Etymon #59
Worth your salt
The word entered English in the late thirteenth century from Old French, itself drawn from Latin. The Latin form named an allowance given to Roman soldiers, money set aside for them to buy a commodity. Pliny the Elder, the Roman author and natural philosopher who died in the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD, discussed the practice in his Natural History, a 37-volume encyclopaedia of the ancient world. Behind the Latin noun lay a single word, one of the most traded commodities in the ancient world.
Latin carried it into Old French, and Old French brought it to English by the late thirteenth century. The Latin form had been in use for centuries before that, part of the daily provision given to soldiers across the Roman Empire. The road along which the commodity was transported was one of the oldest trade routes in Italy, running from Rome to the Adriatic coast. The word had taken root in the three other Romance languages, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese, before it crossed into French.
Behind the Latin noun lay a single word, sal, meaning 'salt', from a Proto-Indo-European root *sal- also meaning 'salt'. The same root gave Greek háls, Welsh halen, Old Irish salann, Latvian sāls and Armenian al. Tocharian sāle, the language of an ancient people whose manuscripts were found in western China, carried the same root to the eastern edge of the Indo-European world. Each carried the word, and one of the ancient world's most precious commodities, across thousands of years and miles.
SAUCE and SAUSAGE share the same ancient root. SAUCE entered English from Old French in the thirteenth century, from Latin salsus meaning 'salted', and has named the condiment ever since. SAUSAGE came through Old Northern French, the Norman dialect carried to England after the Battle of Hastings in 1066, from Latin salsīcia, meaning meat prepared by salting.
For most of its English life the word named any payment for any service. By the nineteenth century it had narrowed to its modern sense. Salt never lost its political power. In 1286 the French crown enacted the gabelle, a salt tax so resented it became one of the causes of the French Revolution. In 1930 Mahatma Gandhi walked 240 miles to the sea to make salt, defying the British salt tax in one of the defining acts of the Indian independence movement.
