Land of the setting sun
EUROPE, n. I’ve never really thought about this word even though I’ve said it a lot. What brought me to the dictionary entry was my recent work on a collaborative writing project set in a fantasy world. My co-authors pointed out that our made-up continent needed a name, so I started thinking about how people name landmasses in the real world.
Let’s be honest with each other in this email newsletter: Europe doesn’t really deserve continent status. A more sensible accounting would treat all that land as Asia, and in many parts of the world people do learn that Asia or “Eurasia” is one continent.
Still, actual contours of the landmass aside, people have been talking about a place called “Europe” since at least the Homeric hymn to Apollo, which the Online Etymology Dictionary tells me dates to 522 BCE or earlier.
Since this first reference to “Europe” occurs in Greek, you might assume that the word “Europe” comes from Europa, the name of a Phoenician princess from Greek myth. Why anyone might have named the whole place after her, none of my usual dictionaries will tell me. But her name breaks down into something like “wide face/eye,” and she was, as women in myth often are, legendarily beautiful. I found an article on Britannica.com that says “some scholars” extrapolate from Europa meaning “wide face/eye” to Greek sailors referring to shoreline of Europe as “wide-gazing”—because it took up a lot of the horizon—but that feels like a stretch to me.
The “Europa” explanation is not certain, and it’s not the only one. Some linguists have looked to ancient Semitic languages to explain “Europe.” Going all the way back to Akkadian, which is so old it was written in cuneiform, we can find a network of words relating to descent, sunset, and the west, built around the sounds “ereb” or possibly “‘ereb,” where the apostrophe represents a pharyngeal fricative or glottal stop—the character ayin in Arabic and Hebrew (it’s often silent in modern Hebrew). The root ayin-R-B is recognizable if you’re a Hebrew speaker (“erev,” evening) and in Arabic it has shifted slightly to ghayn-R-B (“ghrub,” sunset); the root predates both languages. Credit to the Phoenicians for coming up with the idea of writing those sounds as consonants.
If Europe was named by Akkadians (who lived in what is now Iraq, Syria, part of Iran, and Kuwait) or Phoenicians (who had a seaborne empire and lived all over the Mediterranean, but who originated in what is now Lebanon), it makes total sense that they would call it, essentially, “the land of the setting sun”—the west!
Sunset. Photo by Thomas Bormans on Unsplash.
So nobody really knows why we call it Europe, although I’m partial to the latter explanation. Finding the origin of this word in ancient Mesopotamia would explain separating Europe from Asia, since the Mesopotamians lived right in the middle. Besides, it’s also satisfying to me that this association between “descent’ and “west” crosses cultures; in English, we have the fancy word “occident” for west. It comes from Latin “cadere,” to fall.
Did any of this help me with my fantasy-novel problem? Sort of. It was helpful to think about how we name big geographic areas after either myths or cardinal directions—or something else, we’re really not sure—and whatever sound we pick, the place name tends to be (or become) very similar across many languages.
This week in small-r romance, I took a brief break from tearing through T. Kingfisher’s entire publication history—more on this next week—to read The Queer Principles of Kit Webb by Cat Sebastian, a queer (gay m/demi bi m, both cis) historical romance about tempting a sexy retired highwayman out of the coffeehouse he now runs so he’ll help you rob your rich and shitty dad. It’s also about wearing the perfect outfit for each occasion, fighting sword duels, dismantling the class system, eating cake, and pushing your lover against a tree trunk to kiss him passionately. I don’t want to ruin it, but there is a part with a spider that made me clutch my heart and scream silently. It is tender and subversive and entirely delightful. Full disclosure: I had an advanced review copy from the author. Content warnings: child death (in the past), parental death (in the past), emotional abuse, violence, sex.
A wonderful twitter conversation brought this Merriam-Webster article on the origin of the word “blurb” to my attention. Everything makes so much more sense now that I know it started as a joke.
Apologies for the relative scarcity of books in this newsletter that is usually half dedicated to books! Lately all my time is consumed by working gleefully on the aforementioned collaborative project—you can see why, since I open 15 tabs and write a 500-word essay every time I name one (1) fake place—which is a series of sapphic fantasy novellas about a wandering warrior and an actor falling in love. (It’s way more romantic than my paragraphs about the etymology of “Europe” would indicate.) I’ve also been preparing my sixth novel (a sci-fi romance called Nowhere Else) for publication in June. More on that next week.
