“Woof woof” and “iam fari”: divinity, humanity, dogs, and etymology behind first words in Michael Erard’s “Bye Bye I Love You”

My dog, Hugo, has been experiencing a health emergency this week. He is recovering—slowly. I’ve mentioned him far too infrequently here, though he is older than Mashed Radish itself, if not by much.

Talking with my wife after a visit to the animal hospital, I reflected, as one does, on that deep bond we humans have with our pets.  This bond is so deep, I told her, that dog and woof woof are among the most common first ten words babies say in American English. Woof woof—that dog-eared onomatopoeia for the sound our pups produce—is also frequent as a first word in other languages as well.

(Sorry, cats. Then again … We know how you feel about babies.) 

I learned this fact, which is based on research from a project starting in the 1980s, from the latest book by linguist and author Michael Erard, Bye Bye I Love You: The Story of Our First and Last Words, now available from the MIT Press.

Along with dog and woof woof, the other most common ten first words in American English are: mommy, daddy, ball, bye, hi, no, baby, and banana. As Erard observes, “Such words rank high in a trait  called ‘babiness,’ which simply means they’re words that have to do with babies, their immediate surroundings, and important things. Clearly babies encounter a lot of bananas!”

Clearly babies encounter a lot of dogs, too, so central they are to our families, our lives, our humanity.

The story of first and last words that Erard tells in Bye Bye I Love You is intelligent, humane, cross-disciplinary, beautifully written, and comprehensive, as I recently wrote on Strong Language—and can only reemphasize here. His book offers a historical and cultural account of our first and final utterances as much as a linguistic one.

And Erard, for as intense and intimate of topics he explores, knows a dash of humor is welcome, too. “Clearly babies encounter a lot of bananas!” had me laughing aloud.

Now, Strong Language is a blog about swearing by linguists, lexicographers, and other word nerds like myself—and fully embraces profanity in so writing about it. My longtime readers will recall my contributions there, especially on sweary word origins and Shakespearean vulgarities. Last week, in my first post in some time, I wrote about the fascinating role Erard shows cursing has in our last words—and yes, in some instances, first words—in his new book.

Mashed Radish, of course, is a blog about etymology, which also surfaces in surprising ways in Bye Bye I Love You. But Erard doesn’t just compile fun facts and affecting anecdotes. There are plenty of those, and I particularly love how he provides an orienting “List of Questions” with page numbers to their answers. Here is sample of just four of those questions, illustrating the range of his approach: 

• What is the oldest first recorded actual word?
• Do babies who sign produce a first word before babies who speak? 
• What do people most often say as their last words? 
• What do multilingual people say at the end of life?

One of Erard’s great achievements in the book, rather, is digesting a tremendous but previously discontinuous body of research on his subject, from field studies in Papua New Guinea to interviews with doctors in Western hospitals, and shaping it into original frameworks to more systematically understand it.

On Strong Language, I discussed his paradigm for our last language. In brief:

• Final utterances are likely to be short.
• Final utterances are likely to be disinhibited.
• Final utterances are likely to be formulaic.
• People will communicate differently with different partners.

As for a schema for our initial locutions? “Based on my investigations,” Erard writes, “the world’s cultures of child-rearing and person-making fall into four styles or modes of engaging with first words. You might also think of them as four types of expectations about how the signifying self appears.” I quote at length (emphasis his):

The unscripted first word. In this style, adults notice a change, subtle or grand, in how a baby does language-like things. However, there’s no given or expected word, type of word, utterance, gesture, or tone of voice that marks the change. This makes it rather laissez parler, or “say what you will,” meaning that a variety of behaviors can serve as a plausible threshold to personhood and belonging in the community. …

The cultural first word. This laissez parler style contrasts with another in which the form of the first word is prescribed and widely culturally shared—and therefore timeless. Sometimes parents pull something like an adult word from the baby’s babbling, using a fairly rigid matrix of phonological expectation. Sometimes they repeat a word, which the child eventually imitates. Sometimes the child may produce a good number of recognizable words, but only when a specific utterance occurs do the adults acknowledge what the child has achieved. …

The observed first word. … Its roots are in nineteenth-century positivism, which turned infants into subjects of scientific curiosity from educational reformers, psychologists, linguists, and social scientists. Here, adults engage closely with all of the things that babies do, including language. This involves cultural decisions to turn babies into science projects, to process private family matters for analysis and consumption outside the family, and even to enlist parents as quasi-scientists. This approach dovetails quite nicely with the laissez parler style, which it amplifies and informs.

The ignored first word. The high level of expectations that my culture has about early utterances is probably an anomaly in the history of our species. The most likely fate of first words? Like most last words, they’re more likely memorialized in the record of the gods, not the record of humans.

That last line is but one instance of Erard’s skill as a writer, which makes Bye Bye I Love You not only pleasurable but memorable. He goes on about this fourth mode: “To some readers, this indifference to first words may be the most shocking revelation of this book. But it’s not that people don’t notice their kids—it’s that other milestones matter more .” One example he cites especially delighted me: “… in Navajo (or Diné) families, the baby’s first laugh is eagerly awaited—and often prompted—reflecting the importance of laughter as a ‘healing aspect of the human spirit.’ After the laugh arrives, there’s a party, hosted by the person who made the child laugh.”

A laughter shower! More of this, please.

What does any of this have to do with word origins? Well, in his discussion of the cultural first word, Erard connects the etymology of infant to a compelling custom in Ancient Rome, as I was thrilled to learn. “When a certain linguistic capacity emerged in a child,” he explains, “their parents brought an offering to a temple of Farinus, who was the god of first words.”

