Words

Animal

AN-ih-mul
A living creature, from Latin animalis, having breath, anima, the breath-soul that separates the moving from the mineral.
Documented

The breath beings

Latin anima (breath, soul, life) plus -alis: animal, the ensouled breather, distinguished from plant and stone. Anima animates animate, inanimate, animation, animosity (originally spiritedness), unanimous (one-breathed), magnanimous (great-souled), and pusillanimous (tiny-souled, still the best insult in English).

Assessment: Documented: the anima family is elementary and enormous.
Stories

The wind and the ghost

The cross-language rhyme: anima's sibling animus (mind, wind) matches Greek anemos (wind), and the PIE root *ane- (to blow) sits under atmosphere's cousins. Hebrew ruach, Greek pneuma, Sanskrit atman, spirit as breath is a human universal wearing local costumes.

Assessment: Stories: each language pair is real; the universal is the poem written over them.
Interesting claims

The vegetarian's blind spot

The classification's embarrassment: plantae were the breathless class, yet plants respire, and the anima line has been biologically bankrupt since Priestley. The word preserves a pre-scientific soul-taxonomy that biology abolished and vocabulary refused to notice.

Assessment: Interesting: the taxonomy is dead, the words are immortal; this is the archive's whole thesis in miniature.
Sources and further reading
  1. Lewis & Short, 'anima,' 'animalis'
  2. Oxford English Dictionary, 'animal,' 'unanimous,' 'pusillanimous'
  3. Watkins, Indo-European Roots, *ane-, to blow
Worth asking

Where does your language draw the line between breathing and having a soul?

Open in the interactive archive
GR8YFILES · competing origin stories, labeled by the strength of their evidence · readers 14+