of   Dracula, the split personality of Dr. Jekyll, or  the grief of The Babadook.

And when Jim Henson had   to come up with a cast of muppets to help children  understand their emotions, he chose monsters.

Etymology doesn’t just show us how words evolve  over time, but how ideas evolve.

It’s almost like   tracing the thought process of human civilization.

And though it’s taken hundreds of years for   linguists to track this monster all the way back  to the shores of the Black Sea, in some ways,   the connection was there the whole time.

How many  of us as small children insisted that there was