Word-nerd fun: Galaxy

Photo of the Milky Way
taken by my son John
10 November 2023

Yesterday I was reading Chaucer’s delightful Parliament of Fouls. Early on, the narrator says he fell asleep reading Cicero’s “Dream of Scipio,” and he retells the story for the reader. In the dream, Scipio meets his grandfather who “showed him the Galaxy.”

Then today I was reading The Marriage of Philology and Mercury, a 5th century Latin work by Martianus Capella. In Book II, Philology is ascending through the heavenly spheres on her way to the wedding. When she reaches the upper limits of the cosmos, the narrator says, “The incandescence of a milk-white river gradually flowed down from the burning stars. Full of joy and thanksgiving she turned toward the Galaxy where she knew that Jove had assembled the divine senate.”

I wondered whether the word “galaxy” was used in the original Latin so I looked it up and sure enough it says, “iter in Galaxeum flectit.” Galaxias is itself a borrowing from Greek.

The story behind the word galaxy is a fun one, so I thought I’d share it.

Prior to modern astronomy, Galaxy simply meant the Milky Way, γάλα [gala] being the Greek word for milk. The story is that after Zeus’s son Heracles was born to the mortal woman Alcmene, Zeus waited till his wife, Hera, was asleep and put the newborn to nurse from her so he could partake of the divine quality of her milk and become divine himself. When Hera woke up and found she was nursing a strange infant, she thrust him away causing milk to spurt from her out into the heavens, and that’s the origin of the Milky Way.

If you study the word “galactic,” you’ll see “lac” in the middle of it. This is because the Latin root lac, milk, seems to have come from an earlier word which has been reconstructed as either *g(a)lag- or *g(a)lakt-. In English, we get from this root lactate, latte, and even lettuce.

Our word milk comes from the Indo-European root melg- which is a verb and means “to rub off,” and also “to milk.” It’s related to the word emulsion which comes from the Latin emulgeo, “to milk out.” In English, the verb milk seems to predate the noun milk. It’s been used from the beginning to refer specifically to human or animal milk. Incidentally, mammals and the mammary glands are named after mamma, which means mother in English, but it means breast in Latin. They both come from the same root, ma-, which means mother, and gives us the Greek Maia (good mother) and also maieutic, which means to act as a midwife, and is the word 17th century philosophers used to describe the Socratic method.

The Old English language also used the word milk to refer to the milky juice you can get from a plant. The 2nd century text Herbarium by Pseudo-Apuleius describes getting milk from wyrte/wort, meaning from a plant (think of the “wort” in St. John’s Wort). “Almond milk” has been used since at least the 1300s, so keep this in mind next time one of your friends scoffs at people talking about almond milk, and insists that milk can only properly refer to that which is produced by the mammary glands. :-D

 

* In linguistics, the asterisk before a word means that the word can’t be found written anywhere, so scholars have made an educated guess about what it probably was.