A god of first words! Erard elsewhere alludes to spirits attendant on walking and babbling.

He goes on:

These Roman parents would be celebrating the arrival of fari, their word for this newly hatched language quality, which amounts to a sort of authoritative speaking, the same attributed to oracles and prophets. (Fari is an archaic form of fans, a word that refers to speaking, from which we derive the word “infant,” or someone without speech, infans—without fari.) A linguist, unaccustomed to prophecies and oracles, would want to know the properties of fari—an adultlike pronunciation, perhaps? A spontaneous, willful word? This isn’t clear. Suffice it to say that Farinus was believed to have joined his power and ability as a speaker to the child, not simply teaching them but carrying them over the threshold, before which the child was infans—without speech, and therefore not truly human. On the other side, they were raw material for socializing in the ways of the community.  

Fari, which Erard effectively reframes as “linguistic agency,” is the infinitive form of the Latin verb fārī, “to say, speak,” and is associated with prophecies.

Indeed, infant, recorded in English since the late 1300s and entering via a French intermediary, originates from a derivation of fārī, infāns, literally “not able to speak,” with in- as a negating prefix. It also had the sense of “speechless” or “silly.” Infantry, or “foot soldiers,” develops from extensions of infāns in Romance languages referring to “youth” who lacked the experience to be cavalry.

The Latin verb fārī also ultimately yields, among others:

• Affable (Latin for “easily spoken to”)
• Fable (a “story, tale; talk, conversation” in Latin)
• Fabulous (formed from the Latin root of fable)
• Fairy (based on fay, in turn from the Latin for “the Fates”) 
• Fatal (formed from Latin root of fate)
• Fate (originally, a “divine utterance” in Latin)
• Ineffable (Latin for “unutterable”)
• Preface (Latin for “speaking before”) 

I want to say more about how fārī is a member of an odd class of verbs, called deponent, and how fābula features an instrumental suffix, but that’s far less interesting than what Erard has further to say about Roman rituals around the concept of fari:

It refers to a way of speaking that is distinguished by its authority, efficacy, and credibility. Oracles and prophets speak with fari—the utterance is a revelation, a confession. Remarkably, for the Romans … this authority is invested in the language that the child learns to produce. Until they do, they are infantes, without linguistic authority. In other words, fari isn’t just about making sounds but about a verbal decisiveness. Words, but words that mattered.

“At Rome, the speech of infants was taken very seriously,” [Italian philologist Maurizio] Bettini wrote, “not only when a baby first uttered a ‘meaningful word’ (significabilem vocem, an act that the Roman defined in terms of fari), but also when it made its first sound, its first vagitus.” The arrival of fari was not just “vaguely meaningful babble” but a moment of considerable expressive power. There is an anecdote that when Octavian, the future Augustus Caesar, began to talk, the frogs all stopped croaking, because the baby had commanded it. Though this was undoubtedly imperial flattery, it expands on a real Roman belief about the child’s speech act. The first word had so much power because it was believed to be divinely inspired by that divinity known either as Fabulinus or Farinus.

Vagitus is a wonderfully new term to me. English adopted it as a term for precisely that, a “wail or cry, especially of a newborn.” It’s directly from the Latin noun vāgitus, “cry,” from vāgīre, the verb for this.

Erard continues:

The Roman writer Marcus Terentius Varro (116–27 BCE) described how, upon the arrival of fari, ancient Roman parents went to the temple of Farinus to make an offering. Perhaps it was cakes, honey, milk, or meat. A first word wasn’t a signal of the child’s linguistic autonomy—in fact, far from it, Bettini wrote. “Even at the moment in which a baby is said ‘to now speak’ (iam fari), therefore the ‘word’ that comes to his lips is somehow divinely inspired, as with the prophet or seer. In other words, the agency of the animator (the baby) is again joined to that of a principal (the god Farinus or Fabulinus), who supernaturally merged his voice with that of the child.”

How many Romans made sacrifices to Farinus? Such a fact is lost to time. They were probably more attentive to aspects of childhood and their own children than modern people typically give the ancients credit for, but going to the temple of Farinus was likely reserved for elites rather than plebeians. This is a bit at odds with a classicist view that Romans didn’t “discover” babies until the first century CE, well after the ancient religion Varro mentioned had vanished. For a long time, Latin had no word for “baby,” with the modern connotations of a cute, helpless newborn human who inspires feelings of tenderness. Plenty of other baby attributes are expressed in other Latin words: their tiny size (parvulus), their nursing (alumnus and lactens), their cries (vagiens), their doll-like status (pupa, pupus), and their lack of sensible language (infans). However, the meaning of infans evolved so that only by the first century CE did it become a rough equivalent for “baby” in the modern Anglophone sense. No one tied Farinus to the first words anymore, but babies’ relationship to language became central to their place in the civic order.

I hope that you can see some other English words derived from the Latin Erard cites here, like lactic or pupil, not to mention alumnus, originally “foster son” in Latin. 

More important, I hope you get a taste of just how erudite yet accessible, how edifying yet captivating, how extensive yet specific a work is Erard’s book. My consideration here doesn’t even begin to touch on the enlightening science he draws on—and the poetry of the deeply personal, wisely observed conclusions he draws about our first and last words. 

I recommend you discover all that and more in Michael Erard’s Bye Bye I Love You, a smart and moving read not just for those curious about language, history, and culture but also for parents, caregivers, medical professionals, and, given just how much our first and last words can say about us, anyone interested in what it means to be human.

Which includes, down to some of our first words, our special relationships to our pets. Dog: a powerful first word, indeed.

Bye Bye I Love You is published by the MIT Press and available from your preferred booksellers. The publisher sent me a copy for review.