How Spray Became Part of a Diaspora?

One way or another, most people spray something every day, while many young children watch the channel Sprout and millions of people everywhere in the world prepare spread sheets in their offices.

All of them use words that are connected to each other, even though the three words seem to have nothing to do with each other. It is true that the three words in question come from different Proto-Germanic sources, but it is also true that the ultimate source for all of them is one tiny Proto-Indo-European word: *sper “to strew.”

The same word *sper is also the source for an Armenian verb: սփռել ( sprel “to scatter, to strew,” to be pronounced suprel). The original word for spr-el was սփիռ (spir), which later became սփիւռ (spiur ). (Interestingly, unlike sprel, we pronounce spiur as its English cognate spray , with a schwa before the s.)

 

A few decades ago, spiur became the source for the neologism ձայնասփիւռ ( tzaynaspiur ), the Western Armenian word for “radio,” composed by the words ձայն ( tzayn “sound, voice”) and spiur. Thus, tzaynaspiur means “to scatter sounds,” which is exactly the function of a radio.

Much older than that, spiur turned to be the root of սփիւռք (spiurk), the Armenian translation of the Greek (now English) word diaspora (δῐᾰσπορᾱ́ ), meaning “dispersion” ( dia “across” + speiro “I sow”). The word spiurk was composed with the addition of the suffix ք (k), which indicates both plural (գիր /kir “letter” > գիրք /kirk “letters; book”) and place (հայ /hay “Armenian” > Հայք /Hayk “Armenia”).

If you spray, you disperse something, and this is exactly what a diaspora is, the same as the Armenian Spiurk: a place of dispersion.