"Well," said Pooh, "what I like best," and then he had to stop and think. Because although Eating Honey was a very good thing to do, there was a moment just before you began to eat it which was better than when you were, but he didn't know what it was called.
-- A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh
Since everyone already knows where "chocolate" comes from (the Nahuatl xocolatl, duh!), today's Eat Your Words is about a sweet substance that does double duty as a term of endearment: "
From the earliest days of humans having anything that could be called civilization, honey has been the epitome of sweetness, joy, and nature's bounty. An 8,000-year-old cave painting in Valencia, Spain, shows a human figure harvesting honey from a hive while bees swarm around, while remains of actual honey have been found on the inside of clay pots in a Georgian tomb dating back to at least 2700 B.C. Ancient Egyptian and Middle Eastern cultures even used it to embalm their dead, since honey alone, among non-synthetic foods, magically keeps forever.
So, understandably, the word's history goes back a ways, to what linguists call Proto-Indo-European, or PIE for short. According to the widely held PIE theory, almost all of the European languages and the languages spoken from Iran to India came from one source, a group of people who probably lived somewhere between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. This group of people somehow successfully spread out all over Eurasia, and languages as seemingly different as Greek, German, Latin, and Hindi all evolved out of that mother tongue.
No one knows exactly what PIE sounded like, but linguists have worked backward to figure out what kind of language would result in the similarities between such a diverse group. By their estimation, the original word for "honey" was melit, which gave Greek its melis, Latin its mel, Sanskrit its madhu, and us, eventually, words like "mellifluous" and "Melissa."
Why didn't English pick up a word like the French miel to describe Winnie-the-Pooh's favorite food? Well, at some point, the Germanic branch of the Indo-European family started to do things a little differently. Instead of going from the PIE melit, the people hanging out around the North Sea started describing honey by its color, using the PIE word for "golden yellow": k(e)neko (the parentheses around the "e" means that it wasn't always necessary). That became ancient Germanic huna(n)go, which became honung in Old Norse, and then hunig in Old English. Between Old English and now, the letter "g" following an "i" or an "e" sound has tended to drop away or turn into a "y," meaning that the Medieval hunig became our modern-day "honey."
So as you're hanging out with your honey tonight, be thankful for a few solid millennia of language change toward the mellifluous--back in the day, you would have had to choke out a romantic "hi, k'neko!" when they walked in the door.