Tilbake – Going to the tail

When you arrive in a new country and try to learn a new language, there are always a few first foreign words that particularly capture your attention.

For me, one of the first remarkable Norwegian words was the preposition and adverb tilbake, which means “back” as in come back or give back. The –bake part is clearly cognate with English back, and til- is a prepositional element with the same meaning as, and possibly cognate with, English to. Norwegian tilbake is, moreover, an almost perfect translation equivalent of Dutch terug (te-rug) or German zu-rück.

Now the English word back and Dutch rug are also used for the body part “back”. Thus in these Germanic languages “to the back” or perhaps “to the backside” has acquired the meaning of “returning to the origin”, as in the Beatles’ quote Get back to where you once belonged. In English, the directional particle meaning “to” has apparently disappeared, or has always been implicit.

In current Norwegian the words bak and rygg occur side-by-side, where the former means “behind” and latter refers to the body part. This gets a bit confusing, so let’s put the basic facts into a table.

Note in passing that both West Germanic languages derive the word for the location at the backside from a third source (DU achter, EN behind ~ GE hinter).

Generally speaking, the historical development is from the concrete meaning to the abstract, a process called grammaticalisation. The development of prepositions and adverbs expressing place and direction of movement from words for body parts is particularly common. I therefore assume the body part meaning is the oldest. As it is unlikely that Norwegian at some stage borrowed either the word for the body part or the locative preposition, we can assume that two different words bak and rygg were also present in the predecessors of present-day Dutch and English. A quick check with the online etymological dictionary www.etymonline.com confirms that both words originate from proto-Germanic.

What’s intriguing about the body part “back” in relation to spatial reference is that the human back is situated at the backside, that is, opposite the typical direction of movement, whereas in most other animals, the back is the upside.

Firstly, this suggests that pre-modern humans were well capable of recognising the similarity in body plan between themselves and certain other animals, possibly large mammals like dogs and ungulates. Interestingly, I read in the “back” lemma of etymonline.com that “Many I.E. [Indo-European] languages show signs of once having distinguished the horizontal back of an animal (or a mountain range) from the upright back of a human.” While this may be so, it is not clear how this relates to the words bak and rygg. The current languages do not distinguish between the human and animal body part. Nor is there a consistent pattern associating one word with the upside and the other with the backside. (Here I skip a boring discussion of words for mountain ridge, hill slope or the back of various objects.) The grammaticalised uses of both bak and rygg – see the table above – are in fact all based on the usual human posture while walking.

That to go back ~ tilbake ~terug means “to return” can only be understood from a human perspective, because in humans, the back is situated at the side opposite to the direction of movement, at least in the body posture that is typical when walking. In order to arrive at the place one came from, one has to reverse the direction of movement and move backwards. (In most situations this is actually realized by turning the body in the horizontal plane, so that the direction of movement is changed only relative to one’s environment.) If cows or dogs spoke a Germanic language, they wouldn’t say tilbake or terug. Instead, they would express the notion of returning as going to the tail.